polite_gandalf wrote on Apr 24
th, 2014 at 9:32pm:
FD Mark I was of course correct.
When terrorists set out to kill as many civilians as they can, its really just down to chance how "successful" they end up being. Muhammad Atta and his crew pulled it off, but it could easily have passed by as just another footnote in the long history of terrorism in the west. Even when they managed to hit the towers, it was due to another freak of chance that the buildings collapsed causing most of the casualties (thanks in part to a history of improper structural maintenance). Conversely, I'm sure Tim McVeigh would have settled with a death toll 10 times what he got - and might conceivably have got it on a different day. Ditto for the countless other non-muslim terrorists who have proven their intention to inflict maximum civilian casualties - but were thwarted only by chance or incompetence.
If Islamists had killed 3000 people in hundreds of attacks during a sustained period of time, then the 'threat' of islamists would be a no-brainer. But when its one attack which was a complete fluke, and is not really unique amongst all the different terrorist groups in terms of ambition, then its really more accurate to identify it as something that skews the terrorist threat, rather than accurately reflects it.
The best terrorist threat measure is frequency of attacks - especially when those attacks are designed to inflict casualties. That they may sometimes fail through sheer chance in achieving the casualty rate they were aiming for is no reason to dismiss the threat in any way.
Maybe, but as the 2007 FD pointed out, Islamic terrorists see themselves as waging a defensive war. If you’re a suicide bomber, your aim is to cause as much damage as possible because this is what soldiers do in war.
FD doesn’t claim WWII was morally worse than WWI because more people died. FD’s just picked up Sprint’s 2007 argument that Sept 11 cancelled out all other terrorist attacks because of its magnitude.
Which is strange, because back then FD disagreed completely.
The graffiti thing’s a bit of light-hearted comedy, but it’s interesting to see what FD will do with his comedy when he’s desperate.
A joke like that will last 20 pages if you feed it, you know.