Did you hear about Brussels? 26 people there were killed in terrorist attacks today. It’s the first terrorist attack in Europe in months.
Donald Trump sure did. He grunted on Twitter and Facebook, “Do you all remember how beautiful and safe a place Brussels was. Not anymore, it is from a different world! U.S. must be vigilant and smart!”
Ted Cruz did too. He said that the attacks in Brussels show that “Radical Islam is at war with us.”
Okay, they’re upset, and that makes sense. Any loss of human life is sad, but let’s think this through.
If there were terrorist attacks in Belgium, why does the United States have to be vigilant?
If there were terrorist attacks in Belgium, how does that show that Muslim terrorists are at war with the United States?
Is Brussels not safe? There are about 1.8 million people in the Brussels metropolitan area. 26 of them were killed today.
That’s a death rate of one thousandth of one percent.
For every person in Brussels who was killed, 69,230 people weren’t.
There were zero deaths in the United States.
Terrorism is wrong. Violence is wrong. However, the fact this level of violence doesn’t create a general safety problem in Brussels or in the United States.
Despite what Ted Cruz says about it, this isn’t what war looks like.
In Syria, they’re having a war. Besides the government of Syria and a whole bunch of rebel groups, the United States, Russia, and Turkey are killing people in that war. According to the most recent estimate by the Syrian Centre for Policy Research, 470,000 people in Syria have been killed in that war.
26, compared to 470,000 looks like the following image. The red rectangle represents the 470,000 deaths in the war in Syria – one pixel per death. The little orange sliver represents the size of the 26 deaths in the Brussels terrorist attacks today – one pixel per death.
Not one of these deaths took place in the United States.
So, why are presidential candidates telling their followers that the United States is in danger?
Think it through, America.