A week ago, there was a terrorist attack in Iraq, a nation that has yet to heal itself from the divisions caused when the United States invaded and imposed a long military occupation. In response to that attack, the Elite Daily declared that, “From this horrific event, we should also take away the fact terrorism happens everywhere.”
A week before that, in reaction to a bombing in Istanbul, the Prime Minister of Israel announced that, “Terror strikes everywhere.”
Around the same time, Imam Khalil A. Akbar warned that “Terrorism strikes everywhere indiscriminately and threatens the whole world.”
Christopher Stacks tweeted, “Terrorists are everywhere. We have no idea when/where they’ll strike next.”
Kate Levine wrote, “Terrorism strikes everywhere.”
You get the idea.
Actually Terrorism is not everywhere. It isn’t even close to everywhere.
There have been no terrorist attacks in Dayton, Ohio, though a local television news crew rushed to publish a report last month reassuring residents there that, “Terror attacks in Belgium not impacting Dayton airport”.
There have been no terrorist attacks in Kansas City, Missouri, though that hasn’t stopped people there from forming the Kansas City Regional Terrorism Early Warning Group, an organization that looks for “the presence of suspicious people who just don’t belong”, and waits, and waits, and waits, as year after year, no threat of terrorism ever arrives.
There has never been any terrorist attack in Boise, Idaho, although in 2008, the Department of Homeland Security declared that Boise is the city with the highest vulnerability to terrorist in all of the Western United States. In the 8 years since, terrorists have exploited that vulnerability precisely zero times.
Amarillo has never been the scene of a terrorist attack, although the News West 9 TV station did run a story about a local man who once dated a woman who later was the victim of a terrorist attack on another continent.
There has never been a terrorist attack in Orlando, Florida, although TrutherNews claimed in 2014 that the U.S. federal government was planning a terrorist attack there.
For a world in which terrorism is supposed to be everywhere, and in which evildoers are constantly plotting the destruction of civilization as we know it, things actually look very peaceful.
All around the United States, day after day, there isn’t any terrorism.
In the USA terrorism is nowhere.
Nowhere.
So, why are American politicians so busy freaking out about terrorism?
