The key words here are "the West". There have been scores of terrorist attacks in the past few months, nearly all of them in Muslim or predominantly Muslim countries. Leaving aside those countries where terrorism is an adjunct to armed civil strife, there have been major terrorist attacks in Burkina Faso, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mali, Tunisia and Turkey, which reinforces the point that the vast majority of victims of Islamist terror are adherents of Islam.
In light of the frequency and scale of the attacks, should we agree with Newstalk ZB host and columnist Larry Williams who wrote after the Brussels bombing, "Fact: the terrorists are succeeding"?
Well, yes and no. Call me a pedant but that's not a fact; it's an assertion. It's certainly the case, though, that the terrorists are succeeding in perpetrating acts of terror. But then they always have and they always will. Security chiefs have repeatedly warned that it's simply not possible to thwart every single terrorist plot.
Take Britain for example: at least 3000 people are on MI5's database of violent extremists, and terrorism expert Jean-Charles Brisard estimates it takes 20 to 25 counter-terrorism officials to maintain surveillance on a single suspect.
Resources are finite and somewhere along the line someone's going to slip through the net. British authorities are now planning for a worst-case scenario of 10 simultaneous attacks in London.
The demagogues huff and puff and insist they can stop terrorism by being tough and throwing humanity and the law book out the window.
Defeating terrorism takes time [and] stoicism, resilience, the ability to absorb these terrible shocks.
I refer them to the website israelhasbeenterrorattackfreefor.com which, as its name suggests, tracks terrorist incidents in the world's hardest target.
At the time of writing, Israel hadn't suffered an attack for all of six and a half days.
As to whether they're succeeding in the wider sense, that's up to the targets of their bullets, bombs and propaganda.
Terrorism's twin aims are to demoralise the populace - sap its will to resist - and provoke the authorities into extreme counter-measures that validate the terrorist organisation's hypothesis: that we are at war with an enemy who seeks to destroy us.
So when Trump declares that the terrorists are winning, even though they aren't winning in any meaningful sense of the term, he plays into their hands by stoking public anxiety and inflating the threat.
(One of terrorism's propaganda tricks is to make a small organisation with limited capacity look all-powerful and its large and powerful adversary look helpless. Suicide bombing your fellow citizens is entry-level stuff: a fortnight ago a single US drone strike on an Al-Shabaab training camp in Somalia took out 150 jihadists.)
And when Trump and Ted Cruz and their European counterparts like Marine Le Pen advocate immigration bans, closed borders, intensive policing of Muslim neighbourhoods, torture and carpet bombing, they compound the mistake by inflating a terror campaign into a quasi-religious war of survival in which the ends justify the means.
Defeating terrorism takes time - not months or years, decades. That in turn requires stoicism, resilience, the ability to absorb these terrible shocks without giving in to defeatism or forgetting who we are and what we stand for.
As Margaret Thatcher said of the 1984 Brighton bombing that very nearly wiped out the entire British Government: "We suffered a tragedy not one of us thought could happen in our country. And we picked ourselves up and sorted ourselves out, as all good British people do."
Notwithstanding the hysteria and fear-mongering, this Easter weekend most Brussels residents will do exactly what they would have done if the bombings hadn't taken place: go to church or a football match or a movie; spend time with family and friends; go out for a drink or a meal.
The alternative would be to hide in their homes, petrified into paralysis by a risk that's substantially lower than the one they readily accept every time they get in a car.
Debate on this article is now closed.
