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Annie Jacobsen Award, 2007
Posted by KTK

For the most unhinged pants-wetting alarmism in the face of imaginary terrorism, this year’s award goes to Bruce Kesler of the “Democracy Project“:

Stop arguing with your liberal friends about what a dangerous place the world is, and just send them this website. A friend just sent it to me. It’s called Global Incident Map: A Global Display of Terrorism and Other Suspicious Events.

You have to see it to believe it, and I really mean to believe it: The world is a very dangerous place.

It actually is a pretty interesting resource, though also somewhat alarmist. It features a world map with brightly-colored hazard symbols (Biohazard! Explosion! Fire! Electric Tram!) blinking and flashing at “hot spots” around the globe. Better is a dated list of “incidents” broken down by category, with links to further details, ranging back one week. If you’re interested in political violence, this looks like a good monitoring tool. It’s rather overwrought (what exactly I am supposed to feel in response to a blinking tram car symbol I just don’t know, and the Google satellite images of every location are cool but not particularly informative), but you can get good information out of it.

But, typically of the right-wing incitement-to-riot brigade, the message Kesler takes from it is just the opposite of what any rational analysis could possibly come up with.

Looking at the current page (it updates every 7 minutes), there are 77 incidents listed from around the entire world in the past week. That works out to about one incident per every 2 1/2 countries, per week. But in fact, only 26 unique countries are mentioned, most of them more than once. So according to this resource, there was no terrorism at all in over 80% of the nations of the world in the past week. And of the countries that are listed, the US and Israel acount for almost a third of all the incidents. So you’re down to about one incident per month per country, if you’re not a citizen of “greater USRael”.

But what of those incidents? Frankly, they’re pretty lame. Among the 77 “Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity” that Bruce Kesler is panicking over are such heart-stoppers as: “Contents of suspicous envelope handed over to [Irish police]”, “White powder at NAACP was harmless”, “Protester chained to railway line” and “Transpo[rtation] station back to normal after bomb scare”. Oh, my god! A transportation station was back to normal!? Somebody found a white powder that was harmless!? What a dangerous world we live in, with all this “Terrorism and Suspicious Activity” going on!

To be sure, many of the incidents listed are actual terrorism, some of them fatal. And the list is clearly woefully incomplete: it includes 10 incidents in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, but every one has Palestinians as the suspected terrorists; there is not a single incident of Israeli violence against Palestinians listed. There are only 2 terrorist incidents listed in all of Iraq for the past week, but 14 throughout the continental US. So we can’t take this list as exhaustive, and, of course, no such violent incidents should be minimized no matter how distant or infrequent. But for all its flaws, this is the list that has Bruce Kesler in a tizzy - the one he says proves that “the world is a dangerous place”, the one you should monitor constantly to keep yourself in a keen pitch for the Wah on Terra:

There’s nothing I’ve ever experienced – short of actually experiencing war or terrorist incidents –that so brings the message home, literally, right to your computer, and so comprehensively, about the need to be vigilant. . . .

Simply amazing. Belongs on everyone’s computer screen.

So Bruce is going to spend his life being vigilant about what he sees on this map. OK . . . . Assuming every one of these often-laughable “Events” is actually a terrorist incident, and they each kill 10 people (most of them actually killed no one), and assuming for the sake of simplicity that they occur randomly throughout the world, and accepting the US Census Bureau’s estimated world population of 6.63 billion, that would give each person in the world a weekly chance of death by terrorism of . . . 0.0000011%, or about 0.0006% (1:166,667) annually. Assuming you live in the US (14 incidents), Israel (10 incidents, and a 100% victimization rate - not a single incident of violence that involves Israelis is their fault), India (7 incidents), or Afghanistan or Pakistan (5 incidents each), and taking the populations of those countries together (1.602 billion), that gives a likelihood  of involvement in a “Terrorism Event” of  0.0000026% per week, or 0.00013% (1:769,230)annually, for citizens of these horribly dangerous countries. Those numbers constitute a “very dangerous” world for Bruce.

I hope nobody tells him, because he might die from simple fear, but here are some other things for Bruce to be vigilant about:

Yes . . . the fear that gnaws at Bruce Kesler’s heart . . . at any moment he could be attacked by a terrorist, or 154 liposuction doctors. Tell your liberal friends.

UPDATE: Fixed minor errors and typos.

November 21st, 2007 General, Politics, Culture, Iraq, Terrorism, Media, News & Current Events, Math, Fiasco | one comment