In the USA, every year, over 33,626 people are killed by guns. 16,121 people per year are murdered [1]. (The last accurate data collection for this was 2013). In 2013, the total number of deaths for Terrorism occurring GLOBALLY was 17,891 [2].
After 9/11, 50 american citizens have died from Terrorism occurring in the U.S. perpetrated by individuals self-identifying themselves as ‘Muslim’ (an average of less than 4 per year). After 9/11 at least 200,000 Americans have died due to homicide. In just 2014 alone, there were 30 ‘mass shooting attacks’ perpetrated by non-Muslim americans in the U.S., killing 136 people nationwide [3].
Americans are as likely to be killed by their own furniture, as they are from a Terror attack perpetrated by a self-identified ‘Muslim’ [4]
Although every single death is a tragedy in its own right, considering the vast difference in the fatalities from ‘non-terrorist’ homicides, mass shootings and killings, is the ‘Terror threat’ propounded by the Media and Politicians overblown? And if it is overblown, the REAL questions we must ask is, WHY?
Considering that the U.S. government has spent billions, bombed, tortured and shot millions of innocents around the world, all supposedly in the name of ‘protecting the American people’ due to 50 terror deaths in 14 years (and 2,977 deaths on 9/11), you’d think they’d prioritise an even bigger response to the 16,000-30,000 American deaths every year, right? Wrong, and again the questions is, WHY? Surely, if all lives are equal, the killing of 200,000 americans is a far greater tragedy than 50 americans, so why the disproportionate ‘concern’ exercised by the U.S. government?
In 2013, in the UK, on average, there is approximately 1,000 cases of violent assault with a sharp instrument (e.g. knife) PER MONTH [5]. Of these assaults, around 200 per year have died [6]. If the Soldier Lee Rigby, had been murdered for the money in his wallet, his death would have been just another statistic, and gone mostly unreported. However, because he wasn’t killed for money, his death was judged to be more egregious, and cited (some would say exploited) by the media and politicians as ‘evidence’ of ‘the continuing grave terror threat to UK citizens’.
If the UK government cared about the deaths of it’s citizens, it would spend more money and launch more campaigns into preventing the over 500 murders [7] occurring in the UK every year, rather than the (average) of 5 deaths occurring every year from terrorism. UK citizens are about as likely to die from Terrorism, as they are to be killed by bee or wasps [8].
Adding to this, the fact that only 2% of Terror attacks in the EU are committed by Muslims, it strongly begs the question why the British government has spent so much money on enforcing changes of religious beliefs in its UK Muslim population which being held by anyone else would merely be called ‘conservative’, forcing teachers [9], nurses and doctors to report people who may be ‘radicalised’, detaining 56,000 people [10] per year at airports, funding ‘Muslim’ (aka Secularists brought up in Muslim families) ‘counter-extremist’ think tanks and introduced some of the most draconian rights-reversing legislation ever in its history, and spent billions of pounds of military and security operations globally, mainly involving attacking countries that originally had nothing to do with terrorism, despite the fact that terror experts have shown that it only exacerbates terrorism perpetrated by ‘Muslims’ [11].
The only answer we can find, that makes sense of this disproportionate response to terrorism originating from ‘Muslims’ compared with the vastly larger number of violent cases originating from elsewhere, is that it would seem that the U.S. and UK aren’t concerned with number of lives lost both at home or abroad, but in something else, something involving Muslims living in the West, Western ideology and culture, the form they want Islam to exist in (despite the fact that no ‘version’ of Islam condones terrorism [12]), and the power structures of the Middle East they want- which I leave to the reader to contemplate.
Food for thought, this ramadan.
[1] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf
[2] http://www.statista.com/statistics/202871/number-of-fatalities-by-terrorist-attacks-worldwide/
[7] http://www.citizensreportuk.org/reports/murders-fatal-violence-uk.html
[8] http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/06/28/terrorism-bees_n_1633308.html
[10] http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/sep/12/56000-detained-counter-terrorism-powers
[11] http://www.alternet.org/story/48620/the_war_on_terror_is_the_leading_cause_of_terrorism
[12] http://thedebateinitiative.com/2013/06/12/who-justifies-terrorism-part-1/
Abdullah al Andalusi 
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