Don't panic
This is not high security outside a Jewish school because Jewish children are particularly vulnerable to attack. It is normal security outside a school in East London. It is common for secondary schools to employ security guards at the gate and to have a police officer on the grounds to protect the children from the usual perpetrators of attacks – other children with knives (in the UK) or guns (in the US). None of these British schools benefits from the £2 million Michael Gove gave to the Community Security Trust in 2012 to pay for security at Jewish schools only across the UK.
We worry too much about terrorism
By Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune
January 15, 2015
Each of the attacks in Paris that killed 17 people last week was an atrocity, an affront to freedom and an act of terrorism. On those points, most people agree, and they’re right. Most people also fear this marks the beginning of a rash of extremist violence in the West. On that, they’re probably wrong.
If we have learned anything from the experience since 9/11, it’s that the public and its leaders chronically overestimate the danger posed by Islamic militants. This latest episode fits that pattern.
“In the face of rogue jihadists living in the West and urged to attack their homeland, the threat ‘is the new normal,’ one U.S. government official explained,” according to The Daily Beast. “There are thousands more jihadists living in the West than security forces to keep an eye on them. And with the war in Syria raging, there is the potential for that to grow as fighters return from the front lines, potentially radicalized.”
Former U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., echoes that concern, warning in The Wall Street Journal that “the enemy is stronger today in more places than it was on 9/11 and is gaining more ground than ever.” He fears that “the number and frequency of attacks like those in France will increase.”
But he and others have a history of sounding alarms that are false or greatly overstated. In 2011, Lieberman expected that the killing of Osama bin Laden would prompt someone to “attempt an attack within the United States in the coming days or weeks.” It didn’t happen.
In 2003, notes Ohio State University political scientist John Mueller, U.S. intelligence officials expected a flurry of attacks here after the Iraq invasion. Wrong again. Last summer, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel called the Islamic State “an imminent threat [in the US].” Nothing came of it.
The biggest terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11 is the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing — which the soothsayers missed.
Changes in airport security after 9/11. Photo by Globe Photos / AP/ Getty Images
Two phenomena are at work. One is our habitual human tendency to worry too much about dramatic, unusual dangers, like terrorism and Ebola, and too little about commonplace ones, like car wrecks and falls, that are far more likely to kill us. When we hear about terrorists shooting innocents, we get cold chills wondering whether we’ll be next. When we hear that someone died of a stroke, we yawn.
The other factor is a giant public-private network that has a stake in stoking these fears. The bureaucratic reality is that it’s safer to issue warnings about dozens of dangers that never pan out than to downplay a single one that later materializes.
Government officials need a sense of urgent peril to justify their budgets and their powers. Private contractors have reason to inflate the problems they get paid to address. The resulting system, says Mueller, amounts to “a self-licking ice-cream cone.”
By now, the worry about terrorism is ingrained in us. In the wake of the Paris attacks, a Pew poll found, nearly 2 out of 3 Americans are “somewhat” or “very” worried that a terrorist attack will soon happen here.
But public fear has been that high for years. When an attack happens, we expect more attacks — and when no attack happens, we expect more attacks. A plurality of citizens consistently worry that the government is doing too little to combat terrorism.
What is easy to forget is that people in general and Americans in particular enjoy exceptional levels of safety. There was a true threat to our national existence during the Cold War, when nuclear incineration was perpetually half an hour away. There was far more terrorism on U.S. soil in the 1970s, when leftist radicals carried out hundreds of bombings, and even in the 1990s.
The chance that extremist violence will touch any of us directly was minuscule before the latest attacks, and it still is. There simply aren’t that many people with the will, resources and acumen to engage in serious terrorist operations.
But don’t expect that fact to get much attention. As journalist H.L. Mencken once wrote, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
The danger today is not imaginary, but neither is the danger of being struck by lightning. We don’t organize our government or lives around avoiding that risk, and we shouldn’t do it for terrorism.
Steve Chapman, a member of the Tribune Editorial Board, blogs at chicagotribune.com/chapman.
schapman@tribpub.com
Call for more Jews to carry guns a ‘dangerous overreaction’
A rabbi’s proposal for European Jews to be able to carry guns in the wake of the Paris terror attacks is “divisive and dangerous”, leading Jewish figures tell Channel 4 News.
Channel4 news
January 15, 2015
Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the director of the European Jewish Association (EJA), has called on the European governments to allow proprietors of synagogues, kosher shops and Jewish property to be allowed to train and carry guns in a bid to counter fears of rising anti-Semitism.
“Jewish people in Europe don’t feel secure. There is too much fear and threat,” he told the BBC on Wednesday. “We ask the EU government to make it much easier for Jews who want to carry guns to be able to do so.”
He added: “We have to be in a situation where we know that each Jewish institution is protected by a few people who carry guns and will be able to protect institutions in wake of a terrorist attack.”
Rabbis for guns, Menachem Margolin
But leading figures in Britain have condemned the suggestions which come against a backdrop of growing concerns about anti-Semitism in UK and France following last week’s attacks in Paris.
Danny Rich, a senior rabbi and chief executive of Liberal Judaism, told Channel 4 News that the measure was a “dangerous overreaction” that risked compounding social division.
“Terrorists rely on stoking up fears and want nothing more than a society in which we are prone to shooting each other,” he said. “Now, more than ever is a time to, trust in the decency of the British public and the capabilities of the police and security services. This is not the time to be retreating into ourselves or armed strongholds.”
Getting such legislation through parliament in the UK would be “practically impossible”, Westminster sources told Channel 4 News. Nonetheless the debate over the proposal coincides with wider questions of the Jewish response amid increased anxiety after the murder of four people by Amedy Coulibaly in a kosher grocery store in Paris last week.
Home threat
Police and community groups have strengthened security at Jewish locations in Britain in recent days, while the British based Community Security Trust, which monitors anti-Jewish hate crime, said it was working closer and more frequently alongside police to guard Jewish sites.
Stephen Pollard, the editor of Jewish Chronicle newspaper, said the idea of armed response was “utterly ludicrous”. “I simply cannot conceive of a single person that would concur with this however great or perceived the threat,” he told Channel 4 News.
“Deploying armed police at synagogues has been seen in recent weeks and is the right public response. But the idea of arming people is utterly ludicrous.”
Meanwhile a survey by the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) of more than 2,200 British Jews earlier this week found that more than half feel they have witnessed more anti-Semitism in the past two years than ever before.
In July, when Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza was at its height, London saw the highest-ever level of hate crime, of which more than nine-tenths was aimed at Jews.
A spokeswoman for the London-based Jews for Justice for Palestinians said Rabbi Margolin’s proposal would “only add to the climate of fear and panic and could actually be dangerous”.
“This could discourage many Jews from using these institutions and would have a very negative effect on the Jewish community,” she told Channel 4 News.
“We suggest that, instead of adopting Rabbi Margolin’s recommendation, the leaders of European Jewish organisations condemn oppressive Israeli actions such as last summer’s military actions, instead of supporting them.”
ABOUT EJA
- To strengthen Jewish Identity and expand Jewish activities in Europe.
- To defend Jewish interest in Europe.
- To improve the image of Israel in Europe.
The modern European Jewish communities are facing challenges beyond the scope of regional initiatives with limited resources. Most of the Jews in Europe are not part of any community and most of children and students have a very limited knowledge of our culture and tradition. As the level of anti-Semitism in Europe is growing each day, European Jewry must act and defense our interest and future.
The state of Israel has invested a great deal in developing its relations with the US and its Jewry and caring for the Russian and former USSR nations Jewish communities. Due to lack of resources, the relationships between Israel, European countries and the European Jewish Diaspora doesn’t seem to be a top priority for the state of Israel.
EJA helps its member organizations and communities with various resources and represents them in the political arena.
EJA’s board include directors of member organizations.
Rabbi Menachem Margolin, General Director of the Rabbinical Centre of Europe (RCE) serves as the General director of EJA.
European Jewish Development Fund (EJDF)
Rabbinical Centre of Europe (RCE)
European Jewish Community Center (EJCC)
European Jewish Study Network (EJSN)
European Jewish Press (EJPress)
EIPA
European Center for Jewish Students (ECJS)
Jewish European Professionals (JEP)
Morasha
European Jewish Library
CHANA
Tzedek
EUJB
European Kashrut
The European Synagogue
BASSAD
TEV
European Forum of Russian Jewry
Jewish Community of Cyprus
Jnews
Jewish Community of Hungary