How to Defeat Terrorism: by Ignoring It

With every terrorist atrocity, like San Bernardino, I ask myself – what the f— do these people think they’re accomplishing?

The objective in war is to subdue the enemy by destroying his capacity to fight. ISIS and other Islamic radicals can do nothing of the kind. So instead they do terrorism. To what end? To hurt us? Yes. To subdue us? Seriously?

If they’re deluded enough to actually believe in the God they purport to worship – a God who bizarrely approves such horror – then maybe they’re deluded enough to imagine this is a path to . . . something.

But these outrages won’t bring down our society. A San Bernardino every day would get no closer toward that end. Fourteen dead? Why, we Americans murder an average of almost 100 a day, just being our normal selves; in fact, there’s already a daily mass shooting, on average. ISIS would have to up its game by orders of magnitude to have much true impact.

Oh, but they do have impact – only because we behave as though they do. Notwithstanding 100 daily murders, and San Bernardino being a drop in the bucket, we behave like it’s an apocalypse. The President gives a rare oval office address. We get our knickers all in twist, and talk about extreme actions (like Trump now proposing to ban all Muslims from America).  As if that would protect us from terrorism. (While we eschew common sense measures that would curb the vastly greater death toll from gun culture.)

Such irrational craziness can only make terrorists think they’re actually accomplishing something.

Well, it’s called terrorism because it’s aimed at terrifying us. And we obligingly act all terrified. What if, instead, we just shrugged it off and went about our business, treating terrorism as the mere minor nuisance which, in the big scheme of things, it actually is? Making clear that it achieves nothing. That’s how to defeat it.