The College Fix

Move over FBI, CIA and the armed forces.

The real reason America has not seen a huge wave of terrorist attacks in America over the last decade?

There’s no real threat of it.

“Terrorism is not such a huge problem,” argues Charles Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and author of recent book “The Missing Martyrs.”

Kurzman gave a speech Monday at the University of South Florida, and the student newspaper, The Oracle, chronicled his claims:

“If even 1 percent of the world’s billion Muslims, or even 1 percent of Muslims in the U.S. who number in the millions, were interested in doing this violent activity, there is no way they could all be stopped,” Kurzman said. “We would be seeing attacks, we would be seeing arrests, every day and all over. And yet we’re not – we don’t see it.” …

In his lecture, Kurzman referred to several translated documents from the Taliban and al-Qaida, attempting to recruit people in America. These documents told how simple it was to be a terrorist, blowing up a car or cutting the brakes on a truck. “These ideas are simple. Anyone who wanted to be could be a terrorist, and yet we see so little of it,” he said.

Kurzman said the expectations of terrorism stem from disproportionate fear in the world.

“We haven’t seen the level of violence we were prepared to see after 9/11 to be braced for,” Kurzman said. “Yet our resource allocation still seems to be tilted in the direction of those major threats that have not materialized.” …

“We have this idea that we live in a dangerous world and we need to be protecting ourselves constantly in a permanent state of emergency,” he said. “We are living in a relatively peaceful time. … One of the unremarked phenomena of our era is that war between governments has almost entirely disappeared.”

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