The real terrorist threat

"THE PRIMARY terrorist threats to the United States," reports the State Department in its latest survey of global terrorism, "emanate from two regions, South Asia and the Middle East."

Ali Abunimah, an Arab-American propagandist, disputes that Hezbollah is guilty of terrorism, excuses Iran's support for terror groups, and says he is "deeply skeptical" that Osama bin Laden is a terrorist mastermind. He also insists that Arab or Islamist terrorism is not much of a threat to Americans.

As if to underline the point, the trial of two Libyan agents accused of blowing up a jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 opened just two days after the new report was released. Of the 270 victims murdered in the bombing of Pan Am 103, nearly three-quarters were American. Yesterday, President Clinton confirmed that agents of Osama bin Laden plotted last December to bomb large crowds of Americans celebrating New Year's Eve. The State Department's conclusion that Americans are most at risk from terror groups operating out of the Middle East or South Asia must seem a grim statement of the obvious to anyone who follows the news. But not to Ali Abunimah. Writing on the op-ed page of The New York Times last week, the vice president of the Arab American Action Network cited "the government's own data" to prove the government wrong.

"Of the 169 specifically anti-American attacks on foreign soil in 1999," Abunimah wrote, "96 were in Latin America, 30 were in Western Europe, . . . nine in the former Soviet Union, and 16 in Africa. Only 11 were in the Middle East, and just six in Asia." Yet Latin American terrorists, he noted, "get less attention than groups with Arab or Muslim orientations."

But there is good reason for the focus on Arab and Muslim terrorists: They pose by far the greatest danger to American life and limb.

Every terror attack is an outrage, but the most frightful are the ones that result in casualties — human beings killed and maimed. It is true that many anti-American attacks occur in Latin America. Hostages have been kidnapped for ransom; oil pipelines have been bombed. But in very few of those attacks have any Americans been hurt. Terrorism from the Middle East and South Asia, by contrast, is the terrorism that puts Americans in the hospital — or the grave.

Between 1993 and 1999, 67 US citizens were killed in international terrorist attacks, according to the State Department's annual chronologies. (Attacks by American perpetrators, such as the Oklahoma City bombing, are omitted.) Of those victims, 87 percent were murdered by terrorists based in the Middle East or South Asia. Over the same period, 1,299 Americans were wounded in terrorist incidents. Fully 99 percent were attacked by terrorists from the Middle East or South Asia.

(It isn't only Americans who are threatened by these terrorists. Almost 75 percent of all deaths attributed to international terrorism since 1993 were caused by groups from the Middle East/South Asia. Those groups were likewise responsible for 87 percent of all attacks that left victims wounded.)

But statistics are hardly necessary to prove that the terrorism deadliest to Americans comes, in Abunimah's phrase, from "groups with Arab or Muslim orientations." Just run through the list of lethal attacks; invariably the butchers were Muslim and/or Arab. Pan Am 103. The World Trade Center. The Marines in Beirut. The 19 US airmen in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Leon Klinghoffer on the Achille Lauro. Robbie Stethem, the Navy diver on TWA 847. The 12 Americans - — and 212 Africans — blown up at the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

The only notable exception to this bloody list is Oklahoma City. Yet, oddly enough, Oklahoma City was the one atrocity Abunimah mentioned in his column. Why? To make the claim that Arabs and Muslims "have too often borne the brunt of government suspicion and media stereotyping," since in the first hours after the Murrah Building was bombed, there was some speculation that Islamic extremists might have been responsible.

Certainly unjust suspicion and stereotyping should be condemned. "Muslim" and "Arab" are not synonyms for "terrorist." But given the awful toll of victims killed and wounded by Muslim and Arab terrorists, surely the vice president of the Arab American Action Network would want to denounce their crimes as vehemently as possible. Surely he would want to make it clear that Arabs and Muslims in America are horrified by terror committed by evil men claiming to act for the sake of Islam or the Arab people.

But no. Abunimah says nothing at all about the Arab/Islamic terrorism that has shattered so many lives — except to warn against "overreacting" to it. If Abunimah is scandalized by the savagery of terror organizations like Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or the Osama Bin Laden network, he gives no hint of it.

In a much longer version of his essay that he disseminated online, Abunimah disputes that Hezbollah is really guilty of terrorism, excuses Iran's support for terror groups, and says he is "deeply skeptical" that Bin Laden is a terrorist mastermind. It is no surprise that he also holds that terrorism out of the Arab/Muslim world is not that big a threat to Americans.

If only someone would tell the terrorists. "To kill the Americans and their allies, civilians, and military," proclaimed Bin Laden in February 1998, "is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it." Six months later, the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were blown to bits.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.

-- ## --

Follow Jeff Jacoby on X (aka Twitter).

Discuss his columns on Facebook.

Want to read something different? Sign up for "Arguable," Jeff Jacoby's free weekly email newsletter.