Refusing to be terrorized

Bruce Schneier has written a post with which I agree totally. He talks about the numerous incidents that have happened since the London Foiled Attacks when fear led people to overreact and to make flying anything, but a normal experience. He writes, “The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act. And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.” Schneier is right. Fighting terrorism means to refuse to make terrorists achieve their aims by making us change who we are and how we live. It doesn’t mean that we ignore the menace, which is all too real, but rather that we do everything that we can so that it doesn’t reduce our quality of life. I refused to be jumpy when I get on a bus, a train or a plan. More importantly, I refuse to see in every Muslim or Arab, a probable terrorist and I accept that they have the right to live a normal life, one where they don’t have to overcome the presumption of guilt.