aThe twenty-fourth of December 1800 saw the very first bomb attack, against Napoleon Bonaparte. It used a barrel bound with iron hoops and filled with gun-powder and bullets, and dubbed, in the florid language of the time, the "machine infernale." The following century saw around thirty similar events in Britain, France and other European countries, as increasingly sophisticated bombs were set to work on behalf of various separatist and anarchist causes. The twentieth-century began with an average of one terror attack per year. By the nineteen-sixties, this number had doubled. The nineteen-seventies was when it all really took off, and now, fifty years later, we are seeing several terrorist attacks every single day.
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Oh, he's exaggerating, you think. But I only wish I was. Let us look at the events of last month, October 2008. October the first saw three bomb blasts wounding one hundred people in India and an attack by PKK militants in Turkey. The second of October; two suicide attacks on Baghdadi mosques with twenty killed, and four killed and seven injured in a suicide attack in Pakistan. The third of October; a bomb attack kills seven soldiers in Georgia, and another bomb destroys part of a building in Spain. The fourth and fifth were uneventful, but the sixth of October more than makes up for this, with a bomb attack killing several at a bus stop in Sri Lanka, seventeen killed by mortar rounds in a Somalian market, and twenty killed and sixty injured by a suicide bomber in Pakistan. The seventh of October; Two bomb blasts in Baghdad, one killed and seven injured. The eighth of October; Five people injured by a bomb in India, a PKK attack on a bus in Turkey kills three and wounds twenty-two, and ten killed in a suicide attack in Baghdad. The ninth of October; a suicide bomb in Turkey. Eight wounded. Eight dead. Another suicide bomb in Sri Lanka. The tenth; four kidnapped and beheaded in Pakistan. A suicide attack kills forty and injures eighty in the same country. Three bombs in Baghdad; thirty dead, thirty injured. The eleventh of October; An attack on the US embassy in Mexico. The twelfth of October; Baghdad; bombs, snipers and more. Twenty dead, thirteen injured. Columbia; Two attacks on hotels. One dead, seven injured. The thirteenth of October; More bombs in Baghdad. One dead, six injured. Bomb in Turkey, five injured. A bomb in Nepal kills three. The fourteenth of October; Afghanistan. Bombs. Nineteen dead. One injured. The sixteenth of October. Pakistan. Suicide bomb destroys building, kills four. The seventeenth of October. USA. Bomb kills one and injures four. Bomb blast in Baghdad injures seven and damages buildings. The nineteenth of October. Pakistan. Bomb blast kills four and injures seven. Baghdad. Two bombs, two deaths, twenty-seven injuries. Afghanistan. Attack on a bus kills forty. Twentieth of October. Attack in India. Thirteen dead. Twelve injured. Bomb in Pakistan. Two injured. Bomb in Baghdad. Four dead. Seven injured. Afghanistan. Suicide attack. Seven dead. Two injured. Twenty-first of October. Helsinki. Arson attack on mosque injures one. Bomb in Bangkok injures one. Bomb in India kills over eighteen and injures over thirty. Twenty-second of October; Nepal, bomb, over ten injured. Twenty-third of October. Suicide attack in Baghdad. Eleven dead. Twenty-two injured. Bomb attack in Afghanistan kills one and leaves one dead. Grenade attack in Indonesia. Bomb blast in Croatia. Two dead, three injured. Colombia. A series of bomb blasts injure sixteen. Twenty-fourth of October. Bomb in Greece. Twenty-fifth of October; Gunfire in Afghanistan kills three. Gunfire and explosions in Georgia kill two and injure one. Twenty-eighth of October. Gunfire in India; four dead, five injured. Suicide bombs and missile attacks across Pakistan kill thirty-five and injure twenty. Twenty-ninth. Bombs in Somalia. Fifty-six dead. Eighty injured. Thirtieth of October. India. Thirteen separate bomb blasts. Seventy dead. Four hundred and fifty injured. Spain. Bomb blast injures twenty-one. Afghanistan. Suicide bomber. Five dead, twenty-one injured. Thirty-first of October; Grenade attacks and landmines in India. Twenty injured. Bomb blasts in Pakistan. Nine dead, twenty-one injured.
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So there you have it. Check up on me if you like.*1 But it is all true. This is the world that we are living in today. One thousand, six hundred and thirty six individuals killed or injured last month alone. And that was a quiet month, no hijacked jets, no attacks on a 9/11 scale. What is more, the above attacks are only the ones that we know about. As several of my Israeli friends who spent their army-service in the anti-terror service have told me, for every bomber that gets through, there are at least ten who are foiled. And of course, even the mercifully small percentage that do get through the net have a far greater impact than October's figures even hint at. The effects of a suicide-bomb are in no way at all restricted to the "mere" twenty or thirty killed or injured. If it were, terrorism would be a particularly inefficient and unsuccessful form of warfare. The real effects of a terrorist-bomb take place away from the epicentre. There are, firstly, the several thousand families and friendships ripped apart by it's blast. For every individual victim mentioned in the newspaper reports, there are a hundred friends and colleagues shocked and shaken by what has happened. And even those who knew no-one involved are affected in a way that is too deep to describe. For every building blown up by a bomb, there are streets and streets of shattered windows, of people who, whilst unscathed physically, will never forget that almighty crash as the detonation ripped the air in two. Even those who lived too far away to hear the blast, "will never forget the moment they heard the news", the moment that terror struck their city. Life is never the same afterwards. It's called terrorism for a reason. And so...
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#1; Aggressive prevention. There are bomb factories all over the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the Israeli army know exactly where they are. There are hundred of terrorist cells operating in residential buildings, getting ready to attack. It would seem, therefore, that the best tactic in this game is prevention - blowing them sky-high before they do the same to us...
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But. But the fact is, the business of blowing people sky-high is a pretty nasty affair. And not only for those being blown sky-high. As we've said, terrorists like operating out of residential areas, which means that when you go in after them, everyone in the area is treated to a terrifying volley of machine gun bullets ripping through their neighbourhood, with armed troops rampaging through their buildings, helicopters hovering above them, the flashes of explosives and the knowledge that a single stray bullet and they are dead. After being subjected to all this, it is no wonder that they cheer for the brave martyrs who have been killed in the attack, and pledge their allegiance at their carefully orchestrated funerals. For every terrorist that we take down, at least ten are created. In short, it is an utterly hopeless endeavour...
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#2; Hug a terrorist. Considering the sheer hopelessness of aggressive prevention, it has been suggested that possibly, trying the very opposite of aggression might have some effect. And at first glance, it does seem logical to suggest that setting up some sort of social program for our unenlightened brethren, explaining our point of view and the fact that, despite what the cartoons in their newspapers may tell them, we don't actually have horns, might just work...
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But. But there are various obstacles that make this sort of thing near to impossible. You can't just buy a property on the main street in Gaza City and set up a social club and discussion group. You would be dead before you opened your doors. A few years ago, two Israelis took a wrong turning in those parts, ended up in an arab town, and were lynched by a howling mob. These are not hospitable places. If people are living close enough to terrorist groups to be influenced by them, it is more than likely that the terrorists govern the area to some significant extent, and are not about to allow you to influence their target audience. Furthermore, it is disturbingly obvious that playing the whole "lets-be-reasonable" game with these people is doomed to failure. A quick glance at their newspaper headlines makes it clear that Palestinians are living in a parallel universe all of their own, one in which herds of wild pigs and enormous rats rampage through their streets , and horned beasts drink the blood of their children.*2,3
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#3; Buy a terrorist lunch. One preventative measure that does not involve people firing grenades at you is the "human security paradigm". According this this theory, what is necessary is to address the enduring underlying inequalities which fuel terrorist activity. The sort of scheme tries to provide food, water and shelter to impoverished areas, and, theoretically, stops people turning to terrorism in the first place.
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But. As far as most of the terrorist strongholds (and although "stronghold" may bring to mind bunkers and caves, here it refers to whole cities and sometimes whole countries) are concerned, this scheme faces the same problem of #2. You are not going to distribute aid without permission of the terrorists themselves, and what usually ends up happening is that it is distributed to their supporters, or used to widen their fan-base. Any money, of course, goes towards arms. Furthermore, this whole policy seems a bit hypocritical given the general policy of "not negotiating with terrorists". The message that "terror will get you nowhere" is eroded slightly by the fact that, actually, the mere threat of it will give you all the aid you need.
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#4; Know your enemy. Memorising some basic Arabic, as well as a few of the sayings and doings of the prophet, might score you points if you are hijacked and claiming to be an innocent fellow Muslim.
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But. But as most of the most horrific terrorist attacks have shown, especially those targeting middle-eastern airliners and mosques, being a Muslim doesn't seem to count for much against your modern terrorist - anyone tainted by the evils of the west is fair game.
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#5; Strap bags of pig fat to your homes and businesses. This is an interesting one. Apparently, the experts tell us that your pious jihadist will be so put off by the idea of being contaminated with the fat of this unclean animal that he will abandon the mission.*4
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But. But the same experts admit that if this becomes common practice, the clerics will have no problems issuing a fatwah stating that being coated in pig fat as you die is, albeit unpleasant, perfect hallal.
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#6; Remove all the bins from your bus and train stations. This is perhaps the most annoying anti-terrorist practice in existence, as anyone who has had garbage to chuck in a British railway station can tell you. It was instituted to stop giving the IRA a convenient place to plant their bombs.
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But. But indeed. The IRA were cuddly compared to your new brand of terrorist. Lack of proper garbage disposal does little to hinder a jihadist in an explosive belt.
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#7; Set up road-blocks and metal detectors. Ah, yes. Everyone who has been to Israel knows what it is like, standing in long lines outside the bus station, the endless queues at the road-blocks. Still, it stops them getting in...
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But. But, no. It doesn't. The Red Crescent is kind enough to provide the terrorists with ambulances which speed through Israel's check-points...ostensibly to deliver their sick occupants to hospital, but actually, to speed their explosives to their targets. Furthermore, if a terrorist is stopped at the gates or checkpoint, they just detonate there. Given the long queues, they tend to end up killing far more people than anywhere else. Ironic, really. Not to mention the fact that the most commonly used terrorist devise these days is the missile - hundreds are fired from Gaza into Israel every single day.
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#8; Buy a gun! You've always wanted one, and now you've got an excuse! Nail the fucker before he gets you!
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But. But, but, but. They ain't gonna allow you onto a plane with a gun, and as for your home, unless you walk around your house with one already cocked and ready in your hand, you'll be dead before your hand even reaches your holster. Even if you do happen to fire before he detonates, unless you are super-accurate, you will probably just put a bullet into his explosive vest, and prevent him the trouble of pulling the strap himself...
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#9; Don't live in a city. Terrorists want to kill as many people as possible, so you won't find them outside of the city. Small towns are safer, but the safest option is to set up home in a stone-wall cottage with roses round the door. You are unlikely to find explosives hidden among the strawberries and cream at the annual village fete.
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But. If you are looking to avoid and prolonged and painful death, it is possible that the very centre of a city is the best place to be. After all, it is not suicide bombs or shootings that are the big worries anymore, it is nuclear "dirty-bombs" or even conventional bombs. There is very little difference between the ideology of the ruling Iranian "revolutionary guard" and any of your small jihadist terrorist groups. They both spout the same apocalyptic jihadist creed. The only difference between the two is the fact that the Islamists in Iran, with the resources of an entire country at their disposal, are relatively close to getting a nuclear weapon.
And if, at that point, they choose to act on their long-voiced principles, the entire point of living in a village will be lost. Those living in cities will have a nice, peaceful death - vaporised immediately, they won't feel a thing. Those in villages will have to endure the slow and painful option; they will be far away enough from the city to survive immediate death, but with the power of modern nuclear weapons, they will have the burning, the deathly nuclear rain, the fall-out, the radiation sickness, the nuclear winter...all of the horror to deal with. Furthermore, I am reminded as I write this about a survey that was made during the cold war as to the safest viable location in which to live. It was one of many, of course, but this one chose the Falkland Islands as a nice, peaceful place to set up camp, far away from any potential nuclear target. Only a few months later, the Falklands War broke out. I'm not sure what this proves, but it's a fact to bear in mind...
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#10 Don't live in the West. Since moving away from your city and escaping into the countryside is no solution (in fact, more or less the opposite), perhaps it is necessary to leave the whole country, whether it be the US, UK, Israel, or whichever state the Jihadists find so offensive. Not very patriotic, of course, but as every child knows, if you want to live in peace, sometimes you've got to leave home...
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But. But what actually constitutes "the West" is not at all clear. I think that it is about time the term was scrapped in favour of something more genuinely descriptive. You are just likely to be attacked by Jihadists if you are not a "Westerner", as the attacks in Pakistan, Saudia Arabia, Indonesia, etc, show...
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#11 Don't be Jewish. Forget bank-robbing, fire-eating and bear-trapping. Being Jewish is perhaps the most infamously hazardous occupation, and terrorism is just one more reason why. As the numerous attacks on Synagogues, Jewish schools, Jewish Institutions, etc, show, if you are unfortunate to be born with Semitic blood, your first act of survival should be to have plastic surgery on your nose, to burn your family photographs, and to move to Sweden and take a new name.
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But. But it is not that easy. As drastic as the above action sounds, something tells me that it is not likely to work. As Bernard Malamud has said, "if you ever manage to forget that you are Jewish, there will always be a gentile who will remind you." And history seems to bear him out. The vast majority of those carted off to the death-camps in the Second World War spent most of the journey wandering why they were being singled out for their connection with a heritage that they had abandoned and felt absolutely nothing towards. If you do ever get as far as Sweden, you will hardly have finished assembling your new Ikea furniture before someone jumps through your window with his head wrapped in a kafir and starts spraying you with machine-gun bullets. Try it, you'll see...
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#12 Don't take planes. If you need to go overseas to visit the grandchildren, take a boat. One hell of a lot longer, but when was the last time Al Qaeda sailed a cruise-ship into the World Trade Centre?
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But. But taking a boat is not a guaranteed bomb-proof activity. There have been at least seven terrorist attacks against shipping, and there is no reason to think there won't be more. What is more, as events like the Lockerbie bombings show, not getting on a plane is no guarantee that you won't be killed in an attack on one. *5,6
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#13 Don't take trains. Both planes and shipping are out, but you might have thought you could do your travelling by rail. Don't. There have been at least 15 major terrorist attacks aimed against trains, and the fatalities from rail-related terrorist attacks are probably higher than from any other.
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But. But if you are not going to take the train, there is only one viable alternative left - that most vile of all methods of travel, the bus. I've seen many trainspotters in my time - but has anyone ever seen a single bus-spotter? There is a reason for this. No-one likes buses, and if we are forced to start travelling on them, it is a sure sign that the terrorists have won. Besides, buses are no safer...
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#14 Don't take buses. There have been more attacks against buses than against any other form of transport. It would make sense, in that case, to avoid them. Or at any rate, to sit at the back, as apparently the terrorists like to detonate just as they get on.
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But. But it is not quite so easy. In my naive youth, I used to always sit at the back of the bus in Jerusalem, innocently believing myself thus impervious to fire, shrapnel and flying glass. This, of course, was when I did take the bus. More often I would take a taxi instead, thinking of the fact that we were constantly driving past buses on the road a minor technicality. A friend of mine went even further, refusing to take any form of motorised transport...and when a bus blew up a few metres from the pavement he was walking on, he was thrown through a shop window and almost killed. The fact is, as the picture at the top of this page shows, when a bus is hit by a bomb, whether you are at the back of the bus, in a taxi behind it, or on the pavement anywhere remotely near it, your a gonner....
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#15 Stockpile food and water. Having seen that all forms of prevention, from attacking terrorist strongholds to not taking the bus, do little to stop yourself being hit, it is time to move on to a more pragmatic viewpoint. The question is not how to prevent the attack happening, but to decide, once it has happened, how the hell you are going to survive it. One of the most commonly suggested ways of being prepared for when things go down is to store enormous quantities of canned goods and bottled water in your basement. Unfortunately, all of the terrorist-survival websites that suggest this neglect to add just how such items would mean the difference between death and survival. But if we use our imagination, we can just about see how, if poison gas makes leaving the house impossible and/or piped water supplies are poisoned, having your own back-up source might be necessary.
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But; But if poison gas is used, not only would one need a back-up canned-bean supply, but one would also need a completely ceiled room; and I don't believe that even one per cent of those stocking up on Heinz baked beans in tomato sauce have one of those. In terms of poisoned water; You will, of course, need clean water to drink, but you can make this from poisoned water by distilling it, in the same way that you can distil poisonous sea-water. *7
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#16 Know where your fire escape is. Well, if the plane is in trouble or the building is on fire, surely it makes sense to know the quickest way out? That, at least is the message of all those safety videos they insist on showing us at the beginning of each flight.
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But; Well, this is something that I have always wondered about. Has knowing where the safety exit is, how to adapt your gas-mask "in case of sudden loss of cabin-pressure", and were to find your parachute...has any of this ever saved anyone's life? Really. Have you ever heard of a Boeing 747 opening its doors and all of the passengers jumping out to safety? Neither have I. We have bombings and crashes aplenty, but a plane letting down those big rubber slides into the sea and everyone sliding out? Has there been a single instance of those rubber slides ever being used? I'm genuinely curious about this one!
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#17 Survey your surroundings once you have been kidnapped or hijacked. Try to establish some kind of rapport with your captors, since most terrorists are unsure and quite nervous.
Although I have left it till last, this little snippet of advice was actually the first the came up when I typed “surviving a terrorist attack” into Google; a sure enough sign that for every person that reads it here, there are probably several thousand that have already read it elsewhere.
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And so if you are ever unfortunate enough to find yourself in a hijacked aircraft, and start getting to your feet and making your way across to your “nervous” captors, already in your mind envisioning the adoration that will be soon due you as the calm, persuasive savior of the situation…as likely as not you will be much chagrined to see that at least one of your fellow passengers has already had the same idea, and is already now striding purposefully down the aircraft aisle, hard bent on his duty to defuse the situation. And as the blade comes out and the blade flashes in and the blood spurts and screams rise and then die as suddenly into a sudden awful hush…it is then that you will realize that actually, perhaps this whole business is not quite so simple after all. And it is then, of course, that the fear will hit, the real fear, not the pathetic little panicky nothingness that you were once so foolish as to dignify with that term, and you will realize that, not only have you never felt fear before, but your whole life, in fact, has been spent in a near-slumberous complacency, all those years spent utterly unaware of the simple fact of your fragile existence, of the life within your lungs, and as the plane suddenly lurches and fear grabs you so hard by the throat that you can hardly breath, as the agonizing whispers reach your ears (“Two more planes have been crashed into…”, “They say we’re heading for…”), and you lose the struggle to keep your bowels under control, and the plane begins to descend, and, yes, no doubt about it, it’s losing height, and this time it’s not a movie, not a rerun on TV, you’re not going to leave the theatre and buy another carton of popcorn for the car-journey home, because it’s happening to you, amigo, you, just like you always knew it would…
Well, it is then that you will realize that all of the efforts you ever made, or thought of making, fleeing your city, your country, your trains, your buses, cars, barricading yourself behind bags of pig-fat and tins of baked beans in the bottom of sealed buildings in the middle of nowhere, away from it all, away, away, away…all the time you were simply running from the only thing that could ever have saved you; all the time, it was right here, in this nightmare of falling steel, staring at you and daring you to move from your seat…right here, behind those angry Arab eyes.
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Because standing in the aisle with a bloodied knife in his hand is a man who has come willingly and calmly to a fate, the mere prospect of which has you utterly paralyzed with terror…
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“Even as I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall not fear, for You are with me”.
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aaaaaaaaaaIn order to win any war, one must have courage.
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In order to have courage, one must rid oneself of the instinctive fear of death.
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The terrorist owed his terrible fearlessness to what is no more than a new and sinister brand of something which has allowed millions of better men, throughout the ages, to treat death for what it is: nothing more than a night between two days. Faith is easy to come by when you really need it, and in the age of exploding men, we need it now.
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents,_2008#October
2: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Palestinian_official_newspapers:
_Israel_uses_super_rats_against_Jerusalem_Arabs
3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion
4: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3484277.stm
5: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Terrorist_incidents_against_shipping
6: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103
7: http://www.ehow.com/how_2330843_make-fresh-water-out-sea.html