Gideon Polya, “UK and US World’s worst terrorist states”, MWC News, 17 July 2005.
UK and US World’s worst terrorist states
Enough is enough.. Lovers of the English language and of humanity have been enraged for long enough by the hijacking of the meaning and application of "terror" and derivative words by the US-led Coalition and complicit, lying Anglo-American mainstream media. Thus we have the semantic absurdity of the "War on Terror" that is best appreciated if we imagine violent Coalitions conducting wars on fear, concern, sensibility, happiness or transcendent joy. However the very meaning of "terrorist" has been subverted by the leaders of the US-led Coalition who have effectively now re-defined this as "any enemy we oppose, hate and wish to destroy".
Escape from the current Orwellian loop is long overdue. We must insist qualitatively on the centuries-old meanings of English words, as opposed to the Newspeak of the blathering Blair and verbally-challenged, bumbling Bush. We must also attempt to analyze global "terror" realities quantitatively, rejecting the "2 plus 2 does not equal 4" proposition of Big Brother in George Orwell's "1984". We need to critically examine what we mean by "terror" and try to get a quantitative handle on the actuality of global "terrorism".
"Terror" is defined in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary as "intense fear". When "terrorists" "terrorize" by applying "terrorism" to a society they attempt to impose their views or further their goals by "coercive intimidation" i.e. by "inducing intense fear" in the subject people. Further, we can recognize sub-categories of "terrorism" such as state terrorism and non-state terrorism. However the actual intensity or degree of the fear experienced is hard to estimate for individuals and impossible in practice to determine for substantial populations (e.g. Afghan mothers or commuters on the London underground). The "degree of terror" is related to "increased likelihood of death" for oneself or one's loved ones. Accordingly, we could attempt quantitation of "terror" by determining the "probability of avoidable death" for various groups of people.
"Avoidable death" or "avoidable mortality" (technically, excess mortality) is the difference between the ACTUAL deaths in a country and the deaths EXPECTED for a peaceful, decently-run country with the same demographics [1, 2]. United Nations Population Division data [3] enable calculation of the avoidable mortality (excess mortality) for every country in the World since 1950. Under-5 infant mortality is a major component of mortality in Third World countries and using this UN data [3] we can also calculate the under-5 infant mortality for every country in the World over the last half century. Updated UNICEF reports [4] also provide estimates of infant mortality and other key social statistics reflecting global and national policies.
The latest UNICEF report (2005) [4] estimates that in 2003 the under-5 infant mortality was 110,000 in Occupied Iraq, 292,000 in Occupied Afghanistan and 1,000 in the invading and occupying country Australia, noting that in 2003 these countries had populations of 25, 24 and 20 million, respectively [4] and the under-5 year olds in these countries totalled 4.2, 5.0 and 1.3 million, respectively [3]. From this information we can calculate that the probability of under-5 infant death in a calendar year at the moment is about 2.6%, 5.8% and 0.08%, respectively, for Occupied Iraq, Occupied Afghanistan and the occupying country Australia. Thus at present the annual under-5 infant deaths in Iraq average 2.8 for every 100 under-5 year old Iraqi infants.
The probability of infant death is clearly very low in the Coalition occupying country Australia and is also very low in other Western countries [1, 2]. However the probability of under-5 infant death is very high in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories. It is likely that parents (and especially mothers) in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghanistan Territories would have grave fears for their infants when on average about 4 out of every 100 under-5 year old infants die each year. The appalling infant mortality in these Coalition-occupied countries is associated with non-provision of life-sustaining requisites by the US-led Coalition and represents horrendous "passive genocide" in utter dereliction of the Geneva Accords [5, 6].
There have been about 5,000 Western civilian deaths over the last 20 years due to jihadist and Arab insurgent violence (with most having occurred in Israel and the US and the remainder largely due to the Lockerbie, Bali, Madrid and London atrocities) [1, 2]. Knowing that the total current population in Western countries is about 760 million [3], we can estimate that the probability of Western civilian death annually from terrorist attack has averaged about 0.00003%. By way of comparison, in the US (population about 300 million) [3] the annual deaths from car accidents total 42, 643 (2003) [7] and from smoking-related causes 435,000 (2005) [8]. Accordingly, the annual probabilities of deaths from car accidents and from smoking-related causes in the US are about 0.014% and 0.15%, respectively…