Gwynne Dyer writes in the Arab News that terrorism doesn't pose much of a threat and that we really shouldn't do much in response:

There isn't a major terrorist threat; just a little one. The massive overreaction called "the war on terror" is due to the fact that 9/11 hit a very big and powerful country that had the military resources to strike anywhere in the world, and strategic interests that might be advanced by a war or two fought under the cover of a crusade against terrorism. If 9/11 had happened in Canada, it would all have been very different.

A kind of 9/11 did happen in Canada. The largest casualty toll of any terrorist attack in the West before 2001 was the 329 people who were killed in the terrorist bombing of Air-India Flight 182, en route from Toronto to London, in 1985. Two hundred and eighty of the dead were Canadian citizens. Since Canada has only one-tenth the population of the United States, it was almost exactly the same proportionate loss that the United States suffered in 9/11.

It was immediately clear that the terrorists were Sikhs seeking independence from India, but here's what Canada didn't do: It didn't send troops into India to "stamp out the roots of the terrorism" and it didn't declare a "global war on terror." Partly because it lacked the resources for that sort of adventure, of course, but also because it would have been stupid. The investigation was not very successful, and twenty-one years later most of the culprits have still not been punished. But Sikh terrorism eventually died down even though nobody invaded Punjab, and nobody else got hurt in Canada. Sometimes not doing much is the right thing to do.

What a bogus analogy. Militants living abroad engaging in terrorist attacks to influence the politics of their home country is not remotely the same as being attacked on your home soil by a group of terrorists who've publicly declared war against your country and your way of life. If two IRA militants living in New York bombed an Aer Lingus flight killing hundreds of American citizens, for example, I sincerely doubt even a "crazed warmonger" like George W. Bush would invade Ireland.

The fact that terrorists aren't all card-carrying members of the same al-Qaeda network obscures the bigger, more important question, which is whether we can all agree that there is a nasty, fascist ideological strain pulsing through Islam that represents a serious threat to our values and our way of life. Unfortunately, as Caroline Glick wrote in the Jerusalem Post this Sunday, the inability of some multiculti leaders in the West to come to this seemingly obvious conclusion is what makes Islamofascism all that much more of a threat:

It is against the backdrop of the refusal of Western elites to acknowledge the fact that there is a global jihad that the true danger of radical Islam becomes clear. Many argue that the forces of global jihad are no match for their enemies because they lack regular armies.

Yet because of the defiant, irrational and immoral refusal of Western political, cultural and media elites to acknowledge the threat that internal and external jihadist forces manifest to the very notion of human freedom, they make it impossible for their societies to take measures to protect themselves.