Why worry about terrorist attacks?

George Bush blithers so ceaselessly about "the war on terror" that he has to keep concocting new names for it - the latest, "the long war", has an ominous ring, since it implies the American government never intends to shut up about it, ever - and of course both Blair and the US/UK media have got with the programme.

So it's easy to forget that the number of people who have died from terrorist attacks in the last five years sits stolidly at 2,752 in the US (all from 9/11), and 52 in the UK (all from 7/7). For 2004, in both countries? Zero. Ditto, 2003 and 2002, during which 625 and 725 people were killed by terrorism worldwide, respectively.

Meanwhile, every year 120,000 people die from smoking in the UK, and 1.2 million people die from car accidents internationally. In Congo, four million people have died during the latest scrabble for power. But news consumers are bored with reports about smoking and drink driving. Western politicians won't make any domestic headway banging on about some tiresome territorial conflict in Africa.

If this were merely a matter of faddishness, or fear-mongering political opportunism, we've been through Hula Hoops before, and - somehow - we made it out the other side of the cold war. But leaving aside the not inconsiderable matter of passing laws that curtail the "freedom" they are meant to defend, today's overblown rhetoric about terrorism is in danger of conjuring up the very bogeyman it feigns to constrain.

The single most powerful recruiting sergeant for suicide bombers isn't Hassan Nasrallah, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Osama bin Laden, but George Bush - with Tony Blair and CNN competing for second place. Turning the prevention of terrorism into the prime directive of both the American and British governments, and faithfully parroting this rhetoric in the news, effectively advertises a job opening. If you want an enemy this badly, you're going to get one.

Think school shootings - on which I am ostensibly an expert. The biggest drivers of America's bizarre late-90s profusion of teenage kids suddenly razing their classrooms with semi- automatics were outsized media coverage and disproportionately hysterical preventive measures in schools.

Kids saw photos of their peers plastered large as life all over the news, the long profiles on hitherto nobody misfits in their local papers, and envied the attention. In conducting paranoid assemblies and persecuting kids who wrote violent poetry, American high schools just gave their own student bodies ideas.

What got lost in the shuffle is how statistically rare these shootings continued to be, and they would have been even rarer if public authorities and media pundits had simply been a little cool.

I'm no psychologist, but school shooters and suicide bombers surely have much in common. They suffer from equal parts self-pity and grandiosity. They have chips on their shoulders. They feel underestimated and nourish a private sense of superiority.

They glorify their own view of the world, which they fantasise about shoving down everyone else's throat. They covet celebrity, and even the posthumous kind will do.

They're actually very imitative, and suggestible, but they think of themselves as exceptional, as special, as elect. It's a type. It's not just an Islamic type. You find it in every ethnicity, all over the world.

Exhaustive profiles of real and would-be bombers and fist-shaking we-shall-defeat-these-evil-doers from government cannot help but stimulate in these pathetic but ambitious sad-sacks the will to power.

Furthermore, in amplifying the eradication of an essentially criminal problem into a national raison d'ˆtre, journalists and politicians alike do radical Islamists' work for them. More than on the body counts, terrorism depends for its efficacy on shaking faith in systems - transport, trade, the stock market.

Quiet, intelligent security measures are all very well. But shouting from the rooftops about "threat levels" advertises that these systems are unsafe.

I don't know what the answer is. Margaret Thatcher's starving the IRA of "the oxygen of publicity" backfired big-time.

The prospective political dividends of filling the vacuum of villainy left by the defunct cold war with the Big Bad Terrorist are so substantial that realistically Bush, Blair, and their successors can't give the benefits a miss. But there are plenty of loons out there with delusions of grandeur. Even this column gives them a leg-up from madman to martyr.

The contest for the "cleverest" cartoon *about the Holocaust run by Iran's biggest-selling newspaper, Hamshahri, is meant to highlight the west's double standard: Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed were a justifiable exercise of free speech, but the Holocaust is sacrosanct.

Thus the 200 cartoons on display in a Tehran museum are intended to provoke outrage in Israel, America and Europe, and preferably illicit calls for the images - of a Jewish vampire drinking Palestinian blood or Sharon in an SS uniform - to be repressed.

(Guardian UK.)