There's only one way to counter it: you have to change the culture of a nation, which ultimately determines its politics.
300,000 people will die in car accidents over ten years in the US. In a typical ten year span, maybe 0.5% as many will die from terrorism in the US (and really, only 9/11 skews that, otherwise it'd be so small as to be completely irrelevant). It shouldn't take anything more than that simple comparison to get people to understand the context. But then you throw in: propaganda of random sudden death by a foreign attacker, a foreign culture, or the idea of massive scale death from wmd - then you get wild, irrational panic among the vast majority of any people anywhere on earth.
I'd argue we should all be willing to accept an extremely small risk of terrorism death, in exchange for a proper vast amount of liberty. It's a trivial compromise, if a person is not a coward and prefers to live free. There was a time the general population agreed, but that was long ago now. Today, what I just said is more often considered very offensive, politically incorrect, and will be shouted down nearly anywhere it is proposed.
It's clear you often can't stop a terrorist from killing a room full of people. Governments around the world accumulate more power by pandering and pretending you can. If a terrorist is willing to die for it, there is nothing that can stop most small scale attacks. The best a nation can do, is try to limit that, act on intelligence if there is any, and try to prevent large terrorism attacks. That reality however, doesn't win votes, and very few politicians would ever dare tell that truth.
The population wouldn't be nearly so afraid of terrorism, if they weren't being constantly told to be, and or intentionally terrified by the propaganda. The risks were just as high in the 1970s and 1980s, and people were not nearly as terrified.
I'm not completely disagreeing with you, I know that the probability of dying in a terror attack is small.
But I have a Muslim colleague that went to Mecca last year. He came back transformed, not smiling anymore, refusing to shake hands with female colleagues and has been surprised praying in the toilets and in a bus (he's a bus driver) and made a big scandal about having to take of his woolly hat (which apparently he attached religious significance to).
So now I wonder if one morning he'll decide to come at work with an AK-47. And living in France, I'm sure you would agree it's not irrational to think that.
You can't apply reason and logic to his going to Mecca, and arrive at a conclusion that he may come in to work with an AK-47.
I don't find it irrational to be scared of someone that shows signs of radicalization.
That is exactly the "wildly irrational [propaganda that is] being pushed 24/7 by the most powerful and richest entities on earth" 'adventured was talking about. Sadly, this kind of association is so present in our culture now that we need to work hard to stop thinking like that.
> And living in France, I'm sure you would agree it's not irrational to think that.
France is big and - like every country - mostly uninteresting to terrorists. Do you live in Paris?
Seriously, are you uninformed or trolling ? The French wikipedia page [0] (sorry it's not as detailed in English) lists 8 terrorists attacks (3 failed attempts) for the year 2015. I don't want to become an interesting target !
> Do you live in Paris?
I don't and Hervé Cornara[1] didn't either.
So I'm not cowering in fear, ready to accept "fortress Europe" [2] however I'm legitimately (or so I think) worried.
[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorisme_en_France#2015
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Quentin-Fallavier_attack
Uninformed. Thanks for the links, I didn't realize there were more than 2 attacks in France this year.
English Wikipedia has a nicely formatted list[0].
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_France#List_of_si...
I wonder what is stopping people from seeing it this way?