Is terrorism a nuisance we should all just live with?

James Taranto over at the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web has some fun with ridiculous comparisons.

I'm going to quote him at length here - but to get his often hilarious commentary in daily emails, you can subscribe for free here.

Lynching Was Bad, but . . .

Speaking of the Los Angeles Times, on Friday the paper printed an exceptionally idiotic column by Rosa Brooks titled "9/11 Was Bad, but . . ." Brooks suggests that people who worry about terrorist attacks are "irrational wimps":

The 9/11 attacks were appalling and tragic, but they did not threaten the survival of the nation. . . . Of course, 3,000 dead is 3,000 too many. But keep it in perspective. As a nation, we have survived far worse. We lost more than 100,000 Americans in World War I, more than 400,000 in World War II, 37,000 in Korea, 58,000 in Vietnam--all without allowing our national character to turn into quivering jelly.

Every year, we also lose millions of Americans to preventable accidents and disease. We're more likely to die on the road than as a result of Al Qaeda's machinations. Annually, we lose some 43,000 people to auto accidents. For the grieving families, that's 43,000 deaths too many. But, although we surely could reduce auto fatalities if we chose to make it our top national priority, the Bush administration has yet to announce a "War on Highway Deaths."

This is unoriginal as well as fatuous. It's not even original in the L.A. Times, which published essentially the same piece three months ago. But in the hope that our new friends at the Times won't make the same mistake a third time, let's repeat our analogy that shows why this is such a ridiculous argument.

According to this table, 4,742 people were lynched in America between 1882 and 1964. That's an average of but 57 people a year, and the number of annual lynchings peaked in 1892, at 230. By the standards Brooks applies to 9/11, lynching was not a big problem. It killed far fewer people than war, disease, accidents, etc.

Yet if someone were lynched tomorrow, would we shrug it off because the number of deaths is only 1/43,000th of the annual car-crash toll? Of course not. It takes a stunning degree of moral obtuseness to treat a murder in the furtherance of a hateful ideology--be it white supremacy or Islamic fundamentalism--as the equivalent of an accidental death.

A similar bit of foolishness comes from Ian Buruma, who won an award at the book festival. In yesterday's Times, he opines:

Just as Jews, during some traditional Passover feasts, ask God to bring down his wrath on the Gentiles who "don't know him," and many Christians believe that hell awaits those who don't subscribe to their faith, Muslims are led to believe that killing the enemies of Islam can be justified.

"Just as"? Surely there is a difference between believing or hoping that God will punish unbelievers and taking it upon oneself to do it. It doesn't speak well of the editors of the L.A. Times that they not only publish such nonsense but do so habitually.