Students at Carman Collegiate were offered some perspective this week on the terror-related activities that seem to dominate headlines around the world.
    
In his lecture titled Don't Panic, international Journalist Gwynne Dyer explained that while a terror attack is unlikely to happen in Carman, people do worry about it - if not on a more national scale.

"Why do these people (terrorists) hate us? Why would they try to kill us? Are they a danger? So, it's worth talking about."

Dyer explains some terrorists really do hate people in the West while some don't, but says they don't attack because they hate us, they attack because they've got other goals.

So, what are the goals and is there anything we can do about it? Dyer says sometimes the answer is no, there's nothing you can do about it. "You're just going to have to live with this and it probably isn't a big enough problem (that) it's going to spoil your day."

As for how big of a threat are terrorists here at home? Dyer explains it's actually quite small, but is meant to look big and therefore it fools people. To prove the point, he uses the Canadian example of two separate incidents in late 2014 that took the lives of Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent and Corporal Nathan Cirillo.

"Statistically we've lost two people, killed in Canada by terrorists, in the last fifteen years. It's a tragedy that it happened at all but it's not the biggest thing that happened even that month."

"Terrorists are not people who do it because they like killing, imaginably some of them do like killing, but it's still not why they do it. They do it because they've got political objectives, there is a strategy here."

Dyer adds terror attacks aren't just going to happen anytime, anywhere and says the Canadian Prairies are not a predictable environment for terrorists to target.

"It's going to happen somewhere where there's good media coverage because the whole point is to get good media coverage, so we need a little bit more critical mass of media before it's worth doing a terrorist operation (here)... I just don't think it's very likely (but) people will worry, and frankly the media encouraged them to worry."

He goes on to say there was a strategy at play behind the 9-11 attacks in the U.S., explaining that Bin Laden's ultimate goal was to instigate an American attack on a Muslim country. "Because he reckoned that that would help him make Islamist revolutions in Muslim countries."

In an online description of his lecture, Dyer explains that while the success of ISIS, al-Qaeda and other terror groups would be bad for many people in the Middle East, there aren't enough people and resources to make them a global threat.

Meantime Dyer notes terrorism is not a new revolutionary technique, noting it's been used for over a hundred years and, on occasion, achieved what it was used for.

"A hundred and twenty years ago there were presidents and prime ministers and kings getting assassinated by anarchists, who are essentially terrorists. They got a president of the United States, they got a czar of Russia...that's over a hundred years ago and you can track it from there on down."

As for the stereotype that all Muslims are terrorists or have terrorist agendas, Dyer doesn't think they should have to be regarded as such just because a fraction of the population chooses to be.

"The terrorists who bother us are all Muslims, the Muslims we know are not terrorists. I mean one Muslim in twenty-thousand, fifty-thousand, a hundred-thousand might be tempted to terrorism but you don't paint them all with that brush."

Ultimately, as also outlined in the online description of his lecture, Dyer says we'd be better to worry about larger global threats such as climate change.