Every continent has them: members of the verkrappt tendency. So let's stay down there in Australia for a while longer and meet a man who goes cheep cheep. I refer to Jeff Sparrow. He's got it into his head that attitudes to terrorism today are rather like superstitions about witches during the early modern period. Towards this identification Sparrow offers the now well-rehearsed move according to which...
... fatalities from terrorism remain vanishingly rare, at least in wealthy nations. You have four times the chance of being struck by lightning as you do from being killed by a terror attack. You are nine times more likely to choke to death on your own vomit; you are eight times more likely to die at the hands of a police officer than a terrorist. You are also something like a thousand times more likely to lose your life in a car crash than from a terror plot.
And so on. Never mind that choking to death on your own vomit is not something generally brought about through violent attack intended as lethal by its perpetrator, and that car accidents are accidents. Never mind, also, that terrorist attacks justified in the name of jihadist ideology now constitute a global phenomenon which people going about their business are entitled to be protected from by governments, and which any citizen of a democracy should condemn outright without pooh-poohing it as mere superstition. The string of such attacks over the last decade has been more than enough to convince all but the verkrappt.
But, no, for Sparrow terrorism isn't an existential threat and... 'Hence the comparison with witches'; hence 'the theological response to terror'. He never explains why a threat needs to be existential to merit being opposed on every continent, and indeed he lacks the self-consciousness to spot the oddity of his own complaint that Australians are being influenced by the Woolwich murder, when he - cheeping Sparrow - is sharing his opinions on Comment is Free, not short of its own contingent of sparrows.