Europe: Vague terror warnings are worse than useless

“What, exactly, are Europeans supposed to do” with this latest American terror warning? asked Karsten Polke-Majewski in Germany’s Die Zeit. U.S. authorities say they have evidence that terrorists plan to attack “unspecified targets” in Europe. Supposedly, an Afghan native with German citizenship, recently arrested in Pakistan, told them of a “secret network” plotting commando assaults in Europe similar to the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, in which 10 heavily armed Islamists killed 173 people and injured hundreds. Oh, great. Germany, France, and Britain are full of potential targets. What should we avoid: the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, train stations, castles? And for how long? This week? A month? Until something explodes?

The vagueness of the U.S. alert gives “the damaging impression that Europe is somehow unsafe in general,” said the London Independent in an editorial. That’s “a kick in the teeth for the European tourist industry.” Had there been concrete evidence that Americans abroad were specifically being targeted, there may have been some justification for warning Americans against travel to Europe. But there isn’t. In fact, Americans are probably equally at risk at home. After all, the U.S. is also under constant threat of terrorism, as the attempted Times Square car bombing last May proves. Yet “if European governments were to issue a travel alert on America, the U.S. would, understandably, be irritated.”

I’m more irritated at my own government, said Simon Jenkins in the London Guardian. It hurls meaningless phrases at us, expecting us to parse the difference between a “substantial” threat and a “severe” one. Are we really supposed to “calibrate our dread” based on such “verbal garbage”? More likely the point is simply to “keep the public scared and paying taxes.” Nearly a decade after 9/11, we now have “an extensive police and industrial lobby in Britain dependent for its resources on maintaining a high level of public fear.” Surely it is no coincidence that these supposed terrorist threats proliferate during times “when the security lobby is in a fight over money, as now.” The public does not benefit from these vague warnings—but the security lobby most certainly does.

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The constant state of alarm is dangerous in multiple ways, said Wolfgang Böhm in Austria’s Die Presse. It desensitizes us, so that when a threat is truly imminent, we may not respond quickly enough. But worse, the fear makes us far too willing to comply with government demands for access to our private data. We are laying ourselves bare. “And when we are completely naked, we will be even more vulnerable: not only to terrorist attacks, but also to abuses of state power.”