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Terrorism.
First and foremost, it is perhaps impossible to truly illustrate whether terrorism is on the rise or not. Terrorist attacks involve anything from a local city bombing, or bombing threat, such as may be involved with an abortion clinic, to full blown disasters such as that which took place in September of 2001. In the past few years we have seen many different types of terrorist attacks, and a great variance in statistics. Leader states that there is such a thing as dueling statistics. "According to the State Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism, 1995, the total number of international terrorist acts rose from 322 in 1994 to 420 in 1995, but the increase was largely due to a rise in nonlethal attacks in Germany. The 1995 total, while higher than the prior year, is close to the average annual number of incidents from 1989 to 1994 (356) - and that five-year average is considerably lower than the annual average from 1980 to 1988 (562)" (34). We find another author stating that "After a lull of nearly seven years, major terrorist attacks against Americans overseas resumed in 1995" (Anonymous History of terrorism against Americans in Middle East K3341). Leader further notes that "The 1996 totals were not available as of this writing, but incidents for the first six months of 1996 numbered 122. By comparison, the total for the first six months of 1995 was 246, suggesting that 1995 was an aberration in a predominantly downward trend" (34). Bearing the possibility in mind that terrorist attacks may not be increasing significantly, we present the remainder of the paper assuming that terrorism may be on the rise and even if they are not, it is still important to understand why terrorist attacks happen in the first place. .
As mentioned, terrorism, and an increase in terrorism, may be due to many realities. For example, in 1993 there was a rash of terrorist attacks in the Middle East concerning the Israelis and the Arabs.
