You may have missed this when I first posted it back in 2015, so I thought it worthwhile to call attention to it yet again:
This is a good way to insert anti-terrorism messages into popular culture and to make the human cost of extremist violence palpable to those who’ve been inflicting it or, more realistically, to those who’re thinking about becoming terrorists.
It’s slightly more than three minutes long:
My thanks go to Dallin Redd for originally calling it to my notice.
***
And now for a thought on how Islamist terrorism has harmed the tourist industry in the Middle East and beyond.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/18/news/travel-flight-holiday-turkey-egypt-france-tunisia/index.html
It’s obvious that hurting tourism is among the goals of today’s Islamist terrorists, and they’re succeeding.
You might think, at first blush, that this isn’t all that big a deal. After all, isn’t tourism something of a frivolous and dispensable luxury?
Well, for the tourists themselves perhaps it is. They can stay home and spending a bit more time on backyard barbecues. Or they can visit Yellowstone rather than areas where terrorists are more prone to make appearances.
But tourism isn’t frivolous and dispensable for people who make their livings from it, and for countries that depend to a significant degree upon it. Significant dips in tourism seriously harm travel agents, airline employees, airport workers, tourist policemen, tour guides, hotel staff, keepers of souvenir shops, bus drivers, restaurant workers, and their families — as well, of course, as entire national economies in the aggregate. And such damage ripples across societies generally. If the restaurant worker can’t afford new clothes for his children, that hurts clothing stores. If the tour guide is without work, she can’t afford the new apartment that she dreamed of, and that hurts builders and construction tradesmen and real estate people. And so forth.
The fact is, of course, that hundreds of thousands of tourists are out there every day, even in the Middle East. And that the odds that any one particular tourist will be hurt are microscopically small. But the threat is real, and it urgently needs to be dealt with — and not merely for the convenience of some upper middle class travelers spending their retirement money.
Fortunately, even in places that many Americans worry about such as Israel and Jordan and Egypt, government officials and ordinary people are doing a pretty good job at preventing violence against their guests. I can confidently say that, over literally decades of visiting the Middle East and the Islamic world — my first visit to the Middle East occurred just slightly more than forty-one years ago, I have never failed endangered. Not even once.
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