New York

As always, I have a bit of an issue with the entire New York car bomb ‘plot’. Like the one in London, it’s a supposed car-bomb which fails to do anything.

What it does do though – if we’re to believe the entire over-arching terrorism theme of the last decade – is bring it all right back into the limelight (again) but with no casualties, no body count, no negative press, just front and centre in the media and stories where terrorism (yet again) paralyses a city.

I wrote a piece many many many moons ago (way before D4D was even an idea) about terrorism and PR which made the same kind of points, that if terrorism is about keeping one’s cause in the media, then the ‘best’ way is to do so without causing damage or loss of life. That way it’s all about how people are reacting to the threat of terrorism, not to the reality of terrorism. There’s a world of difference between the two.

After all, if you can “design” a device/event that can be the lead story in world-wide media for a week, and paralyse a city (even if only for a few hours) and do no damage whatsoever, that’s quite an achievement.

Even better, when people then go on TV to make big press/media announcement about how their country and their people won’t bow down to terrorism and it’s in response to something like this then I’m sorry, but terrorism’s won. You’ve already bowed to it, made people aware of those causes, and kept it in the mind.