September 11th’s Hidden Lesson
Spreading terror is pushing a narrative. The more people convinced they should be afraid, the more terror spread, and the more successful terrorism is as a tactic. The senior religious leader of the Islamic State of Iraq declared that “terrorizing the kafir [infidel] enemy is a Shari’i [holy] obligation.” Al-Qaeda’s lead scholar stated “striking horror, panic, and fear in the hearts of the enemies of Allah is a divine commandment”. Refusing to be terrorized is refusing terrorists’ their explicit goal.
Travel firms have regularly declined to challenge this goal, erring on the side of caution. But sheepishness can be deadly. Following September 11th, airlines pulled television advertising altogether. Al-Qaeda wanted Americans to fear flying but had no control over the reality — driving is a hundred times more dangerous than flying. They were, however, unchallenged in controlling the narrative. As many as 20% of Americans who would otherwise fly decided to drive. The Max Planck Institute, in a study published in Risk Analysis, found that decision cost 1,595 Americans their lives in 2002 alone.
Airlines responded to the uncertainty and solemnity of the time, and few could fault them for pulling ads in the moment. But, if we want to defeat terrorism, we need to learn that their reaction, however reasonable at the time, did not work. Al-Qaeda achieve another goal, and Americans became less safe. Terrorism is a propaganda campaign, and airlines inadvertently withdrew millions of dollars to combat enemy propaganda.
Cancelling Trips to Paris Was Far More Dangerous Than Going
The world’s most dangerous jihadist group today is explicit about their goals when it comes to travel. ISIS’s number two, in a warning to Westerners claimed: “you will pay for it dearly when your economies collapse… You will pay when each of you feels afraid to travel abroad.”
Like al-Qaeda a generation before, ISIS has achieved wild success at controlling the narrative. A 2015 survey by YouGov found that 10% of Americans who planned to travel internationally cancelled a trip due to fear of terrorism, costing the travel industry $8.2B. The CEO of Marriott stated that “terrorism and domestic politics represent the biggest threats to the growth of tourism”.
But like al-Qaeda a generation before, ISIS’s success is a function of perception, not reality. The murder rate of tourists visiting Paris in 2015, including the Bataclan attacks, was 0.15 per capita. The murder rate in the United States is 3.9 per capita. The wealthy in the United States, the likeliest group to travel, had a murder rate of 2.5 per capita.
For a wealthy American, cancelling a trip to Paris in 2015 resulted in a 1567% increase in danger. The odds of being murdered are still so low that we could attribute no additional deaths to cancellations, but that Paris was safe held true. No tourists, out of 17 million, were killed in Paris in 2016.
The city’s demonstrable safety meant little with ISIS in full control of the narrative. Paris lost $850M in the year following the Bataclan Attack. Occupancy rates in the city halved. What ISIS wanted us to believe faced few challenges.
Erring on the side caution leads many to stay away from challenging public perception following a major attack. But doing so makes Americans less safe and concedes to ISIS an undeserved victory. Since 2001, our ability to understand why and how people book has skyrocketed. We can understand what works in undermining ISIS’s lie about the safety of travel, and we can deny terrorists one of their stated goals and make Americans safer.
Terrorism, by its nature, is about perception. Its success is measured by the fear it instills. That it relies on perception and not reality is its greatest weakness. Rather than accepting terrorists’ success at crafting the public’s view, travel firms can lead the charge to defeat terrorists at their weakest point.
