Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

But what’s more telling, perhaps, is not what Trump’s list included — but what it didn’t.

Some of the countries most devastated by terrorism from Islamic extremists were left out entirely. Whether that suggests that the administration thinks they received adequate coverage is anyone’s guess. But it was a glaring omission either way.

In 2015, nearly three quarters of all deaths from terrorist attacks occurred in five countries — Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria, according to the State Department. The White House chose not to include any attacks from Iraq, Nigeria and Syria on its list. The two others got a single mention each — a knife attack that wounded a U.S. citizen in Pakistan in 2015, and a suicide bombing that killed 14 Nepalese security guards in Afghanistan last year.

Similarly, between 2004 and 2013, about half of all terrorist attacks and 60 percent of fatalities from terrorist attacks took place in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, Erin Miller, of the Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland, told the BBC.

It’s hard to precisely quantify how many victims of terrorism are Muslim. Some have floated statistics as high as 95 percent, and the U.S. government has published reports reflecting that number. But experts such as Miller say it’s difficult to determine how accurate the reports are because most data depends on news coverage, and often the religious affiliation of terrorist attack victims is not included.

“It’s not out of the realm of possibility, given the extreme concentration of attacks in majority-Muslim countries,” Miller told the BBC.

What the data show, according to the Global Terrorism Database reported by Voice of America, is that a vast majority of terrorist attacks — about 98 percent between 2001 and 2015 — occurred outside the U.S. and Western Europe, even if the White House’s list and rhetoric may suggest otherwise.

A Washington Post analysis of all terrorist attacks from the beginning of 2015 through the summer of 2016 found that the Middle East, Africa and Asia have seen “nearly 50 times more deaths from terrorism than Europe and the Americas.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/07/whats-largely-and-glaringly-missing-from-trumps-list-of-terrorist-attacks-non-western-victims/?utm_term=.1c303c71f208