Tourism, Security and Safety From Theory to Practice

Crime vs Terrorism
All too often crime and terrorism and their impact are confused. This confusion is under-
standable in light of their overlapping at times. For example, Victor Davis Hanson has
noted “Unfortunately to the sniper’s innocent targets in Virginia and
Maryland(emdash)or any others who will die by an unhinged Al Qaeda
wannabe(emdash) it makes very little difference if they were victims of terror or ter-
roristic (sic) behavior” (Hanson, 2004, p. 11). They ought not to be. Although both are
Tourism, Security and Safety: From Theory to Practice
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Table 2
Key Differences between Militant Islam (MI) and Religious Islam (RI)
Militant Islamism/European 
Issue
Totalitarianism
Religious Islam
Operates in the sphere of
Public life
Spiritual/private life
Led by
Engineers
Religious scholars
Outside influences
Importation of Western ideas 
Does not seek to emulate the 
such as Friday as a Sabbath 
West. Friday is day of
(not part of totalitarianism)
assembly
Locus of law
In place
In the person
Attitudes toward the West
Seeks to confront West/
Seeks to develop its own 
pluralistic democracies
relationship to God and 
humanity’s place in the 
universe
Population
Demographics as a weapon. 
Love of children
Murder of children
Key nations as models
Iran, Saddam’s Iraq
Turkey
Type of philosophy
Political (totalitarian)
Religious (seeks converts)
View on nostalgia
Nostalgia based on 
Adaptation to modernity
pseudo-history
Main recruitment source
People trained at secular 
People with high levels of
universities
anxiety or fear
Logic
Uses Western logic
Appeals to the emotional 
and mystical
View of existing system
Seeks to change it
Seeks to destroy it
Source:
Compiled from Peters (2002).
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social illnesses that are highly destructive to a tourism industry, to misdiagnose the mal-
ady and to mistreat it can create an even worse situation. On the whole, crime lives off a
tourism industry in a parasitic relationship. Criminals rarely seek publicity and tend to
work on a one-on-one basis, be that basis an aggregate of many or simply of two indi-
viduals. From the tourism criminal’s standpoint, a tourism industry in decline will result
in lost opportunities. Thus, on the macro level the criminal will want a successful tourism
industry, even though on the micro level he/she may be doing great harm. The opposite
is true for the terrorist. Terrorists are not out for profit, but for a cause. As such they seek
the macro destruction of the tourism industry as a way to hurt or destroy a particular
nation’s economy. Terrorists rarely seek profit, but instead determine success by the quan-
tity of dead bodies and by the loss of economic opportunities. Table 4 provides some nine
different categories and how criminal acts and terrorism differ from each other.