But who cares if it terrorises? I mean, I care if my tube train seems scarier than last week but I'm irrelevant. If the goal of Islamic terrorists is to have America or Britain change its foreign policy towards Islamic countries, I think that Islamic terrorism has achieved the opposite of that. If the IRA's goal was to change the position of the British government from 'we don't negotiate with terrorists' then the bombs that had a big impact on the financial centre of the UK had the effect of changing that policy. I'm arguing that terrorising normal people only has the effect of turning normal people against your cause, much like the Blitz which was designed to terrorise the population didn't make the British want to surrender to Germany, and when Britain did gain the upper hand, the British public were happy for the British state to visit worse destruction on German cities.
The main effect of terror is destabilisation, which is also what breeds terrorism. Islamic terrorism in Europe turns people against their muslim demographics, and most importantly promotes populism and right-wing politics in general. Those are all pretty auto-destructive things. Some normal reactions to terrorism is to alienate some demographics or to exact revenge on some countries, both of which just create more recruits for the terrorist. It makes sense if you don't take that universal-islamic-state narrative too seriously.
