By Alex Rosenthal | USF Oracle | February 12, 2013 | [Original Article]

The question was simple, yet it carried lots of controversy with it. 

If terrorism can be done as easily as creating a homemade bomb or other do-it-yourself means, then why are there so few terrorists?

This question, among others, was posed to an audience of several dozen in the Grace Allen Room of the Library Monday afternoon. The man asking the questions was Charles Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill and author of recent book “The Missing Martyrs.”

“Unlike most presentations on terrorism, I’m going to say that terrorism is not such a huge problem,” Kurzman said. “It’s not the large problem many of us expected after 9/11.”

Kurzman’s lecture served as the inaugural headline for the Citizenship Initiative Speaker’s Series, a lecture series designed to prepare USF students for global citizenship.

Furthermore, he said, the connection between Islamic fundamentalists and terrorism wasn’t strong either. 

“If even 1 percent of the world’s billion Muslims, or even 1 percent of Muslims in the U.S. who number in the millions, were interested in doing this violent activity, there is no way they could all be stopped,” Kurzman said. “We would be seeing attacks, we would be seeing arrests, every day and all over. And yet we’re not – we don’t see it.” [Read More...]