Worried about visiting Israel this year? Israel’s safer than you think

Don’t be worried about visiting Israel this year; Israel is safer than England or America.

Israel ranked 32 in the 2014 Global Terrorism Index; the UK was 27 and the U.S. was 30.

So Israel did not even make it into the top thirty countries suffering from terrorism.

In every first world country the chances of being murdered are 40 to 100+ times greater than the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack. Yet few people worry very much about being murdered.

Most people get their information about terrorism from the news media in the country in which they live. Thus they form their opinions about how serious a threat terrorism is from narrow local perspectives.

Countries with the highest rates of terrorism have certain commonalities in behaviors and attitudes. Government corruption is generally higher among the 10 countries with the highest number of deaths from terrorism.

According to the Gallup World Values Survey, these countries have 11% more people facing a bribe situation than the international average.

All ten countries with the highest number of deaths from terrorism have significant Muslim populations and there are relatively more people expressing the view that the West is in conflict with the Muslim world.

The rates of political terror and political instability are also significantly higher in these ten countries than the international average.

On the other hand, acceptance of the rights of others, including both formal laws that guarantee basic freedoms as well as informal social and cultural norms that relate to behaviors of citizens, is one of the strongest defenses against terrorism.

Yemen is the worst performing country in this area with Nigeria and Pakistan also performing in the bottom ten out of 150+ countries.

The top ten terrorist hot spots are: Afghanistan, Nigeria, Colombia, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Philippines, Egypt, Russia, Somalia, India and South Sudan.