Silvan Shalom Quotes
We have the responsibility to protect our people and that's why we're building this fence. We've suffered from 19,000 terrorist attacks during the last three years.
Shalom, Silvan. Interview by Wolf Blitzer. CNN Late Edition, Cable News Network, 22 Feb. 2004.
The bipartisan Presidential Commission had unanimously made 41 recommendations to prevent future terrorist attacks. While the Bush Administration and Congress implemented a few many of the more critical ones were left unaddressed. The commission on its final day issued a report card giving failing grades to both the White House and the Republican-controlled Congress.
The Bush administration were busy making their appointments and setting some domestic priorities. In 4 months 9-11 would make them wish that they had taken these warnings more seriously. See {637530}.
This quotation is one of the few honest answers that government politicians give to questions about the effectiveness of prevention. All prevention whether it is to reduce terrorist attacks, fatal crashes on out highways, illicit drug usage or anything else, have two major problems in terms of communicating effectiveness. First, it is impossible to accurately measure what did not happen. Second, whereas prevention failures have real people and faces of the victims can be identified, it is impossible to identify the specific benefits of prevention. We know who died in the Boston Marathon bombing, but we do not know exactly who was saved by the prevention of a planned terrorist attack that was thwarted in New York. Even when the government does know that a terrorist attack was thwarted, it is rarely a good idea to make that information public as then the tourists will learn details of how a particular planned attack went awry, whereas if the government is silent, they have much less information and cannot easily adjust their strategy and tactics.
Zion Silvan Shalom is an Israeli politician who served as a member of the Knesset for Likud between 1992 and 2015. He held several prominent ministerial positions, including being Vice Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior. He resigned on 24 December 2015 following allegations of sexual harassment. Later on, the Attorney-General closed this investigation and said these claims were unsubstantiated.
