Something that I find quite scary is that these terrorist attacks as well as other actions by extremists can serve to further alienate muslims in the western world. Take the words "allahu akhbar" (or how it is spelled), it simply means something relatively harmless like "God is great", but I dare say most westerners today associate it with something a little more sinister, like a terrorist battle cry. The actions of these terrorists is creating more and more such associations and if it goes far enough, you can end up in a situation where islamism and the harmless things that relate to the religion remind us of fear, violence and terror. When that happens, it ultimately doesn't matter if you're a rational being - as long as you're a human being with normal feelings, these associations can still be created and will create emotional responses.
All in all, it leads to the alienation of muslims in the western world. Non-muslims will get more suspicious, more negative towards islam - the conflict of religions and culture will escalate. This conflict, and a general environment of more alienation of muslims, may in turn promote more radicalization to extremist movements on either side.
This may be just the kind of world that such terrorists want to create. A world where it's muslims against western world culture. It is also the kind of world that western right wing political extremists want.
Such a world is incredibly dangerous and all of us should try to prevent that from becoming reality.
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