"You are a tiny band of nutjobs. You can't kill us all. You can't even kill .00001% of us." If we're talking about the US population, then 0.0001% is thirty pe

"You are a tiny band of nutjobs. You can't kill us all. You can't even kill .00001% of us." If we're talking about the US population, then 0.0001% is thirty people. They can probably manage that. However, on your broader point, nouveau-Islamist terrorism differs from more traditional varieties (the IRA et cetera) in that its practitioners are markedly less rational. For them, terrorism isn't a tool which they're applying calmly in the hope of achieving a political goal. Most of them seem to just want to kill infidels, because the existence of people who aren't Muslim makes them angry. So I don't think the refuse-to-be-terrorized strategy actually works. They don't particularly care whether you're scared of 'em, as long as you die. (They're not very rational or very nice.)