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Not even evidence that Korody was toying with the idea of insinuating herself into a synagogue to murder Jewish children in order to save them from hell has been enough to completely silence the laughter that the court proceedings have induced. And fair enough. Laughing at terrorism is not necessarily such a bad thing. It does tend to foil terrorism’s whole point, after all.

It’s come down to whether the self-declared Muslim converts are such morons that the whole enterprise can only be understood in law as a case of police entrapment.

Neither is it a vice to laugh at what is widely held to be a Conservative campaign stratagem of exaggerating the menace of jihadist lunacy. “In Canada, you’re way more likely to be killed by a moose than a terror plot,” some junior advertising-jingle wags pointed out to amusing and viral effect earlier this year. Around the same time, celebrity pseudo-journalist and stolen-files trafficker Glenn Greenwald was pointing out that Canadians are more likely to die from being struck by lightning, or from a random intestinal bug ingested during a restaurant meal, or by falling down in a bathroom, than from a terrorist attack.

All of which is true. But if you’re the sort that thinks these vaudeville talking points situate the phenomenon in its only sensible political context, here’s the point you’re missing: it’s not always about you, your personal safety or the sophisticated aversion to fear-mongering you no doubt believe you possess.

It’s about Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Cameroon, Mali, Nigeria, Bangladesh and quite a few other places where hundreds of millions of people, particularly women and children, are obliged to live every day under the threat of both organized and random Islamist terror. It’s about Canada, true enough, in a small and direct way: in several foiled terror plots and in the separate murders of Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent and Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, coinciding with an armed assault on Parliament Hill, last October.