Well, I wouldn’t visit Beirut this week for a vacation, but yeah, I’d visit places that were considered a small risk. I’d just pay attention to the travel advisories. If the risk is, "Foreigners have been kidnapped for money in this region, but it’s safe in all the rest, then I’d stay out of the dangerous region unless the risk of the kidnapping is very small.
You can visit the Travel section of the U.S. Department of State’s website. They regularly issue Travel Warnings to recommend that U.S. citizens avoid certain countries. Currently, there are travel warnings in place for Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, East Timor, Haiti, Chad, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Nepal, the Phillipines, and Uzbekistan, among other countries. They also publish Consular Information sheets on every country in the world with information on public safety, crime, travel rules and regs, etc. There’s lot of helpful stuff there.
(1) Americans watch too much CNN, Faux News, etc. Our news organizations love to scare the piss out of everyone, and we gobble up the fears like candy. We’re a nation addicted to fear.
(2) That said, we’re all a little new to this terroism thing. We handle serial killers, high school shooters, and gang violence just fine (Los Angeles is the murder capital of the world, but nobody’s cancelling their trips to Disneyland!) Gun violence is okay, but things that go BOOM! make us nervous.
(3) Our current administration has a vested interest in playing up the fear of (2) as long as possible, and so does (1).
Strikes me you’d better avoid the US, too - there are terrorists who fly planes into buildings there and kill lots of Americans, apparently.
Agreed. I moved to NYC about two weeks after 9/11, and a few people thought I was crazy, saying “aren’t you afraid of more attacks?” Actually, no. If you know that you’re really not safe anywhere, then you’re safe everywhere. Or at least not imprisoned by fear of not being safe.
For a short while it looked like I might have an opportunity to go to Dubai (UAE) on a work-related project in March 2003. It turned out we couldn’t go, but if we had we would have been there right when the U.S. invaded Iraq. Would I still go if given the chance? Probably, yeah.
Yup. I went to Nepal while it was on that list, and had no trouble. The “Maoist” terrorist group, the cause of Nepal’s listing on the Department of State’s warning list, were actually pretty friendly. They took a mandatory donation from my cousin, gave her a receipt in case she ran into another group of Maoists, and sent her on her way. The situation there has since escalated, of course, but I still wouldn’t rule it out as a vacation spot.