Most every democracy with serious and continuing problems with terrorism throw out the law book and human rights.
Afaik, this goes for USA, Britain, Israel, Germany, Spain and Italy. And probably more cases. (Note "continuing problems". e.g. Breivik was a lone crazy.)
The reason is shown by the grandparent comment; terrorism is optimized to scare voters. And politicians are scared of hysterical voters, they need to fix that to keep their jobs.
> Most every democracy with serious and continuing problems with terrorism throw out the law book and human rights.
Most every government (whether or not it is a democracy, and whether or not it actually has serious and continuing problems with terrorism) latches on to terrorism as an excuse (though rarely the only excuse) to throw off legal (and/or traditional, depending on the nature of the--note the small "c"--constitution) constraints on the powers and activities of government.
> The reason is that terrorism is optimized to scare voters.
True.
> And politicians are scared of hysterical voters, they need to fix that.
Less true; politicians have a often want hysterical voters -- hysterical voters that can have a prepackaged solution (even if the conception has little to do with the problem that has made the voters hysterical) are very popular with politicians, because its how they get approval to do things that they want to do that would, aside from the hysteria, never be acceptable. Note how many of the measures adopted in the US in response to terrorism were things which had either been tried previously under other pretexts (most recently, in many cases, in the Drug War) -- either proposed as legislation and failed, attempted without legislation but ruled illegal without supporting legislation, or had legislation passed but ruled unconstitutional when adopted for domestic law enforcement purposes.
Yes, it is a common excuse in e.g. non-democracies to call democracy activists for terrorists (often combined with claims that all the democratic countries are in a conspiracy against them, because we hate Russia/Pakistan/Iran/etc.)
And no, if there is a terrorism problem scaring voters the politicians are empirically motivated to fix it -- see my examples of throwing out the law book -- or it isn't a democracy. [Edit: To be clear, I think the Drug War etc are different; propaganda -- not really about scared voters.]
I've went through 9 terrorist attacks in Israel before I joined the military - I lived in downtown Jerusalem during the Second Intifada. In the other countries, you're right - there is no excuse for getting rid of personal rights and freedoms, but in Israel the sheer number of terrorist attacks cause the reality to be different. If we didn't have the intel, we could never stop the terrorists, and that is simply unacceptable.
Israel do have everything on a different scale; multiples of times more terror against its civilians than what the rest of the western world have -- combined.
Afaik, despite this the courts in Israel seems to better keep up rule of law than the US ones, re terrorism... Which is sad.
But I think that without terror problems, the situation would be very different in Israel. And you probably agree.
Edit: I think you missed my point a little. I didn't discuss if it is right to throw out freedoms or not, I noted that empirically democracies seems to be very likely to do that in a certain situation.
Afaik, this goes for USA, Britain, Israel, Germany, Spain and Italy. And probably more cases. (Note "continuing problems". e.g. Breivik was a lone crazy.)
The reason is shown by the grandparent comment; terrorism is optimized to scare voters. And politicians are scared of hysterical voters, they need to fix that to keep their jobs.