CNN news 2014-11-23 加文本

cnn news 2014-11-23

CARL AZUZ, cnn ANCHOR: A terrorist attack in the city of Jerusalem. That`s where we start this midweek addition of cnn STUDENT NEWS. Thanks

for watching.

Two Palestinian attackers with a variety of weapons entered a synagogue early Tuesday. They killed four Jewish worshippers before police arrived

and killed the two attackers. One police officer was injured and later died.

This was the deadliest terrorist attack in Jerusalem since 2008. The city is holy to three major world religions: Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

And Jerusalem status is a major point of dispute between Israel and Palestinian Arabs. After the attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin

Netanyuahu called for national unity against the terrorists and against the Palestinian leaders who he says spread lies about Israel.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas denounced the attack. But when you see news like this it`s disturbing. Where else could this happen?

Here is some perspective from cnn`s national security correspondent.

JIM SCIUTTO, cnn CORRESPONDENT: I realize we come at you almost every day with a new terrorist threat or an update on an old terrorist threat and I

understand how that could be overwhelming. So, I want to talk to you the way I talk to friends and family about what they should truly be concerned

about and what they shouldn`t worry about so much, what shouldn`t keep them up at night.

Consistently, U.S. intelligence officials and counterterror officials tell me that the two main groups to be worried about are AQAP, this is al Qaeda

in the Arabian Peninsula, a group that`s very skilled and is attempted to get explosive devices onto airplanes. You remember the underwear bomber in

2009. They are still trying and they have a master bomb maker who is very skilled at hiding explosives in things like personal electronic devices.

The other group is the Khorasan group, which we just begin to hear about this year. This is an offshoot from al Qaeda, a number of senior al Qaeda

leaders who are now basing themselves in Syria, and according to U.S. intelligence, plotting attacks on the U.S. that may be in the final stages.

Those are the two main groups and again, like AQAP, their goal is to get explosive devices onto airplanes, possibly bound for the U.S.

We`ve talked a lot about ISIS, and ISIS does potentially pose a threat to the U.S. mainland, because it`s done such a good job of attracting foreign

fighters to Syria and Iraq and the worry is that those foreign fighters will go home some day and make - carry out terror attacks when they go

home, but the best information now is that ISIS is more focused on the fight in Syria and Iraq, so that`s a threat that we may have to face some

day, but that is not acute today.

Now, beyond AQAP and the Khorasan group, I`m told that the most likely terror attacks to happen on the homeland are so called lone wolves attacks,

these are people who are inspired by extremist propaganda and carry out an attack on their own, perhaps with no communication whatsoever with the

group back home, whether it`s a Khorasan group or al Qaeda. It makes them harder to track, but it also limits the kinds of attacks that they could

carry out, how ambitious they can be, how dangerous they can be. Now, together what this gives the intelligence community to face is a terrorist

threat that`s more dispersed, bigger number of groups, more spread out. And therefore more difficult to track, but possibly less ambitions in their

attacks than al Qaeda was with particularly the attacks on 9/11.

To help you sleep at night, I do want to end on a statistic. This is the total number of terror deaths of Americans on U.S. soil going back to 2009.

As you can see, in the single digits except for 2009. That was the attack at Fort Hood in Texas.

And I will show you these numbers: this is a number of deaths from lightning strikes in the U.S., also going back to 2009. Three or four

times as many every year than terror attacks and then here deaths from car accidents, many hundreds or even thousands of times more than terror

attacks.

It`s not to say it`s not a serious threat, terrorism, but statistically, you are very unlikely to be hurt in the terrorist attack on U.S. soil.