For South Asians who have lost more people to terrorist acts in the last nine days than Americans have lost in the last several decades, the global news media's portrait of America's "summer of terror" amounts to something of an overkill. If anything, the media portrayals of TWA Flight 800 and the Atlanta pipe bomb have only convinced South Asians that America is a far safer haven than their own homelands. PNS commentator Andrew Robinson is a writer who has lived in India and Bangladesh for the last five years.

DHAKA, BANGLADESH -- Between the time that TWA Flight 800 exploded over the Atlantic and the pipe bomb exploded in Atlanta, terrorist bombs killed and injured hundreds of people in Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka. If one includes the 400 Sri Lankan troops ambushed on a train by suicidal Tamil rebels moments before the 747 exploded, the death toll of terrorism in South Asia during those nine days exceeds the death toll of terrorist acts in North America over the last several decades.

It's easy to see why the clamorous reaction of the international media to the two events -- Terrorism in America! International outrage! -- strikes most South Asians as excessive. The Olympics are not exactly seen here as the global event that the media in Atlanta make them out to be. The one-fifth of humanity that lives in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka couldn't have more than two dozen representatives competing in Atlanta. A Bangladeshi sharp shooter scored 35th out of 43 competitors. The much-touted Indian marksman didn't even qualify.

Indeed, the vast disparity between what one sees in the streets and what one sees on satellite television and in wire reports is becoming a regular feature of this region, making both the outside world and the media's portrayal of it seem unbelievable.

In 1994, when bubonic plague struck Surat, India, the international media transformed India into a Dantesque pandemonium (people raiding pharmacies, massacring rats, etc.) Yet, all over the country, people went about their everyday lives as if nothing had changed. The "humanity threatening epidemic" that disrupted international trade killed just 50 people -- far fewer than malaria, for example. And most Indians themselves stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that India already has the world's highest number of cases of a far more devastating epidemic -- HIV.

For an American watching world events from South Asia, it is hard to imagine that Americans are suddenly more afraid of something that has occurred so many times before -- at McDonald's, in subways and school yards, in a San Francisco law firm. As the BBC newscaster in Atlanta the night of the bomb talked about the looks of shock and horror on the faces of bystanders, the images that struck home were of a man waving at the camera and a young girl laughing at a friend's joke.

In the end, the news media's coverage of terrorism does nothing to address the root problem -- society's indifference to obscene acts of violence. The real point about portrayals of medieval pestilence or some new terrifying -ism Americans are losing sleep over is that they provide advertisement copy for news channels. Throughout the dramatic broadcast of the Olympic bombing here in Bangladesh, four words rang out like the Islamic muezzin inviting the faithful to come and behold the omnipotent nature of good and evil (and give a dollar or two to some sponsoring agent): "THIS IS THE BBC."

But Americans should rest assured that in South Asia at least the Land of the Free is still perceived as the Land of the Secure. "You are from America?" a pair of customs officers asked as I passed through Dhaka's Zia International Airport last week. "Then you please give us visa sponsorship to your country."

Last year, a Bangladeshi emigre in the U.S. tried to obtain visas for a 31-member basketball team which would compete against U.S. college teams, even though none of the Bangladeshi players were over five-and-a-half feet tall and none of them could identify the location of the free throw line. This year, even if terrorists strike every major American city, most of the Bangladeshi athletes -- like their South Asian counterparts -- would still gladly trade the opportunity to compete for a gold medal in the U.S. for the much more golden opportunity of staying there.