Well, I don't discount the lives of the people dying in the middle-east. Overall, terror is killing way more people than 2001 and it's very concerning.
Also, even if accepting your stats about the number of casualties as truth, it's irrelevant. For argument's sake, let's accept that they're smaller and less destructive. They're way more frequent which goes to show there are more people willing to drive a car into crowd than fly a plane into a building. That's not a good thing.
Also, if the end goal of terrorism is to strike fear in the mind of society, it's actually more efficient way to go about it. Every time there is a big crowd for something, I think to myself that one day it'll happen in Canada too and someone will end up running a truck through the crowd or pulling out a gun and start killing people randomly. I don't think of a mass orchestrated plan at all though. As the attacks become more mainstream, the chances of them happening seem to become more likely too and not as unfathomable.