Slate editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg, projecting his own ignorance and lack of imagination onto the rest of the world:
Before 2001, few Middle East scholars worried that the United States was vulnerable to a major terrorist attack.
Really? Aside from the fact that the Middle East isn’t the only potential source of terrorism (see, for instance, Japan’s 1995 sarin gas attacks; the 1983 hotel bombing and mass poisonings in Oregon by followers of an Indian guru; many acts of terrorism in Europe by Irish, Italian, and German groups throughout the 1970s and 1980s; oh, and the 168 people killed in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh) did Weisberg assume his “Middle East scholars” somehow forget the 1993 bombing of the same New York City complex destroyed on September 11, 2001? Sure, it wasn’t “major” compared to 9/11, but that wasn’t for lack of trying.