The most recent suicide bombing in the US was carried out by:
a) a foreign Muslim terrorist
b) a native non-Muslim terrorist
c) a foreign non- Muslim terrorist
d) a native Muslim terrorist
Answer after the jump
Answer: B – surprised? You were probably thinking there hadn’t been any suicide bombings in the US since 9/11. But that would be to forget University of Oklahoma student Joel Henry Hinrichs III who killed himself by detonating a bomb 200 yards west of Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, where 84,501 spectators were attending a football game.
The reason why very few people know about this is because the media barely covered it. Why? Well first because no one else was killed aside from the bomber but second the incident didn’t fit with the media narrative – in the minds of the media (and others) terrorists are likely to be Muslims and ‘foreign’ to boot. That is not to say that in the initial period after the bombing the police weren’t looking for such a description:
An off-duty police officer noted a discussion Hinrichs had with a local feed store owner about ammonium nitrate and had begun an investigation, one heightened by innuendo regarding the Pakistani heritage of the bomber’s roommate (who was found to have had nothing to do with this).
For further proof of Nassim Taleb’s dictum that we are very bad at learning the right lessons from random or unpredictable events (i.e. we often end up preparing for the last war) as our normal response is to prepare for the same event reoccurring, rather than try to be better prepared for unpredictable events in general.
Exhibit A: Could Suicide bombing happen here?
Since Sept. 11, when America went on alert against terrorist strikes, there has been some small comfort in the knowledge that unlike al-Qaeda, most militant Islamic groups don’t seek to attack targets inside the U.S. But the sickening rise in the number of Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel, and a spate of attacks last week against synagogues in Europe, raises a new worry: Could the intifadeh spread to the U.S.?
Such an attack almost happened in 1997 when a Palestinian immigrant named Ghazi Ibrahim Abu Maizar came within hours of detonating a pipe bomb, and himself, in a Brooklyn, N.Y., subway station used by many Orthodox Jews. Though the would-be suicide bomber wasn’t working for any Palestinian group, his case suggests that Middle East violence could provoke independent attacks in the U.S. “One of the biggest dangers is that lone individual,” says an FBI counterterror agent.
Law-enforcement and intelligence officials…recognize that the ease of manufacturing a bomb makes suicide attacks a serious threat. “It’s something to be concerned about,” says a U.S. intelligence official. So far, there’s little sign that it’s in the interest of Palestinian bombers to attack Americans.
