As was observed in the comments section there, terrorists cannot destroy us but they could get us to destroy ourselves. I’m not sure what it would take to provoke us into self-destruction, but my fear is that the answer would be “Not very much.” I look at what we did in response to 9/11, and then I wonder what we would do if there was, say, a wave of car-bombings. And I get scared.

Well said, sir. There is no existential threat to the U.S. from terrorists. Taking out a city or two, while horrible, is not the end of the U.S. - we have cold war contingency plans for that. No terrorist has access to weapons on the scale of the USSR. It’s not an existential threat, but a psychological one - and, therefore, one where our response is everything.

A friend of mine worked with troubled youth here in northern California. One of the more popular symbols to draw by poor, abused, neglected white kids was the swastika.

The “creative synthesizers” of terrorism are indeed often middle class educated folks with lots of opportunity, but due to their idealism they shun this in order to harp on grievances that are often justified. The “rabble”, however, is attracted to these folks because they seem to, though perhaps incorrectly, provide an explanation for the poverty and limited opportunities the ordinary person confronts. The actual recruitment of lesser terrorists depends on certain actions at the margin - foreign occupation in the case of Al Qaeda - that actually push people to act on terrorist sympathy rather than simply provide widespread passive or rhetorical support.

A hypothesis that completely fails to explain most of the terrorist attacks in US history. Timothy McVeigh? Eric Rudolph? The Ku Klux Klan? Did they really have “limited political rights”?

In Holland, on the other hand, they’ve got state sponsored religious institutions and generational welfare/non-citizens which prevents them from a feeling of being on the “inside”, as opposed to “outside”. A perceived sense of difference and aloofness is made official.

Also noteworthy, Muslims in the US tend to be wealthier than their European counterparts.