Daniel Benjamin’s Faulty Terrorism Assessment

In his Sept. 11 op-ed, Daniel Benjamin writes: “[T]he last two years have witnessed an unprecedented wave of terrorism outside the United States, including attacks in Bali, Moscow, Mombasa and Riyadh, to name only a few of the most lethal strikes.” The country which is the most frequent target of lethal terrorist strikes is conspicuously absent from this list. In just one attack, 22 Israelis (including six children packed into a bus leaving the Western Wall Jewish holy site were killed by a Palestinian terrorist on Aug. 22. This compares to 16 people killed Nov. 28 in an Al Qaeda attack in Mombasa which targeted Israelis in an Israeli-owned hotel. From September 2001 to August 2003, Palestinian suicide bombers have hit Israel nearly 100 times. Israeli security forces managed to thwart another 239 planned attacks. Talk about “an unprecedented wave of terrorism outside the United States.”

Given that Israelis have been the prime target of terrorism outside the United States in the last two years, it is certainly curious that the writer omitted them in his assessment of the international phenomenon.

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