By the way I fluffed another one: in my initial post (12:40 am), I meant to ask,

If that is NOT jarring to our collective sense of safety, what is?

——

Personal sense/experience, as RandomThoughts (1:16 am) posits?

Or perhaps an M J R sense of irrational paranoia?

Seriously though, I think that a sense of safety is predicated on one’s personal experience even more than one’s gender. If you’ve been in a near fatal car accident, or lost a loved one to an abrupt unexpected death, your sense of safety going to be far different than that of someone who has only observed such things from afar, so to speak.

Yes, 9-11 affected my sense of safety somewhat, but nowhere near the way it affected those whose loved ones died, or who were at Ground Zero or the Pentagon as it happened before their very eyes.

If that’s jarring to our collective sense of safety, what is?

There have been Islamic terrorist incidents here since 9/11, but mostly of the thwarted variety. Their successes have mostly been elsewhere.

The Islamic terrorist network that projected force from there to here on 9/11 was broken apart.

We don’t know what law enforcement, intel, clandestine, military, etc, have done to prevent more attacks since 9/11. Maybe they have been more successful that we credit them.

That said, Islamic terrorists have been attacking elsewhere continuously since (and before) 9/11. It would seem that terrorists could attack here in the manner.

However, Islamic terrorists are more interested in fighting for dominance in their homelands than here. The terrorist organizations that are still operational therefore have focused their resources over there rather than here.

Which leaves only the self-actualized lone wolf types, the kind who listen to Awlaki sermons every night, to try something here.

After 9/11, US targets in Iraq and to a lesser extent Afghanistan satisfied the Islamic terrorist lust for American blood.

Operation Iraqi Freedom really did decimate Islamic terrorists, but they have been revitalized in the Arab Spring.

“Perhaps because they think we would retaliate in a fairly strong way and they don’t want to run the risk of activating that sort of response? I really am not sure, but I think it’s a choice of theirs rather than an inability.”

It is a matter of choice on the part of the jihadi, but if they chose the path of subjecting us to the campaign they have waged against the Israelis our government’s response would be similar to the response after Newtown: restrict the rights of law abiding citizens while doing absolutely nothing to confront the real threat. The so-called war on terror has killed a lot of jihadi, but the leaders of jihad know they have plenty of cannon fodder and they are in it for the long haul (centuries if need be). We’re in for the next election cycle.