On September 11, 2001, I was enjoying the tail end of my summer holiday with family in Connecticut. Over the past year, I had been studying Osama bin Laden’s enigmatic fatwas as a graduate student at Oxford. At the time, al-Qaeda was not well known, so I was surprised to find that in the climate of paralyzing fear after the attacks, everyone around me professed to know exactly why this group had struck the United States.
Why People Keep Saying, “That’s What the Terrorists Want”
Something called “correspondent inference theory.”
November 20, 2015