ABSTRACT
On a weekend in New York in June 1993, the Middle East Institute at Columbia University convened a conference with the title, "Under Siege: Islam and Democracy". Fortunately, even as the participants at Columbia's conference busily deconstructed the media's putative bias against Islam, the authorities understood that the most dangerous possible effect of the World Trade Center bombing was not offensive headlines or attacks by bigots against innocent Arab-Americans. In short, conventional wisdom decreed that the bombing occurred in a vacuum: it was pathological, not political. This abdication on the part of the professional interpreters of Islam left it to the investigative press to draw an outline of the suspects' murky world. The press of Cairo and Beirut will continue to debate whether the bombing of the World Trade Center was a Mossad plot or a blast of hellfire, but for the people most at risk, the question is whether the bombing was indeed the disembodied work of individual criminals.
