LONDON -- Osama bin Laden is Timothy McVeigh with a beard, and no more representative of the Arab world than McVeigh was of America. It's important to hang onto that thought, because otherwise the storm of emotion that followed the broadcast of the tape in which the author of the atrocities of Sept. 11 boasted of what he had done could sweep people in the West away to -- well, to exactly where he wants them to go.
Where he wants Americans in particular to go is into an us-and-them "clash of civilizations" mind-set that validates his own claim that the West is at war with Islam. The terrorists really will have won if, six months from now, most Muslims share his view that the rest of the planet is an anti-Muslim conspiracy, and the rest of the world sees Muslims as a threat.
Terrorism, especially of the sort practiced by outfits like al-Qaeda, is not really about blowing things up and killing people; that's just a means to an end. It is about shifting attitudes and setting agendas: a kind of psychological jujitsu in which the actions of far larger communities and institutions can be manipulated by a small group of determined people who know just how to use modern mass media to magnify the impact of their violence and to steer the reaction in the direction they want.