Were we too quick to dismiss Islam 10 years ago?

Mark Steyn looks back at a column he wrote after the Oklahoma City bombing.

Re-reading this piece from that week’s issue, what strikes me now is the difference between the first and second halves of the week. For the first 48 hours, it was Islam, Islam, Islam. Then McVeigh was captured, and Islam was barely mentioned again. The President, for his part, seemed relieved not to have to deal with the jihad, but, a decade on, you can’t help feeling the whole Islamic thing might have been abandoned a little hastily. Tim McVeigh, one notes, turned against his own country after serving in the Gulf War, and seems to have been unusually Islamophile for a right-wing gun-nut. In typical fashion, the FBI managed to bungle the investigation, misplacing evidence, failing to search properly, etc. But what did the President care? He managed to hang McVeigh round the necks of militias and, with a stretch, talk-radio and, with a further stretch, Newt and the Congressional Republicans. It worked out so well for him, that, after the Princess of Wales died, George Stephanopoulos enthused to Christopher Hitchens: “Tony Blair’s handling this really well. This is his Oklahoma City.” As Hitchens said, this is the way these people think.