I don’t understand the U.S. definition of a terrorist attack.
Here in Israel we’ve been having these “isolated” attacks by lone attackers, for ever. Mainly stabbings. People being stabbed in the streets of the Old City in Jerusalem in the small hours of the night, for instance. There were quite a few of those at one time. There were isolated incidents of stabbings and shootings in other parts of the country, too, not just in Jerusalem. In many cases this was part of being accepted into a terrorist cell – you had to go out and kill a Jew to prove you had it in you. But a lot were just individual initiatives, sometimes by people who were accused of being collaborators and needed to clear their name. They were all terrorist attacks. Even if the perpetrators were working alone with no apparent connections.

I don’t see why you need an organization behind you for it to be terrorism. If you do it to terrorize, which Mr. Hedayat was obviously doing, then its terrorism. The Unabomber was out to terrorize and he was on his own. And his attacks were pretty spread out, meaning that each one of them was actually an “isolated incident”. So he wasn’t a terrorist?

Maybe 9/11 has made the F.B.I. think that if it’s not an attack on a colossal scale, then it’s not worthy of our notice. That’s a rather scary thought, isn’t it?