The phrase "since the 2001 al-Qaida attacks" was wrongly attributed to me. In my view, "al-Qaida", as an omnipotent terrorist organisation, is a figment of the US media's imagination and there's no independently verified evidence that it was responsible for the ghastly attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. It is not that I don't believe Osama bin Laden and his bandits incapable of such atrocities, but I've never bought the propaganda of the US empire and, thus, that phrase could never have come from me.
Hamid Dabashi
Columbia University, US