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Panic has been induced by trivial health threats.

Unfortunately you hit the nail on the head, and the government and media have both encouraged this panic.

Examples:
Sharks in Florida a few years ago. Just about the same number of attacks as every other year, and for as many people as are in the water it's surprising it's not higher. It was a slow summer for news, so the media jumped on it, the government talked about it, and all of the sudden you'd think sharks were somehow crawling onto the beaches and pulling everybody in sight, into the water.

Anthrax from 2001. At some point the media found out that cattle can and do get anthrax. They about **** themselves and along with the government, managed to scare a whole lot of people who apparently weren't too scared about it going through our postal system . Those of us who grew up on farms and ranches were scratching our heads wondering just what the hell they were so worked up about - if you've worked around cattle for large portions of your life, you've probably had to deal with it at some point.

Auto racing accidents. Dale Earnhardt was killed, and within a short time a few other drivesr were killed or seriously injured. All of the sudden, various levels of government started talking about the safety of racing, the media was right in the middle of it, etc. You'd think that all of the sudden it got dangerous and that it had always been safe. Guess what? Strapping yourself into a hunk of metal and flying around a racetrack at 150mph is dangerous. Did they not get the memo that many people have been killed or injured since somebody first had the idea to race to internal combustion powered vehicles? Why did they ignore the fact that if a NASCAR drive is in a wreck, he has a better chance of surviving than you probably do, due to the fact that their cars are built a lot safer, and they could literally have world-class medical attention within a minute or two.

Our favorite, our nearest and dearest - kids and firearms. You have a few isolated incidents, some children are killed at a few schools, and all of the sudden we have an epidemic and we have *gasp* children being exposed to firearms. The government and media is scaring the crap out of everybody, causing parents to think about homeschooling their kids, etc. and you have gun control being talked about. No talk about holding parents responsible for ignoring the fact their kids had a nice little cache of firearms and dangerous chemicals in their bedrooms, no sir, not going to do that. Got to do something about those evil guns.

If your wondering why I've picked several unrelated topics, I'm actually arriving at a point.

My point is - if we suffered attacks similar to what Israel has went through, the United States of America would pretty much cease to exist. The government and the media have scared the **** out of people over simple things, and whether it's to get ratings or to justify their budgets, they have gotten very good at it. If we had a couple of buses, supermarkets, malls, whatever bombed, the government and media would whip the public into a frenzy, and you would start seeing checkpoints literally everywhere, the government (pick your level - city, county, state, federal) would start looking at anybody who bought or read anything that could be somehow used in a terrorist act (regardless of whether or not whatever attacks spurred this had anything to do with said reading materials or items) and confiscation of things deemed dangerous would probably begin.

The ironic thing is, if you said "wait a minute, the terrorists want to induce a suspension of rights, because that's the only way they can destroy us - by causing us to self-destruct", you would probably be labeled a traitor or terrorist.