Re: But would this have become a real one?
The trouble is we don't have enough details to know if this was some kind of entrapment, or if the FBI was getting in front of someone who would have done it anyway. I don't trust the news stories on this, and it's likely the FBI is keeping a lot of information to itself.
I'm reserving judgment on this. Just glad some guy didn't bomb a bunch of innocent people. Random violence of the sort Israel sees all the time is so damn easy to accomplish. I could think of a couple of ways that wouldn't even require explosives, and would leave almost no tracks.