[Brendinooo]

When I studied abroad in Australia I lived in a house that included two Sri Lankans. When the other American in the house and I talked about how much 9/11 affected us, they brushed it off. Sure, they'd heard about it, but they said their reaction was more like, "Welcome to the world, America." A 40-year civil war was just ending in their country (I'm probably being charitable to my countrymen to say that maybe 10% of Americans knew that; I certainly didn't), and one of them said that everyone knew someone who had been around a bombing, or had been affected by one themselves.

This is all anecdotal, but it's meant to support your point - while 9/11 was certainly one of the deadliest and probably one of the most costly (monetarily speaking) single attacks ever, it was hardly something that put us on equal footing with places like Israel and pre-2010 Sri Lanka. But it mattered to all of us a lot more because we had never seen it here, we didn't think it could happen here, we knew where NYC was, we knew those skyscrapers, etc.