One question I do have is whether, because too much of our info is filtered through western media, patterns of behavior that are intelligible to radicals in the ME, are made to seem unintelligible to us for obvious reasons. Clearly the assassination of Sadat was not terrorism, and the case of Algeria should provide us with a strong counterfactual in at least a few analytical contexts. Because we usually think of revolutionary activity in terms of the state, perhaps we're missing something that is potentially important. The civilian dead that result from the attacks in that part of the planet, while they're no one in particular to "us", may be considered important enough to merit targeting in the eyes of those who carry out the attacks. In that sense, the constructing of a sense of randomness by media ideologues serves a purpose; under no circumstances is the behavior of theologically motivated anti-imperialism and other indirect and direct strategies of political destabilization to be seen as intelligible or rational. I just wonder how many people in DC and tv land have Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" on their nightstand because "containing" Islamic radicalism is going to be *very* expensive, the use of the word infinite, in this context, being totally scary. Good thing they didn't call it operation "eternal justice". I'm not for one second denying terror, I just don't think it's an ism--that it's an end in and of itself either in the Mid East or Central Asia. Perhaps we need to look more closely how the term is used for places like India and Pakistan etc. in order to unbundle the contexts in which the term is bandied about and manipulated.
Ian