>> But the
Muslim-Brotherhood/al Qaida types are different story,
and these are the people with bombs.<<
I don't think it's right to conflate AQ with the MB. They're quite different and they don't really get on. The Muslim Brotherhood and its associated organisations (like Hamas and that Pakistani one that I forget what it's called) don't in general endorse the use of violence outside dar-al-Islam. The MB's terrorist activities are directed at the establishment of Islamist governments within Islamic states (plus Hamas, which has fallen rather further from the tree). If you look at the theorists of the MB from Qutb to Qaradawi, they do not in general endorse the use of violence in order to spread Islam to the non-Islamic world; Qaradawi has suggested that this might actually be blasphemous. And by the Islamic world they mean something sensible; that bit about "Andalus" that you occasionally see in the nuttersphere is really not representative. "The caliphate" also in general means the territory occupied by the Ottoman Empire rather than anything global; the MB's actual ambitions go _beyond_ "the caliphate" as they are pan-Islamists. But Qutb had spent time in America and wrote about it a lot; if he had believed that the destruction of the American system by force was a good idea he had ample opportunity to mention the fact and didn't.
It is more difficult to get a handle on what Al Qaeda think because they don't really have many theorists (or indeed much structure beyond the personality cult of bin Laden) and it is difficult to tell what is core doctrine and what is posturing, since they tend to operate around OBL speeches which clearly have elements of both. There is more of a basis in AQ doctrine for violence outside the context of specific domestic struggles, but I don't think it's at all clear that we should regard Osama's grandiose statements about global domination as more definitive than the 1993-vintage of rather more modest demands.
In any case, as I have argued on a number of occasions, Doctor Ian Paisley believes literally and non-metaphorically that the Pope is the antichrist, but his only actual political program relates to the government system of part of the island of Ireland.
best dd
PS: my new favourite quote:
"Bloggers *are* the public. That’s why we’re so so awful."
http://www.thepoorman.net/2006/08/11/the-end/
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