Don't forget the Beltway Sniper. From the Trial:
Malvo testified. He said Muhammad's plan was to use the money to create a community in Canada to train 140 children as terrorists to carry out shooting rampages across the country and destroy the economy by killing 10 people a day.
Duh, why is this not counted as terrorism?
They meet with foreign leaders, and find they have more in common with them than they do their own countrymen. Maintaining power, diplomatic issues, opposition parties, making decisions that affect millions of people, and the frequent feeling of isolation that comes with being the leader, and having no equal with which to discuss things. In Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, and a few other countries, these men see themselves as parents of rather unruly children who need to be controlled because they don't see the big picture.
They fear the concept of their people becoming uncontrollable more than they fear foreign invasion. They desperately want the world to be divided up into trade regions, and they see the biggest problem as being the racism of the uneducated masses. So, they downplay ethnic violence.
Islam, OTOH, watches us far more closely than we watch them. Their battle ability is practically nonexistent; their military tactics suck, and they can't manufacture anything more complex than a rug.
A friend of mine used to negotiate oil contracts. He said that they were the worst people in the world to negotiate with. He said they'd spend months negotiating, everything was set up, and right before the signing ceremony they would declare some insult to their honor, stomp out of the negotiations, and demand more concessions. The oil companies would make concessions, provide more patronage jobs, and the negotiations would begin again.
He said the important things to remember about negotiating with Islamists is that they're always lying, and that there will always be at least three "insults to their honor" during the negotiations.
They use almost perfect tactics in dealing with the post modernist, because the post modernist enters the situation walking on eggshells. They fear offending people (note, they only fear offending the "right" people, which are people who are either liberal or ethnically different from themselves) so much that they will concede everything prior to beginning negotiations in order to achieve a dialog and mutual understanding. Post modernist thinking actually goes all the way back to Paul Gauguin and his concept of the "noble savage" and, of course, to Nietzsche and his moral relativism (with roots further back). Current post modernists make the mistake of assuming that all other people are largely like them and think as they do, or, at least would, if they were only educated enough. They cannot accept the fact that the Islamist means it when he says he has no desire to live in peace as long as people who believe differently from him are alive. They cannot accept it because they cannot face the awful choices this puts in front of them. Noam Chomsky, for example, who has apparently never faced any danger more imminent than choking on an after dinner mint, feels qualified to critique the US as a totalitarian regime and defend Islamists, about 90% of whom would kill him on sight, simply because he is a Jew (secular Jew, not to be confused with religious). From the confines of his ivory tower, he insults the people who keep him safe, and defends the people who want to kill him, because it's all theoretical to him. In all actuality, to many of the Chomskies of the world, the selection of a side carries no more importance than the selection of who you root for in a football game, because they don't actually believe that people they have no desire to kill want to kill them. As a side note, I notice that Chomsky while deploring the US, has no fear that George Bush or the US government will take any actual action against him. He would not be so bold as to criticize Castro while living in Cuba, or openly proclaim there is no God while living in Iran.
The higher up the ladder they get, the more insulated they become. If MIT received the same level of bombing that Israeli cities receive, the ideology would change quickly. As it is, to the leaders and the academics, it's all theoretical. Except for the leaders of Israel and the leaders of much of Islam.