The howling here is a silent rage. Islam is gauging it very closely. If they are not, they should be.
I've come to believe that they are unable to gauge Western reactions.
Maybe it's partly because Clinton let so many attacks go by with minimal to no response such as the attacks on U.S. embassies, the first WTC bombing, the Cole bombing, etc. The Europeans have been lying down supinely while the Muslims are flooding into their countries and the rape/theft crime rates have drastically gone up accordingly. The Russians left Chechnaya in 1996 and the rate of Chech attacks, including scores of kidnapping Russians for ransom money not only didn't abate, but rose dramatically. The Russians had to re-invade in 1999 to try and stop Chech attacks, but have been ham-strung by Western criticism.
Maybe all this seeming passivity caused the terrorists to be cocky. So cocky they trained in the U.S., stole our planes and wreaked our proudest buildings with great lose of life. Surprise for them, though, Bush isn't Clinton and al-Queda has been on the run ever since. But they haven't learned a thing from Afghanistan, the Muslim terrorists are upping the ante. They are now wildly striking out all over the world: the Moscow theater, Bali, the French tanker, and so on. What they aren't able to gauge is that they are establishing themselves as mad dogs that HAVE to be killed, and revealing their *religion* as a demonic dealth cult. We're scared of them, all right - scared in the sense of pulling out a gun to shoot a mad dog. That, they can't understand. They're too insulated, too ignorant, too blinded by their cult-fanaticism.
And the inter-connectedness of this was so plainly shown by the Chech terrorists in the Moscow attack phoning Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and other Muslim countries. It's not "rebels" in Chechnaya, "separationists" in Indonesia, and Palestinian "protesters". It's all Muslim terrorism and largely funded by Saudi Arabia with it's virulent brand of Wahhabi Islam, and with additional funding from Iraq and other Arabic states.