But they didn't. Because, if they had, there would have been widespread revulsion within the perpetrators' own communities. To put it at its most tactful, that doesn't seem to be an issue here.
So the particular character of this "insurgency" does not derive from the requirements of "asymmetrical warfare" but from . . . well, let's see, what was the word missing from those three analyses of the Beslan massacre? Here's a clue: half the dead "Chechen separatists" were not Chechens at all, but Arabs. And yet, tastefully tiptoeing round the subject, The New York Times couldn't bring itself to use the words Muslim or Islamist, for fear presumably of offending multicultural sensibilities.
Steyn makes some magnificent points.
However, I wouldn't allow the IRA and ETA etc. off the hook so easily. Enniskillen, the Madrid bombings - no minor acts of terror in their own right.
That's right. I'm not as familiar with the ETA (though it's a Communist terrorist outfit as well), but I'm old enough to remember the IRA planting bombs that killed innocent families (often Catholic) and their responsibility for blasts in London as well that could not help but kill innocent people of all ages and conditions. Their love of violence and death always seemed to me the same sick philosophy of the jihadis.
And the ANC were no saints either.
But the ETA didn't do the Madrid bombings...
Not that I'm defending them, of course, but a group with ties to Al Qaida took responsibility, if I'm not mistaken.