Okay. Thanks. Make you a deal - I'll remember that we had this discussion and you remember that I don't take kindly to assumptions, fair enough?

So the original question:

So you don't believe that there may be a slight difference in these guys coming from relatively comfortable American lives to someone who may or may not have lost multiple family members and or a home at the hands of the forces surrounding them?

The original question rephrased in a less inflammatory way:

"There's clearly a difference between comfortable Americans and Palestinian militants, however."

(not really a question anymore, is it?)

Right. Clearly. But it's a matter of degree. It all starts with disaffected youth and ends with insurgency - And while there are far more Palestinians in Hamas than there are white kids in al Qaeda, there's still John Walker Lindh.

And yeah - if you're a happy white kid in Minnesota it's a lot harder to find a Jihadi message. But the Internet is the Internet and the 9/11 bombers? Disaffected middle-class Saudis. The 2005 London bombings? Disaffected middle-class Britons.

But that's obvious stuff. Public knowledge. It's the perspective - that it's a matter of degree - that is the controversial opinion here. That's the drive of the article, that's the point of my statement.

So maybe it's my turn to be shocked - how do you think someone ends up strapping on a bomb and walking into a crowd? 'cuz the way you phrased your response - and the way you've phrased your responses since - indicate a high degree of skepticism about known facts.

Born in 1968 in a small town in Egypt's Nile Delta, Atta moved with his family to the Abdeen section of Cairo at the age of 10. Atta studied architecture at Cairo University, graduating in 1990, and continued his studies in Hamburg, Germany at the Technical University of Hamburg.

Dude never once saw an Iron Dome. Still flew a 767 into the World Trade Center.

Reza Aslan makes a point in How to Win A Cosmic War that Islam recognizes the near enemy, the far enemy and the cosmic enemy. Local battles involve people whose lives are fucked up by the near enemy - your tribe keeps stealing my goats. Tribal battles involve people whose lives are indirectly fucked up by the far enemy - Saddam gassed the Kurds and I like Kurds. Cosmic battles involve people who are pissed off by ideology - Fuck Israel because they're Jewish. Death to America because they're capitalist swine.

It's Maszlow's Heirarchy, basically. If you're dealing with the near enemy, you have no time for the far enemy. If you're dealing with the far enemy, you have no time for the cosmic enemy. The only people who can really pick idealogical battles are the ones that don't have anything better to do. That's why Pashtun tribesmen don't put Semtex in their underwear and board flights to New York... that's a job left to:

Upon his release from prison in 1996,[8] he joined the Brixton Mosque.[9][11] He later began attending the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London headed at that time by the anti-American cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri and described as "the heart of the extremist Islamic culture" in Britain.[3][9] By 1998 Reid was voicing extremist views,[3] and may have fallen under the sway of "terrorist talent spotters and handlers" allied with Al Qaeda.[9]