One thing I’d like to add is the fact why Israelis were targeted at the Chabad (now Nariman) house. I think there could be a greater force in training/ funding these terrorists than Pakistan and Saudi… Has anyone questioned the Islamic Republic of Iran coz its president is always at loggerheads with Israel? Another reason could be that the terrorists wanted to trigger a world war by targeting every ethnic group from the world which is in limelight and according to them is “un-Islamic”…. Wind the clock back to 2006 when Ahmadenijad spoke about his beliefs that the motive of his revolution was to call the 12th Imam, the Mahdi two years from then, i.e, now. (simply a shameless and irrational reason to trigger WWIII)…

Whatever be the reason, the Islamic countries on a political level have a lot of venom stored for non-Islamic groups. It could well be speculated that from here things get worse before they get better…

In other words, the fact that the terrorists singled out Americans and Britons was aimed at maximizing the media exposure of the attack. Remember that giant attack on Mumbai's trains in '06? Well, if so, then you were paying attention. That attack didn't target American tourists, so American dollars in the pockets of American television viewers weren't at stake. As such, it didn't get half the air time the latest attack has.

When it comes to the terminology used to describe the ideological motivations of the attackers, I am always irked when I see ''extremist'' and ''Islamic'' in tandem. What I see is a quiet assumption that faith in Islam leads naturally to violence and that for such violent impulses to be supressed faith in Islam itself must be moderated. I guess the word that bothers me the most is ''moderate Muslims'' or something to that effect. How often do you hear something like: “Moderate Christian voters this year decided to put down their concerns over Barack Obama's positions on some issues and give him responsibility over an economy and two wars the Bush administration and the Republican party have mismanaged.” Or something to that effect.

I will say though that there are people who will distort religions of all kinds to motivate people to violence. Islam is no exception. Since the 1980s, extreme religious movements all over the world have gained political power. Remember like, the last 30 years of American political history from Reagan to Rove? Yeah, that all happened. There are all sorts of explanations for this phenomenon. Millenarian hysterics, reaction to modernity and globalization, or cyclical quirks in political systems are all culprits.

Unfortunately, the lack of terms to properly describe all these things persists as a problem.

Easy labeling serves to displace informed and critical judgment about the causes of such violence. Matt, it is true that these attackers have called themselves the Deccan Mujahideen, but whenever a group of Muslims has a gripe about something and wants to make its message seem much larger than itself, it seems to me only natural that it will try to tie its message into a broader ideology, especially when the press and the so-called “experts” you speak of are so willing to accept that narrative in the place of real investigation. Over the past few days, we've heard that the militants have targeted Westerners, Jews, Indians, that they're from the Deccan region (Hyderabad is the city most associated with this region, and Hyderabad has had its share of Hindu-Muslim violence over the past 20 years. Just one and half year ago, on May 18, 2007, the Mecca Masjid, the main Mosque of Hyderabad, was bombed and 15 or so Muslims killed by the bomb and by police gunfire), that they're attacking India because of its treatment of Muslims , etc. etc. My point is, the terrorists themselves have spewed off a variety of motivations for the violence ranging from India's treatment of its own Muslims to random angst against Westerners. Add to this the views of the “experts” and Indian government that the group is from Pakistan (anyone who knows anything about such violent attacks in India knows that political wisdom mandates that the Pakistani government be blamed first after every an attack) or that the attacks are reprisals for Indian acts in Kashmir or the quasi-genocide of Muslims in Gujarat n 2002, and it becomes obvious that we have absolutely no idea, collectively, what the motivations or sources of this violence are.

The problem with labeling this attack with broad terms used in international contexts is that the terms are often loaded and carry with them all kinds of connotations that will no doubt cloud how we investigate what happened. The terms may force us to look at this only through the prism of a broader global struggle, for example, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as it causes us to overlook events such as the one in Hyderabad, or about the two bombs that went off outside a mosque during Ramadan prayers and killed 7 people in Malegaon, a town near Bombay, just a month and a half ago, or countless other events that do not easily fit into whatever narrative is being pushed on us by the terrorists themselves, the Indian Government officials, and the press outlets, pressured as they are to be the first to deliver us a neatly packaged story.

I'm not saying that these attackers aren't 'extremist' or 'Islamist,' but know that terrorism is a method to control popular opinion, and it is strategic, and I fear that far too often we all take the bait.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZnbo1OJAYo

On a personal level, I might take greater distance from my co-religionists than you, but I don't wince when Baruch Goldstein is referred to as a Jewish terrorist, or when the Kakh movement is referred to as a Jewish terrorist organization.

But I can't deny the existence of a stream of Islamist extremist ideology that draws on the teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, Hassan al-Bana, Sayyid Qutb, and the actions of Omar 'Abd al-Rahman, weaving notions of jihad together with an outlook of takfir.

It seems to me that the folks doing a disservice to Islam might be the ones with the guns and bombs, not the folks with the notebooks and cameras.