Rare silence from the left

Except when they find a preferred form of fundamentalism they’ll fight to the death. One they incessantly accuse of backwardness, social heartlessness, and everything else that bugs them about western civilization, but would have never kidnap people and force their ways on them like the Ottoman Sultans a thousand years ago. Finally released,:

American Steve Centanni and New Zealander Olaf Wiig of US organisation Fox News were dropped off at a Gaza City beach-front hotel.

Mr Centanni said they were forced at gunpoint to convert to Islam. They stated their conversion in a video released before they were set free.

The captors had called for the release of "Muslim prisoners" in the US.

The US had rejected the demands.

Said one abnormally honest and intelligent Fifth Column miscreant at the time of their abduction:

I hope Centanni and his cameraman make it out of Iraq alive.

Points to a certain fixation, no? Besides, without having to say it, they are undermining their own linkage/no-lankage game (Israel’s actions are a cause of the need for a war on terror, but Saddam’s weren’t, Palestinian violence not related to Jihad, Hizballah not related to Jihad, etc.): the press kidnapped in Gaza were kidnapped in the interest of fundamentalists, just as we see in the Arab world. The fact that they were in Gaza and not in Yemen or Iraq is irrelevant insofar as their war against the rest of humanity is concerned. Jihadist fascists are attacking all of civilization, even Arab civilization, even committing the Cardinal sin of attacking other Muslims.

This makes them no different than the Real IRA going after the IRA, the Red Brigades and the Bader-Meinhof Gang going after the most liberal society on earth, and so forth. They also had the silent support from detached young morons willing to march in the streets, just as a bin Laden pronouncement can telegraph the same way. The were funded in part by states (the KGB). They were transnational. They professed what they thought was a universaly theology.
The difference is that the public and the government went after them in ernest before they reached the scale they are at now. But in a touchy-feely and fearful age, the rump of Muslim society is afraid to stare down Jihadist. Had the radical leftist revolutionaries (who wanted to modify society as much as Islamic fundamentalists do now) not been stared down in that way, we would find ourselves fighting a Jihad of that type at home.