roid wrote:if you guys want to label all terrorists as Al-Qaeda....
Most of us on this side of the aisle are smart enough to know there are other terror groups... none of us would dare call someone from the IRA or the PLO or Hamas "Al Qaeda", for example. We wouldn't call the Ba'athist part of the Iraq insurgency AQ, either. (Strictly speaking, though, only the Ba'athists deserve to be called an "insurgency" -- the foreign fighters in Iraq, including AQ, should be called invaders.)
AQ is the label many of the terrorists involved in certain types of actions are claiming for themselves, now. I think it's mostly marketing on their part -- since AQ is a known name, they just use it instead of coming up with a new one.
This is a well-known phenomenon. People hear a term applied to people they want to be like, so they start using that term themselves. How many people call themselves "Buddhist" or "Christian" or "Wiccan", not because they actually follow the ways of Buddha, Christ, or Gerald Gardner, but because somebody they look up to uses that label? How many people call themselves "postmodernist" who don't have the slightest clue what it means? Why, then, would it be surprising that many people call themselves "Al Qaeda", not because they have some official affiliation with Osama, but because they like how they're treated when they claim the label?
