Yea, everyone in the twin towers were christian extremists...
Oh wait, no they weren't. The muslim extremists are out to kill everyone who doesn't follow their particular warped flavor of their religion. It's a religious war between all religious extremists and the entire rest of the world, not between 2 poorly behaved religious extremist groups.
I'm personally on at least one target list and have been for over 7 years. Being a target of a group of people I haven't done anything to really defined my attitudes towards religious extremist terrorists in general... If they're dead they can't hurt me or my family, and since they declared war on me personally before I did anything, I have absolutely no regard for their welfare. If they knock off their holy war and decline to continue coming after me and my family, I'd consider it "over", but they show no sign of doing so. When it comes to questions of "them or me", I choose me every time especially because they came after me first. I feel no compulsion to turn the other cheek because they'll keep killing until either they're wiped out or they convert everyone to their ways.
It's the difference between a military combatant and vermin. For example, back in the cold war, the typical Soviet troop would be considered by anyone to be an enemy military combatant. He probably didn't want to be fighting anyone, he didn't want to come to my house and kill everyone inside just to make a political statement or religious conversion, he was simply acting as the fist behind the last resort of the politicians of a legitimate government. A terrorist for whatever reason has decided that he needs to kill people not for defense and not in the interest of a legitimate national interest, but to forward his own personal agenda. Since I am not only a target in general, but also my name has been specifically passed to them, and there is no possible military justification behind targeting me or my family, to me they become vermin that need to be exterminated the same as I'd exterminate a scorpion running around in my house.
It's a good damn thing I'm not running the show because any city that harbored terrorists would have 48 hours to turn over the bastards or the city would be obliterated. If they want to be terrorists or permit terrorists to live safely among them, they can live in holes in the sand like the rest of the vermin.
But I'm not running the show and I follow orders, so my life and the lives of my family remain at risk from these extremists who consider me and my family nothing but objects to be blown up to help make their religious statements. Maybe that is called "civilization", giving people who have sworn to kill you and everyone you love a chance to do so repeatedly before you go after them, hoping that they'll get someone else next time and then just go away.
