Terrorists then, Jihad now

Hitchens is being a bit reductionistic in his comments, but I think we can recognize what he's saying. Although Marxists were (and are) willing to inflict violence for the sake of the Great Utopia, they have a tendency to be ideological rather than fanatically religious (where religion and ideology are bound under the banner of Jihad). Here's a snippet for your thought:

Conversation with these men over the years was enough to convince me of what I already knew: It is indeed possible for one man to have been both a terrorist and a freedom fighter, though it is probably better to have skipped the "terror" phase altogether. The Iraqi Kurds, for example, never tried to involve noncombatants in their war of liberation. Nonetheless, evolution can and does occur.

This is only one of the many ways in which to appreciate how much the current phase of Islamic "terrorism" is utterly different. Whether or not the London plot turns out to have been real, one knows for sure that similar plots have been afoot ever since the 1990s, when Ramzi Yusef and others conspired to bring down several jumbo jets over the Pacific. And one day fairly soon, we may be sure that human and mechanical debris will fall from the sky upon a city. If you look at the four men I cited above, you will find that they did not plan to inflict murder at random, that they had at least a reasonable belief that they were left with no other recourse, that they had some concept of tomorrow being better than today, and that they accepted—and still accept—responsibility for their actions. What could be more different from those who plan to inflict mass death at random, whose agenda is tyrannical and theocratic, and who are so arrogantly exalted by fanaticism that they wish only to be among the dead? This isn't at all about bad methods being used for "justifiable" reasons or causes. It's about being able to tell a great deal about the "end" from the sort of "means" that are employed to attain it.