Continued from last week’s column:

Insurgents, my Webster’s Dictionary has advised, attack a “civil authority or an established government.” They attack armies, soldiers, military airplanes, tanks, ships, or bases. Maybe, when they’ve nicked themselves shaving or had a particularly bad breakfast, they assassinate a general or try to blow up a military arsenal. Rightly or wrongly, their grievances are directed at a defined enemy – a government. Those who represent that government are their intended victims.

Al-Qaeda, to the contrary, targets civilians. Nevertheless, the media exclusively refers to them as “insurgents.”

From recent news reports of massacres in Iraq:

“Twin suicide bombers have killed at least 35 people and injured 65 in an attack at a market in the Iraqi province of Diyala.”

“Iraqi families were shopping and preparing for evening prayers in the town when the bomb blew up. More than ninety civilians died, including women and children. More were badly burned or pierced by shrapnel. ‘I saw how the flames swallowed the panicked people as they ran away,’ a local teacher said. ‘The fire chased the people down and ate them alive.’

“At least 30 people were killed and many wounded in a suicide attack on a crowd of mourners in Iraq. The attacker detonated his explosives near the city of Baquba, north of the capital, Baghdad.”

When Iraqi citizens are out shopping at a market, praying at a mosque, or mourning at a funeral, they are like MOVE’s blamless neighbors on Osage Avenue: Convenient third parties targeted by terrorists to coerce a government and manipulate the news.

Both Arab groups on which the world press bestows unlimited attention – al-Queda and Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) – practice textbook terrorists strategies. You will recognize all of them:

Disregard of the law, due process, and representational governments. They attack politics, per se.

Advocacy of hopeless and often incomprehensible causes.

Effective refusal to negotiate by making impossible demands and/or changing demands in mid-negotiation.

Staging dramatic situations designed to have public impact.