A few vignettes from almost 30 years in the Bay Area.
One tiny Marxist-Leninist faction (the one that supported Albanian Enver Hoxha) saw itself as the true inheritors of the Working Class Revolution. At least until one night when there was a doctrinal split, hard as it is to believe that the Hoxha-ites could be split without resorting to fractions, and the dominant faction reported later that the deviationists were so disruptive, the campus police had been called.
I am a believer in civilian review of the police, but I often thought that the Berkeley group called 'Copwatch' was too hard on the officers. I think I was too hard on Copwatch, though, because when one of their leaders ODed on heroin, they called Berkeley PD right away.
I'll try to connect this to Al Qaeda on the flip.
But first, a story about Uhuru House, the African People's Solidarity Committee. They hate the police so much they had a protest about the shootout in which a criminal named Lavelle Mixon died. He took four officers with him, starting with two at a routine traffic stop. Mixon was probably afraid they knew about his DNA match with a prepubescent rape victim. Except, of course, the time the African People's Solidarity Committee leaders got into a fight about who should enjoy the favors of their women's auxiliary (the Committee itself was restricted to black men in something out of the 1960s). I don't have to tell you who got called, do I? (Hint, it was the police.)
This is the sort of story I remember when I read criticism of the FBI and their arrest in Portland. OK, maybe it will turn out that all their evidence is a fraud, but that's what trials are for. What I don't understand is accepting the evidence at face value, and still objecting to what the FBI did. No, infiltration like that isn't entrapment. No, being tricked out of going to Alaska is not a Get To Make A Bomb Free card. My biggest regret is to date there is no sign that the anti-abortion and violent PETA activists haven't been infiltrated as successfully.
The need for law enforcement will not vanish if we live under Islam, Communism, or veganism. That's unfortunate, and the story of Cain and Abel is one tradition's way of trying to explain, partially, the presence of evil in the world. I'm sure other traditions have stories with the same moral, that human society has conflict, and human morality has its psycho-pathologies.
Al Qaeda is not, in the largest part, a reaction against our Israel policy, and certainly not against our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, since they have been attacking us before we were even there. Insisting that Al Qaeda's behavior must really be about us is arrogant whether it's Sarah Palin defending everything we do or it's the American far-left attacking everything we do. Maybe it's about them, and they're evil. Certainly nothing about (to take an easy example) the treatment of women and girls under the Taliban, and their confederates in rural Pakistan, makes the prospect of life under their restored Caliphate attractive. Why don't we give terrorist the credit, so to speak, of knowing their own program, and not try to fit it into our own.