I posted this on another thread earlier today, but this thread is probably more apt.
I'm reading a book about the American Revolution. It's interesting to read about the likes of Samuel Adams, one of the precipitators of the American Revolution. Adams' extremist views and sometimes quite radically intemperate actions polarised his more even-tempered fellow revolutionaries (and the large numbers of non-revolutionaries among the colonists, who preferred to remain loyal to England) early in the period of turmoil. He was almost certainly seen by the majority, even people on his side, as the Osama Bin Laden of his day.
I sometimes wonder if the Americans, with their current 'war on terrorism', ever pause to ponder on the irony that their own nation was born thanks to what the law abiding Establishment of those times would have seen as terrorism no less heinous than that perpetrated by today's Islamic radicals. (Roger's Rangers, irregular Continental troops who fought totally outside the accepted norms of combat, were the PFLP of the day.) The society the American Revolutionaries were attempting to create, a republic with voting rights for the common, untitled man and a democratically elected head of state, would have been seen by the Royalists of the day to have been every bit as threatening, radical and extreme as the Islamic society Bin Laden and his followers aspires towards today. Even closer to the current age, thinking Israelis must squirm when they look back on some of their founding fathers, like the leaders of the Stern Gang for instance, one of whom later became their Prime Minister. The irony gets really thick when an Israeli asks from whom did the Palestinians learn the ground rules in using terrorism to advance their political case.