"Along the rock-strewn cliffs of Afghanistan, overlooking roadways carved out by mules and horses, the fighters from the East were known as the masters of the heights. They were vicious and unforgiving in battle, even more so than the Arab volunteers who came from places like Egypt and Palestine and had hundreds of years of rage to dispense. They were especially renowned for kidnapping Soviet soldiers, especially those on sentry duty, and dragging their struggling bodies back to caves where they were stripped of their weapons and rations, barbarically tortured, and then mercifully executed with a rock to the head - why waste a 7.62mm round on a man who was already dead?

"Unlike most of the volunteers to the cause in Afghanistan, these warriors had grown up on a steady stream of American culture, Coca-Cola and rock music. They wore blue jeans and US Army camouflage fatigues. Unlike most of the foreign volunteers to the Afghan fighting, these warriors did not speak Arabic. They spoke a combination of Tagalog and tribal dialects from a distant group of 7,107 tropical and jungle islands in the Pacific, far from the desert hell of Afghanistan." [Samuel M. Katz. Relentless Pursuit: The DSS and the Manhunt for the Al-Qaeda Terrorists. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, 2002, p. 17, p. 95]

And outside the Philippines? What have they done?

1. Sirhan Sirhan, who assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968, was a Palestinian. And his release was demanded by a Palestinian Black September faction that hostaged on March 1, 1973 the US Ambassador to Sudan and four others in the Saudi embassy reception in Khartoum.

2. The Palestinian Black September faction disrupted the 1972 Munich Olympics when it assaulted and hostaged the Israeli athletes.

3. A Black Muslim sect took over three Washington, D.C. buildings, hostaged 134 people and killed a student on March 9-10, 1977. Hamaas Abdul Khaalis and his ring of Hanafi Muslim extremists demanded the reimbursement of an old $750 fine, the death of a rival sect that killed his family in the US capital in 1973 and the pull-out of a commercial film bio of Islam's main man ("Mohammed, Messenger of God," 1976, starring Anthony Quinn as Hamza). [Timothy Naftali. Blind Spot. New York: Basic Books, 2005]

4. In 1979, militant Iranians occupied the US embassy in Tehran, hostaging 60 people in a drawn-out stand-off.

5. Islamic Jihad sent a suicide bomber to the US embassy in Beirut, killing 63, while the Islamic Amal sent another to the US Marine Corps barracks in the Lebanese capital, killing 200, in 1983.

6. In 1984, Dawa (The Call) murdered the president of the American University of Beirut, abducted then executed the CIA Station Chief in Lebanon, and kidnapped Jeremy Levin of CNN.

7. Hezbollah kidnapped in 1985 the Associated Press' chief correspondent in the Middle East and skyjacked TWA Flight 847 (from Athens to Rome), murdering a hostage, US seaman Robert Stethem, in the process.

8. On January 25, 1993, a Pakistani lone wolf, Mir Amal Kansi, shot to death two CIA employees in the Agency's compound in Virginia.

9. Hezbollah bombed in July 1994 the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, killing 100 in Argentina.

10. The extremist Algerian Groupes Islamiques Armees hijacked an Air France flight from Algiers, intending to crash the jet on Paris in 1994.

11. On August 7, 1998, Al-Qaeda detonated bombs at the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Some 257 lives were lost.

12. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a Uighur-Kazakh Muslim separatist group that wants to revive a fundamentalist version of the independent and non-Chinese pre-1949 East Turkistan Republic, is blamed by Beijing for "more than 200 terror attacks between 1990 and 2001" in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. [www.cfr.org/publication/9179/]

At the very least, these instances of outlaw behavior make it extremely difficult to address ethnocentrism, prejudice and racial discrimination. Profiling, violence and religious fanaticism make interpersonal communication across cultures very problematic. "Arab Americans, for instance, complain that other US Americans often hold undifferentiated stereotypes about members of their culture." [Myrone W. Lustig and Jolene Koester. Intercultural Competence. 3rd ed. NY: Longman, 1999, p. 151]

Familiarity with West Asian traditions, exposure to Middle Eastern religions and inter-faith dialogues can mediate fear and loathing of things and people associated fairly and unfairly with jihad.