The Root Cause of Terrorist Activity

The root cause of terrorist activity is the belief that the victim will back down. For example, I'm sure nearly everybody in the blogosphere has heard of the attempt to intimidate Greg Baer of Bank of America. You can find the reason they thought they could get results in the following paragraph:

Of course, HuffPost readers responding to the coverage assumed that Baer was an evil former Bush official. He's not. A lifelong Democrat, Baer worked for the Clinton Treasury Department, and his wife, Shirley Sagawa, author of the book The American Way to Change and a former adviser to Hillary Clinton, is a prominent national service advocate.

The union terrorists figured that all he needed was a nudge.