I think that it's worth digging into this a bit because I see this lying at the heart of the problems with the West's repsonse to terrorism.
It's basically a mistake about who we are fighting. So, for instance:
When the IRA puts a bomb in Manchester shopping centre the people walking through it have no say in whether or not Ireland is for the Irish, it doesn't mean that the IRA hate shopping.
This is a flawed analogy: Bali is not Ireland, and the Balinese are not responding to Western actions against them (according to your logic) but supposedly to Western actions to the worldwide umma. It is the equivalent of ethnic Irish in the USA bombing San Fransisco in response to British policy in Northern Ireland.
When Jihadists talk about bombing nightclubs, they justify it because nightclubs are disgusting places.
“One of the things that’s commonly said by Islamists is that it’s acceptable to bomb a disco, because a disco is a place where people are behaving in a disgusting way. Go away and die – that’s all Bin Laden wants you to do. It’s not just about Iraq, it’s about ham sandwiches and kissing in public places and sex with girls you’re not married to.”
- Salman Rushdie,
http://johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1002
You say that (among other things) Islamist terrorism is a response to Western intervention in the Middle East. However, this thinking is deeply wrong.
You are not an Islamist, you are a secular liberal westerner. What pisses off fundamentalist religious fanatics is always going to be qualitatively very different to what pisses you off. It makes it very easy though, doesn't it, to understand these people if they have a rational reason for hating people in nighclubs, it makes the world a bit simpler? The last century was typified by wars fought for existential reasons, not for rational political outcomes. ("If we fly planes into the NYC skyline, maybe Israel will leave the Palestinians alone"). We've been here before, it is absolutely the same impulse: terrorism = totalitarianism. Camus nailed this fact to the ground long ago. But liberal people find it impossible to concieve of actions which originate in such harmful and seemingly irrational ideologies. We had the same problem at the start of WWII. "Oh, the Germans only want to redress the balance which was put out after WWI", etc. The people who flew the planes were rich and educated, part of the globalised, westernised world. They haven't been oppressed and they don't resent their lack of choices. Choices are the problem. Islamism is an attack on modernity, not on an unjust US foreign policy.
The Islamist's don't agree with you. Do you think bin Laden gives a toss about the sufferings of individual Palestinians? About the sufferings of ordinary Muslims? Not a chance, bin Laden cares only for the cause: he is a fanatic. Do they talk about the Palestinian problem in terms of a two state solution? Nope: Palestine belongs to the Islamic Empire, that's the whole damn reason that fundamentalists fight, that's what jihad is:
fatah, the opening. "End the occupation of Muslim lands", get it? Because Islamists are historicist in their world view, they want their historical glory restored. Remember what got bin Laden so upet in the first place? US troops in the penninsula, never mind the fact that they were there in the first place to defend Kuwait from Saddam, Muslim land is Muslim land only, "end the occupation".
And that's what Israel represents to Islamism, the occupation of part of a historical power, and not just by the rival christian empire (what does bin Laden call the coalition? "Christian crusaders") but by the fuggin Jews, by dhimmis, by no one, who not only occupy Muslim lands, but who have also humiliated all arabs armies who tried to destory them, even from a position of extreme Israeli asymmetry, when no one expected the IDF to win. The humiliation can only be further evidence of the fact that the Muslim world has fallen from the truye path of righteousness and can only return to greatness by returning to the goals and systems of the four "righly guided caliphs", back to the ways of the salaf, the companions, and away from the secular modernist ideas (Arab socialism, pan Arabism, etc) whihc have failed to lift the Mid East.
Why, for instance, did Islamists not target Saddam Hussein when he committed acts of genocide against two separate groups of people in Iraq? There is no explanation which fits your analysis. How many acts of genocide have the Americans committed against Muslims? Why do the Islamists not target regimes where gross acts of human rights abuses take place? Why do they not campaign for an end to the stoning of women in Iran if they care so much for the lives of down-trodden Muslims? Why do they not aggitate for political freedoms in Egypt? Nobody kills and oppresses more Muslims than other Muslims, and that is a very sad fact but a fact nonetheless.
Can you point to the actual US actions and policies which the Islamists are reacting against, or is this more of a feeling that you have?
A read a piece by Phares (Lebanese counterterrorism expert) relating how on the day after 9/11 he was watching al Jazeera, two clerics where arguing venomously about whether now was the correct time to strike out against America. Not whether it was the right act, but whether it was the right time. Phares said that the realisation that whilst in the US people didn't even understand why this had happened, amongst the jihadists the debate had already moved on, shocked him.
Most imortantly of all though is the fact that 9/11 was not aimed at the West to prove anything to Western governments, principally. It was done for its true audience: the Muslim world, everything bin Laden does is for the benefit of this audience. He certainly doesn't give a shit about what you or I think, we're kuffar. 9/11 was pure spectacular propaganda on an unimaginable scale, wiht the aim of lighting up the umma with his cause: the restoration of the caliphate, the return of the Islamic empire and the resumption of jihad, of the opening of dar el harb to dar el Islam.