We've been told any action reasonably expected to elicit a violent response

[JoePhilly]

9. It relates to the reailty of what is actually going on, as described in your OP.

The INTENT of "our extremists" (eg., the film maker) is to incite retaliatory violence, but violence that will occur to other people.

Our extremists want a holy war, but they don't want to fight or die in that holy war themselves.

Our extremists know that they are protected by oceans. They also know that Americans living abroad do not have that same geographic security. And they are happy about that.

And so for our extremists, the best way to create the holy war they want, is to incite violence from the Islamic extremists, who are unable to engage our extremists directly, and so they attack the closet surrogate.

Every Religion has extremists (see Abortion bombers on wikipedia).

The reality is that the moderates of the world must take on ALL of the extremists, condemn them all, and cut them off.

And if our extremists had any guts, or if they believed in their God, they'd go over to the ME and fight. But they won't. They'll hide behind the oceans.