When al Qaeda targets you

it means you're doing the right thing. the philippines was doing the right thing, so militants decided to take a filipino hostage. filipinos, however, allowed themselves, their country and their sovereignity taken hostage by small group of meddling a*sholes as well.

the fact is that jihadists are just evil people. they see no difference between the iraqi campaign or the afghan campaign or the the 9/11 attacks. they're all battles in the same war:

The truce gave countries three months to pull troops out of Afghanistan , Iraq and other Muslim states or face attacks like the Madrid train bombings in March that killed 191 people.

but victory is slowly being won by those backward idiots shouting allahu akbar thanks to our little show of cowardice. the press and left in the philippines keep on deluding themselves of the righteousness of their act that they've forgotten what the jihadists has in store for them. they simply ignore the fact that jihadists will attack only if we thwart their evil deeds, prefering instead to appease them. of course they don't call it appeasement, they just reason out that we had no business with the illegal war of aggression... yada, yada, yada, never telling you that jihadists don't see it that way.