There aren't a lot of secularly-based anti-imperialist attacks by Pakistanis or Libyans in Iraq. Those that do happen are connected with an openly Salafist-Islam-supremacist organization. It also pays to remember that al-Zarqawi, the core of AQ in Iraq, was from Jordan and operated in Saddam's Iraq, and that when bin Ladin got mixed up with Zarqawi's group their narrative said less about the US and more about the Shi'ites. Again, religion + politics, imperialism on the back burner. Moving on ...
The IRA was a religious-political struggle. Yet we didn't hear of attacks by Brazilians against the British Embassy, nor were there Italian or Croatian cells active in Belfast. (Yet in the Balkans, there were Arab cells fighting with the Bosnians.)
The US attacked Panama. But Latinos in the US didn't start killing random non-Latinos. Heck, even Panamanians didn't. And there was a long history of US imperialism in, oh, Panama and the rest of Central America. (Yet in Nigeria, there's this odd business with polio--outbreaks in Taliban territory are followed soon thereafter by outbreaks in Boko Haram territory.)
Even more telling, in neither case was there an upswelling of Catholic violence against the US. Bombs didn't go off in front of the US embassy in Austria, nor were US tourists in Rome gunned or run down. There were protests, but the protests focused on political identity--those sharply left of center focused on being anti-US because the US was opposed to a lot of revolutionary movements around the world and had been imperialist (again, in opposing a lot of revolutionary movements around the world). Even when there's a Tunisian attack in France, the attackers' notes point to ISIS, to AQ in various forms, and not to the history of French imperialism in Tunisia or Algeria--if you read left, center, and right, you find that discussion mostly quite left of center, whether in the US or France. When you do find imperialism in the attackers' notes, it's not short-term stuff like the Picot-Sykes agreement, but 19th century imperialism writ large or even the loss of the Balkans and Spain. Then it's no longer "ethnic" in the sense WEIRDs think of it, but ethnic in the sense of religious-political identity. (WEIRD is white, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic).
Arguments based entirely on historical imperialism fail. They'd predict that Asians, being Asians with the same history, should engage in similar sorts and degrees of violence against their former colonial oppressors. But Hindu Asians are different from Muslim Asians. ("Asian" in Britain is primarily "S. Asian".) Same cause, different effects ... cause and effect aren't established. If you see a picture of the guy who ran down the London Bridge folk and he had dark skin, you'd probably not first think, "Ah, he's a member of the BJP." And there's not a lot of Indian Muslims attacking in Britain; they have their own struggle.
I guess if you wanted to you could go back a layer or two to when the British overthrew Muslim apartheid in S. Asia. Most of the territory had Muslim rulers, merchants, schools, but a small minority population; the Hindu population, a large majority, were second-class citizens. That's led to all kinds of problems now. But it also led to Pakistan's establishment, since the former oppressed didn't want the former oppressors around, and the former oppressors resented having been stripped of their due and wanted to be with others like themselves. We hear about the persecution as Muslims fled; the large-ish Hindu minority in what's now Pakistan suffered the same. That might account for the Hindu/Muslim Asian split in terms of (low-incident) behavior.
There's too much more to write. But you've mixed all kinds of things into a pot, a veritable mulligatawny. It obfuscates instead of illuminating. The views of the attackers don't need to make immediate sense to you or me and there's this haste to immediately deny anything they say that we don't think fits our views on the matter. But the goal is to figure out that their views are, and that's necessarily a posteriori. We can use their own narratives and give them the dignity to be able to say what they think, even if we find it unpleasant. The way Chomsky relied on paradigms and contrasts to get at underlying structure is also reasonable, I think. Critical thinking--first trying to find evidence to demolish one's own hypothesis instead of doing the humanities thing and looking primarily for evidence in support--helps. Whatever the answer, it's likely to be complicated. And it's also likely to be situated deeply in the attackers' culture and psychology and sociology, not in WEIRD reductions of those things.
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