Military/academic reaction to radical groups/biased news?

[Nygdan]

They defaced a military recruitment office in Berkley, California a few years ago, which amounts to vandalism. And during Gen. Petraeus's hearings in 2007, they had to be escorted out of the Armed Forces Hearing for disruption. Being anti-war is one thing, this is radicalism to the extreme.

When they start kidnapping and executing soldiers, assassinating government officials, and bombing government offices, I think then we can say they are radical extremists. Right now they're on par with the Boston Tea Party. They're basically within their rights, with some jumps into vandalism and public disorder (and to be clear I am no "fan" of code pink and I don't think that they stand up to well in a full comparison with the Sons of Liberty ).

there will always be crazies out there, thus militaries are necessary for national self defense.

Not to be a nitpicker, but there is a pretty big difference between internal 'crazies' (ie, people we don't agree with) and using the military against them, and then using a military for defense of the nation from outsiders.

You don't hear about the people being beheaded in mainstream news.

I think that something to keep in mind here is that people already understand that the taliban and al-qaida are horrible. So there isn't much need for the news to repeat that (of course, arguably, if they heard more about it, they might say 'well, civilians died when we bombed a safehouse, but we got the guy that had been slitting kids throats").

A lot of Centcom videos on youtube showed US forces helping the Afghan security forces, like putting in technology for clean drinking water and teaching first aid to Afghan medics save lives.

Right, we have our propaganda, and they have theirs. Ours is less controlled and theirs is more effective. Of course, their propaganda only really is targeted at those people who are on the edge of being a terrorist, while ours is targeted at everyone. So when theirs is successful they get a fighter, but we don't really even know 'how' ours is succesful. I mean, we can recruit thousands of times more fighters from our population than they can from theirs, but thats not the end goal of our propaganda in the first place anyway.

I asked a Marine recruiter on my campus why the news was biased

Maybe a recruiter isn't the best source for unbiased information.