I think it is also important to look at the big picture and see the patterns. As Christianity was destroying civilization and learning, Islam came out of the desert and kept education and civil behaviour alive. The Golden Age of Islam coincided with the Dark Ages of Christianity. The art, architecture, music, literature, and science that we know today bears the imprint of Islamic culture.
Today, the tables have turned and much of the Middle Eastern Islamic world has fallen into a dark age. The largest Islamic population in the world is in Indonesia and Malaysia, and the darkness and violence we see in the Middle East does not really relate to them. Thus, I am led to see that what we fear and loath in Islam may be regional and cultural issues as opposed to simply a matter of religion. From North Africa, across South Central Asia, and into Southern Asia, we see a distincly Persian mountain culture that has been adopted as part of the Shiia version of Islam. During the reign of the Ottoman empire, the Persian Shiia took Iraq and imposed their religion and culture there, and spread it over time through Wahabi missionaries and mercenaries west into Arabia, and East into Afghanistan and the part of India that later became Pakistan. The moderate Muslims of Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Lybia, and Morocco retained the moderate Sunni religion. As the Ottoman empire was being crushed at the end of WWI, and the European powers scrambbled to gobble up the pieces, chaos ensued. Quickly, the Europeans divested themselves of their portions of the Muslim world, and the result was total anarchy in many areas. Radicalism thrives on chaos and anarchy, so the Persian Shiia got their foothold areas where they were once forbidden. Today the real struggle is still between the Sunni and the alien Shiia. Shiia was created as a religion to wrap around the radical mountain Persians, And Sunni is the religion of the Arabs and the Turks.
Again and again, the Shiia have tried to redirect the animus of their Sunni enemies by trying to make it a war between Islam and the world... between Islam and Christianity.
