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If terrorism is so "alien" to Islam, why is there so much of it? Islam may reform itself from the inside, but not before their more militant elements, Wahhabism and the fundamentalist Shi'a sects, have their ears pinned back for them. No doubt, there are some very good and devout Muslims. There are also many Muslims who believe in the sanctity of the religious life, separate from the secular life, but apply those principles every day to the way they conduct their personal affairs. Belief in representative government, and the administration of just law, is entirely compatible with a deep personal devotion to Allah.

But ducking behind a supposed faith as an excuse for murdering and enslaving those who are different from yourself, cannot be tolerated in any world where the ideal of peace is held to be a goal. There are many way to achieve an absence of war, but only a very few may truly be called "peace". America has its own pockets of unrelenting intolerance, but these are regularly exposed, and reduced, in an ongoing effort to prepare for our own more nearly just society. We should ask no less of our Muslim neighbors.

Well the problem you see is, when an Islamonazi blows up a group of diners at a pizzaria, or flies a plane into a building full of civilians, thats not defined as terrorism by many muslims. It falls under their religious definition of defence of Islam if they feel that the Dar al Saalam is under attack ( the house of the believers ).

" It depends on what your definition of the word is, is."
W.J.B. Clinton

You make a really great point - on the other hand it raises questions about the last 1460 years of Western and Central European history.

Those people were all Christian. They couldn't make it through a full decade without war or totalitarian (terroristic) regimes somewhere in the area in that whole period. In the end one group decided to dispose of the entirity of the Jews, and almost did so!

It's only now after 50+ years of a benign American Occupation that they've been able to tone it down.

Then there were the Mongol Invasions (roughly 600s to 1400s), and whether they were Buddhist, Moslem or Christian, they were equally brutal and rapacious!

Islamic civilization has been, on the whole, at least as peaceful as that of Western and Central Europe.