I disagree. I would point out that Muslims aren’t always the violent exclusionist. In Kosovo, the Muslims were the tolerant and peaceful people whereas the culturally christian Serbs were the mass murderers. The major differences was the degrees of education, trade and experience with other cultures. At different points in history the tolerance of Muslims for non-Muslims exceeded the tolerance of Christians for non-Christians.

The major problem with Islam is that most of the Islamic world today is stuck in the Medieval ages. They have the same lack of separation between the secular and religious as did medieval Christianity. You will find parallels for every bad thing in modern day Islam in pre-Enlightement Christianity. Remember, it wasn’t until the 1600s that people began to speak of “Europe” instead of “Christendom” just like modern Muslims divide the world into dar-el-Islam and dar-el-Harb. Many Christian religious authorities claimed that Christians didn’t have to keep their word if given to non-Christians, that certain weapons and tactics could be used against non-Christians but not Christians, that Christians had a religious obligation to wage war against infidels etc. They even had religious figures serving as temporal leaders and raising armies. The brutality of the wars of Reformation alone should put paid to the idea that something innate in Christianity keeps Christians from committing atrocities in the name of God.

We can only imagine what Christianity would be like today if the early flowering of trade, science and exploration of early Islam had led the Islamic world to invent science and capitalism and leave “Christendom” in the dust the same way we did Islam. Would all the Christians still stuck in the medieval world view be as open, tolerant and peaceful as the more knowledgable Islamic world? I seriously doubt it.

I, for one, would not like to share planet with 15th Century Christianity.

The Western world had to claw it way up from the brutality, ignorance and dogmatism of medieval Christianity and we had centuries to do it in. The Islamic world had to accomplish the same transition in mere decades.

That is not to say we will not have destroy Muslims that can’t learn to adapt to the modern world. However, it does mean we can’t condemn an entire culture group as irredeemable and incapable of living in the modern world. We don’t want to contemplate the kind of actions that such a view of Islam would force on us.