Reply #15: Not really...

[Spider Jerusalem]

except that religion (generally in its extremist, fundamentalist form) is the one common characteristic found among a disparate population of radicalised anti-Western fighters who hail from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and so on. Most of these are Salafi or Wahhabi, some are Shi'a, but these aren't distinctions that most Westerners are going to make every time; they're all as much Muslims as a liberal Sufi mystic or a moderate Sunni imam, just as Pentecostals and Southern Baptists are as much Christians as Episcopalians or Catholics.

If they claim act in the name of god and religion, it is because they have been misled by men who have perverted their religion to their own ends, and declared it a sacred duty and obligation to kill in the name of god...but there's nothing especially new in this; look at the Crusades, or the Inquisition, or the Counter-Reformation, or the persecution of Catholics in Protestant Europe, or the persecution of Jews everywhere, for countless examples from Western history.

(And I for one don't have a negative image of Muslims; my best and oldest friend is a Sufi.)