I was wrong about Islam
As a pedantic, Presbyterian Scot who has long delighted in the perceived superiority my education affords me over others, I’m more reluctant than most people to admit that I’m wrong. But for the last decade or so I’ve been a somewhat activist atheist. (I don’t like the word militant in this context as I’m not at war with anyone, I merely reject superstition). And while I maintain that its ideals remain fundamentally at odds with the civil liberties that characterize western culture, I think I might have been wrong, in at least one important respect, about Islam.

I am now more inclined to think of Islam’s problems in the context of political tensions, economic malaise and social strife rather than more intrinsic, fundamental ills. I have yet to hear @SamHarris refute the point that the most recent invasion of and subsequent occupation of Iraq was, in large part, a Christian crusade led by evangelical zealots like George W Bush, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld and Cheney and involving war-profiteering, Christian fundamentalist militants like Erik Prince, who openly believes his purpose is to wage a crusade. This undertaking in Mesopotamia has killed more innocent people than all conventionally-defined acts of terror in the last century.
While I routinely reject the false equivalency between WBC or KKK and ISIL, al shabbab and al qaeda on the grounds that you couldn’t fill center court at Wimbledon with the number of Christians who would have you killed for working on Sunday, depicting Jesus or leaving the faith, the notion that Islam is the sole religion of today responsible for promulgating violence is demonstrably false.

The difference, it seems to me, is branding: ISIL nominally exists to create a caliphate through the religiously emotive “jihad”, while western democracies are theoretically secular. Conversely, the name “Operation Iraqi Freedom” belies various insidious ulterior motives, all of which supersede the spreading of democracy as plausible motivations for the war. A thinly-veiled crusade foremost among them.
