Muslim people, like Christians are (often) fine, it's 'Islam' that's the problem. The decency and other virtues that people like to ascribe to their religion is in fact a function of their humanity. Religions, especially unreconstructed, or only partly and patchily reconstucted ones like Islam serve mainly as excuses for justifying the otherwise unjustifiable. What could be argued about simply in terms of its impact of other human beings suddenly has the unquantifiable and mercenary element of 'what God wants' added to it. Unfortunately a scary number of them think that God wants them to kill in his name. I am interested in tolerating only religions where the vast majority of adherents have got past this stage, and I am unconvinced that this has occurred with Islam. Do you remember the Salman Rushdie affair? I was in Britain at the time, and I remember watching talk-shows in disbelief as well-off educated western Muslims calmly argued that his death was entirely justified because his book had insulted Islam. If these people didn't know any better (and were arrogantly prepared to spit in the face of a society that had tolerated them and allowed them to prosper) then we cannot be very sanguine about other Muslims in other parts of the world - unless of course they act according to their underlying human decency rather than from their religion.