People professing certain branches of Christianity have certainly perpetrated what would today be considered heinous acts of infamy. Sometimes these people were Popes and Kings and Queens. No Popes and Kings and Queens of the recent past would dream of thinking or doing these things in the current era.

Islam is a much younger religion than Christianity. Islam has not gone through a Reformation or Enlightenment period.

As people, Muslims are NO DIFFERENT from us or anyone. As an institution, Islam is in a different time zone, psychology, and acting off a different game plan than the rest of the West (and most of the East).

This would come to a head at some time, and in our case it is the twin drives of the need to relate economically with the Muslim world over oil, and the technological changes wrought to the world making it impossible for Muslims to escape being bombarded by media pleasant, unpleasant, and downright obscene. They are being dragged into modernity kicking and screaming, and on one level, who can blame them? On another level, we are seeing a relation of belief to superstition and the use of religion as a power device that we ourselves are not totally free from.