Can't engage well with all this. Largely because I can seldom get into Mudcat at all at the times I'm free to try. However, this from Jim is, to me, the only honest way to see these things:

When are these morons going to come to terms with the fact that in the main, these are not religious conflicts, but disputes over territory and political power, and atrocities are not confined to one side - all wars take place with claims of "God on our side"

Nobody ever fought a war for God. Wars are never about something as trivial as that. It behoves us all to cast aside our favourite theories and tendentious notions and look for the real reasons wars are waged. Jim nails it here. The people who kidnapped those poor girls may well be hiding under some assumed, perverted definition of Islam, but they are, most decidedly, not Islamists. Nothing in Islam permits or would condone the atrocity they are committing. They are thugs, and let's not glorify them by calling them something else, especially when to do so would suit rather well our own political or religious predilections.