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xephrys - I think that you and I agree more than you realize. Beyond my point that there is no common "culture, lifestyle and morals" in the US, I agree that we're talking about a cultural problem, not a religious one. We're talking about cultures that allow this sort of thing, not the religion that serves as the excuse.
As for the largest amount of strife occurring in the Muslim world, I think you've been paying too much attention to the headlines. There are active wars and revolutions going on across Asia and Southern Africa that have nothing to do with Islam. The Maoist rebels in Nepal couldn't care less about burhkas. Neither could most of the sides in the Conglese wars.
There aren't many parts of the world that have spent an entire generation untouched by war. Germany is about to accomplish that, but they're the major power in Europe that will. The US has never done it, and the Middle East is no different.
As far as your claim that there's a higher incidence of "genocide, illiteracy, warlordism gender-related crimes and mistreatment and hate-related crimes against others of the same base religion" in Islamic countries, I think you're confusing politics and religion. When the Ottoman Empire was actually a world power, none of those things happened, at least on a mass level. They had a strong central government, and it worked well. If you look at the Middle East since the Ottoman collapse, you'll see scatterings of weak and weaker governments punctuated with the occassional military strongman. Then compare that to Eastern Asia, South America or even Western Europe and you'll see about the same incidence of these things during times of weakened government. If you really want to turn this into a debate of correlation of genocide, illiteracy and warlordism between the modern Middle East and Feudal Europe, I'm happy to go in that direction, because the data supporting my argument is there. I mean, we can talk about the 100 Year War, the War of the Roses, etc. which all had lots of Christian on Christian warfare goodness along with the occassional genocide (know many Hugonauts? Or Spanish Jews?). But that's a threadjack.
As far as the targeting of civilian populations as a part of warfare, where have you been for the past 70 years? The Allies firebombed Dresden. If we had lost, those responsible would have been convicted of war crimes (assuming the same standards were used). The US targeted Vietnamese civilians on a regular basis. The entire idea behind a nuclear deterent, which was the cornerstone of American defense and foreign policy from roughly 1952 to 1995 was the mutual destruction of both the US and Soviets, military and civilian. Our hands are no dirtier or cleaner than anyone else's. It just makes us all feel better to pretend otherwise.
All that said, I am back at where we started - religion has nothing to do with this argument. It's the culture that matters. Some cultures fear change - look at the news out of Russia in the past couple of days for a fantastic example of that - but that's an unwinnable proposition. All cultures have to adapt at some point or they'll choke themselves out. We're just now starting to see waves of permanent Islamic immigrants to the US. Assimilation is a given eventually, and we've seen it with every single other wave of immigrants that have ever hit our shores. All these arguments have been made for the past 160 years about the Irish, Italians, Indians (dot, not woo-woo obviously), Germans, Jews (both Polish and Russian), Greeks, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, French, Sicilians, Mexicans or whatever else.
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