[Steve_Seattle]

"And Islam is indeed not the problem -- Muslims are the problem. How do you propose to change their minds?"

The problem is the confrontation between Islam and modernity, which creates an enormous psychological conflict in the minds of some Muslims, particularly younger men who are disaffected from society through lack of education and upward mobility (no, I am not blaming Islamic terrorism on poverty). For a young Muslim male who feels alienated and emasculated, there is the image of the holy warrior Mohammed to fall back on and emulate. Religious violence thus becomes his chosen route to manhood and salvation.

So I see this as a psychological problem that needs to be exposed and defused; we will not do that by calling Islam "a religion of peace," but by somehow undermining and emasculating the psychic appeal of the "holy warrior," by making that image seem spurious and unmanly in some way. We must psychologically move the Muslim male away from the ideal of holy war and towards something like chivalry, i.e., an appeal to manhood based on care for and relationship with women and concern for the disadvantaged. Muslim men must be shown another way to be male. To some extent, the Sufis have done this.

[Chaguito]

We must psychologically move the Muslim male away from the ideal of holy war and towards something like chivalry...

Who is "we"? Will infidels change 1200 years of tradition and doctrine, for instance attitudes toward women and a society that disagrees with them? 1200 years of doctrine that conquest is mandated by Allah? The Sufis are exceptions that prove the rule - tolerated by Muslims, but never a mainstream concept in the mind of Islam.

All of this analyzing the psychological conflict within the muslim male mind is similar to the analyzing of the German nationalist mind before WWII. They were cheated of Lebensraum, and conceded that territory, their lust for conquest would go away.

It won't.