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Even if what you say is true, and I'm not sure that it is, all progress seems to have ground to a halt when Islam spread throughout their lands. Even your own examples of Arab invention mostly date from before Mohammed. Islam is unapologetically and aggressively anti-intellectual. When Islam forces another culture to submit, it exploits what intellectual resources are there and attributes them as its own, but it cannot invent something new. A Western invention is to build the World Trade Center and invent flight and build Boeing 767's. This is something the Arabs wouldn't have thought to do. The Arab innovation was to smash one into the other thereby destroying both; this is something Westerners would not have thought to do, so in that sense I suppose it is inventive. You can say that the Arabs have contributed mightily to civilization, and that may be true. But who cares if they invented Alegbra a millenium ago? What have they done for me lately? Are they part of the march of progress now? Drugs to help patients with AIDS? A less invasive means of heart surgery? Hydrogen fuel cell? A space program? Laser vision correction? Honestly, can you name one bit of astounding life-affirming innovation along these lines that has come out of the Arab world in the last century? The suicide bomb belt, the shoe bomb, the tampon bomb, the hijack, the synchronized hijack, these are their most influential recent contributions to the store of human knowledge.

The extremists in any religion are a minority(its not muslims blowing up Oklahoma or abortion clinics/killing doctors).............

Ahh, the moral equivalency argument. "The West has terrorists, and so does the Arab world, so one's no better than the other." Although the point you are making is a bit like saying, "The kamikaze was a small minority of extremists in Japanese society," as if the appearance of the kamikaze had nothing to say about the larger society in which he appeared.

Yes, the extremist who actually commits the violence, who straps himself with semtex wrapped with ball bearings soaked in rat poison and walks into a Sbarros and expodes, yes I will grant that he's a small minority of the Arab population. But then the town where this minority extremist was born goes and names a street after him. The Arab university builds an art installation to celebrate his "achievement." None of the American homegrown incidents you cite were: A) Cheered by people in the street (polls consistently show at least a majority of Palestinians approve of suicide bombing) or B) Were state supported. There is no "Tim McVeigh Avenue" or "James Kopp Street" anywhere in the US. Terrorism is sponsored by the elites and romanticised by large percentages of everday people in Arab society and the terrorists occupy a place of honor in the popular imagination; this is true in Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iraq, "Palestine", etc. And I hate to get into the numbers, but 17 abortionists have been killed from 1970 to today, about on average than 1 per every 2 years, making it a pretty rare event in a country of 300,000,000 people. The Oklahoma City boming was sui generis, nothing like it has happened before or since. It would be absurd to claim that the US most influential contribution to the world's arts and sciences of late has been Federal Building and abortion clinic bombing. But it would not be a stretch to claim that the Arab countries current top exports are oil, madrassas, judenhass, WMD, mayhem, and murder. And excuses; let's not forget that. They also have a tremendous productive capacity for lame excuses. Would that they would return to their glory days of innovation and civilization that you so extol.