But they're wrong here. What is actually happening in Islam is that a small, violent, fanatical, and very militant strain of it has been fantastically enriched by oil wealth and unleashed on an otherwise reasonably pacific community, in an autocratic culture with no real control over the ones with the weapons. It isn't as if "decent" Muslims haven't fought back, they have, most recently in Algeria and Egypt, and they've been slaughtered for their efforts. The militants are now enough of a problem to justify the state-level intervention that the United States has belatedly offered, and I would defend our Iraq policy on that account to any critic in the world.
For those who are convinced that they're all out to get us, I have two offerings - first, that it simply isn't true historically; for four centuries or so it hasn't been Moslem aggression that's killed millions, it's been Marxist, and to a lesser degree pagan and Hindu, and Shinto, and yes, Christian. The difference now is that the bad boys have money, guns, and a zest for using both. The second thing I'd like to point out is that yes, the Koran does call for the forcible conversion of the infidel - unless the infidel is of the "Peoples of the Book" - i.e. Jewish or Christian, which religions share the founding documents claimed by Islam as well. This point means, and it has been pointed out by Muslim critics braver than I, that bin Laden and the Wahhabis and the Ayatollahs who have said specifically that there are no innocent, are in fact heretics and blasphemers. It is truly worth one's life to say it, but it's true.
All of this is caught up in a worldwide purging of the foulness and poisons that have accumulated during the Cold War - the ethnic hatreds suppressed by state force, the bipolar stability now shattered, the hatred for the winners by the losers and for the rich by the poor. If we can keep our heads through all this and not simply kill anyone that threatens we just might pull the world through all this. If not, nighttime, and I'm not joking.