If Muslims find distaste for the words of their prophet, then they can't be Muslims, that maxim being the very words of their prophet.
They must convert, enslave or kill infidels or they are infidels themselves. "Interpretations" are just a mealymouthed way to say they don't have the courage to keep the commandments of their god.
My opinion. It won't change until the entire middle east Islam apologizes to Salmond Rusdie.
All words must be interpreted.
But the Koran is not even plain words. In the Sura entitled The Cow one reads:
[2.62] Surely those who believe, and those who are Jews, and the Christians, and the Sabians, whoever believes in Allah and the Last day and does good, they shall have their reward from their Lord, and there is no fear for them, nor shall they grieve.
while in the Sura entitled The Dinner Table one finds
[5.72] Certainly they disbelieve who say: Surely Allah, He is the Messiah, son of Marium; and the Messiah said: O Children of Israel! serve Allah, my Lord and your Lord. Surely whoever associates (others) with Allah, then Allah has forbidden to him the garden, and his abode is the fire; and there shall be no helpers for the unjust.
Thus Christians according to one sura will be rewarded, have nothing to fear and shall not grieve, while according to another they are forbidden to the garden of Allah and have their abode in fire.
The Hanbali school resolves this by condemning Christians, since the sura in which their false prophet pronounces us condemned occurs later in the Koran.
The Koran, like every religion's sacred text is full of contradictions when read at face value. Every religion has developed traditions for resolving these ambiguities--even Christian fundamentalists who call themselves 'Biblical Christians' drink more deeply from the traditions of the Church than they are willing to admit. There are passages of the Old Testament which could be used by a literal-minded Israeli to justify genocide against the Palestinians (=Philistines, the newer name being a Latinate corruption of the older), but they are not so interpreted.
Islam has a long tradition of moderating the violent passages of the Koran and Hadiths: the Moguls decided to accord Hindus the status of dhimmis, even though they are plainly polytheists. The Sultans, who were the Caliphs of the Sunnis in their day, did not as the neo-jihadists now do, consider Christians and Jews as unbelievers to be killed out of hand, but accorded them the second-class citizen status of dhimmis.
The current war is a result of this tradition waning, and the infusion into Islam of ideas from Western philosophy--the redefinition of 'martyrdom' to include not just death in battle against non-Muslims but self-destruction in the pursuit of the death of non-Muslims arose first in the thought of Sayeed Qutb, who adopted the existentialist notion of 'absolute commitment' and applied it to Islam.
This is a reversal of what had been a trend, to regard the injunctions to slay unbelievers as injunctions to slay unbelief in oneself, to turn jihad into an inner spiritual warfare. And in this reversal, I see the hand of the Evil One: for if jihad as spiritual warfare only had grown as the dominant thought, in the end, the Muslims could have been evangelized by the tradition in which inner spiritual warfare is most fully developed--Eastern Christianity. As it is, they are being driven deeper into the darkness their false prophet wrought.