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no, the most important factor in my cultural war is couched in religious terms, but it is not, in fact, religion. First off, none of Mohammed's words actually survived him, as he was illiterate. The Koran was written down from remembered speechs and talks he gave, as well as private conversations between himself and his followers, including his several wives. The Hadith, the laws developed from them are likewise constructs of others memories. Many of them, including practically everything every one of his wives said about the subject, have been dropped from the Koran and Hadith in the past thousand years or so. Anyone who tried to cling to those parts was killed as a heretic.

There are a number of "moderate" Muslim groups who do not divide the world into the Dar-al-Islam (House of Peace), and the Dar-al-Harb (House of War). The House of War refers to places where Muslims are a repressed minority, properly speaking, unless you're an Islamofacist (my favorite term for the seriously militant types.)We need to support those, and, especially, encourage them to support us. Funny thing, the Shia are some of the ones whose traditions would seem to make them most likely to be on our side; it hasn't worked out that way, though. The moderate Sunni are most likely to be our friends; The Turks, the Kurds, the Moroccans. The Wahhabi are most assuredly not, and neither are many of the Egyptians. Even the Saudi's don't know what they are, except that most of them are Wahhabi. So although it looks like religion, it is really culture. The nearest Christian equivelent would be Roman Catholics and Albigensians.

Finish the thought, fool!

Roman Catholics and Albigensians are both Christians, at least from outside the two churches at the time. The Roman Catholic church exterminated the Albigensians because their beliefs were "heresy" to the Roman Catholics, "Catholic" meaning "Universal." Martin Luther almost got the same treatment a few years later, despite the fact that he was a Roman Catholic priest. This is cultural, not religious. These folks broke cultural rules, and some thought that they had to be punished because their culture demanded it. Nothing in the Bible does, unless you have a really uncharitable interpretation. Some Muslims are that way with the Koran and Hadith, and those are fair game, as far as I'm concerned. Anyone who wants to leave me alone to tend to my own business is fine by me, whatever his religion. Anyone who wants to force me to do anything I don't want to do, religious or otherwise, is the enemy. My church, and many others, believe that we are supposed to tell others what we believe, along the lines of telling your neighbor when his house is on fire, but we're not going to force him to dump water over his roof if he doesn't see the smoke and flames.