AgentCooper - the reason why your heart breaks is because, like all of us, you recognise the basic disconnect between an individual, who can indeed be a 'nice person' and the hegemonic belief system that they subscribe to/are exposed to/are socilaised into. Quite clearly, humans are all the same - we feel emotions, we laugh, cry, love our children, enjoy food, feel jealousy. Somebody can indeed be a wonderful human being but subscribe to negative views. That does not make them "a bad person" - all it means that their culture permits or even encourages the expression of such views ('culture' defined here as family, peers groups, religion, current economic, political, historical time). If we stop trying to focus on individuals and instead focus our attentions on what we are allowed/encouraged to believe/which behaviours are permitted, then we might begin to understand how change can come about. The article I posted yesterday has, I think, the solution. It encourages Muslims to fragment their identities as Muslims, which, at the moment, are very tightly and almost impenetrably interwoven with Islam: It asks to uncouple Islam from a Muslim identity and begin playing around with other identities - that of being an atheist Muslim, an agnostic Muslim, a gay Muslim scientist, etc.. We do this routinely in our Western cultures - we can occupy several, sometimes what may seem as traditionally contradictory identities at once - a Christian gay scientist, and no-one bats an eyelid. I firmly believe that this will begin to happen with second and third onwards generations - once young people begin to experience the freedoms available here, will they really choose to turn their back on them? Can we draw parallels between the 'battle' between Eastern Bloc communism and free market democratic western societies? What did people want and which system emerged victorious?