Had to post this as relevant here, from an article (US-centric) by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2015 - www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-06-16/problem-heaven). I've pasted in the relevant parts below:
We have a problem—not a problem from hell, but one that claims to come from heaven. That problem is sometimes called radical, or fundamentalist, Islam, and the self-styled Islamic State is just its latest iteration. But no one really understands it. In the summer of 2014, Major General Michael Nagata, the commander of U.S. special operations forces in the Middle East, admitted as much when talking about the Islamic State, or ISIS. “We do not understand the movement,” he said. “And until we do, we are not going to defeat it.” Although Nagata’s words are striking for their candor, there is nothing new about the state of affairs they describe. For years, U.S. policymakers have failed to grasp the nature of the threat posed by militant Islam and have almost entirely failed to mount an effective counteroffensive against it on the battlefield that matters most: the battlefield of ideas.
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In the war of ideas, words matter. Last September, U.S. President Barack Obama insisted that the Islamic State “is not Islamic,” and later that month, he told the UN General Assembly that “Islam teaches peace.” In November, Obama condemned the beheading of the American aid worker Peter Kassig as “evil” but refused to use the term “radical Islam” to describe the ideology of his killers. The phrase is no longer heard in White House press briefings. The approved term is “violent extremism.”
The decision not to call violence committed in the name of Islam by its true name—jihad—is a strange one. It would be as if Western leaders during the Cold War had gone around calling communism an ideology of peace or condemning the Baader Meinhof Gang, a West German militant group, for not being true Marxists. It is time to drop the euphemisms and verbal contortions. A battle for the future of Islam is taking place between reformers and reactionaries, and its outcome matters. The United States needs to start helping the right side win.
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Yet this line of reasoning fails to understand the crucial link between those who preach jihad and those who then carry it out. It also fails to understand that at a pivotal moment, the United States has opted out of a debate about Islam’s future.
THE FAILURE
American policymakers have made two main arguments for avoiding the subject of Islam, one strategic, the other domestic. The first holds that the United States must not jeopardize its interests in the Middle East and other majority-Muslim parts of the world by casting aspersions on Islam. The second contends that the country must not upset the delicate balance in Western democracies between Muslim minorities and non-Muslim majorities by offending Muslims or encouraging so-called Islamophobes. Yet it is becoming harder and harder to sustain these arguments, since U.S. interests in the Middle East are in increasing jeopardy and since the domestic threat of militant Islam is far greater than the threat of a much-exaggerated Islamophobia.
The United States cannot wish away the escalating violence by jihadist groups or the evidence that substantial proportions of many Muslim populations support at least some of their goals (such as the imposition of sharia and punishing apostates and those who insult Islam with death). The Middle East and North Africa grow more violent by the day. A substantial part of Syria and Iraq has fallen to the Islamic State. Yemen has collapsed into anarchy. Islamists have set up bases in Libya. The militant Islamist group Boko Haram is causing grave instability in northern Nigeria, as well as in neighboring Niger and Cameroon.
The nonstrategy, in short, has failed. Indeed, the official U.S. position collapses when the United States’ own Middle Eastern allies begin openly referring to Islamic extremism as a “cancer” (in the words of the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the United States) and calling for a “revolution” in mainstream Islamic religious thinking (as Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has). As for the home front, an estimated 3,400 Westerners, many of them young men and women with promising futures, have voluntarily chosen to leave behind the West’s freedoms and prosperity in order to join the Islamic State. More British Muslims have volunteered for the Islamic State than for the British military. The United States is not in this dire state, but the direction of travel is troubling. Already, more than 50 young American Muslims have tried to join the Islamic State, and around half of them have succeeded. It is time to change course.
THE OPPORTUNITY
The first step is to recognize that the Muslim world is in the early stages of a religious reformation. To understand its nature, it is important to distinguish between the three different groups of Muslims in the world today. The first consists of Muslims who see the forcible imposition of sharia as their religious duty. The second group—the clear majority throughout the Muslim world—consists of Muslims who are loyal to the core creed and worship devoutly but are not inclined to practice or preach violence.
The third group consists of Muslim dissidents. A few, including myself, have been forced by experience to conclude that we cannot continue to be believers, yet we remain deeply engaged in the debate about Islam’s future. But the majority of dissidents are reformist believers, among them clerics who have come to realize that their religion must change if its followers are not to be condemned to an interminable cycle of political violence.
Yet there are two fundamental obstacles to a reform of Islam. The first is that those who advocate it, even in the mildest terms, are threatened with death as heretics or apostates. The second is that the majority of otherwise peaceful and law-abiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrants for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts