There are many Muslims like me who hate the extremism in some of our communities. We are that majority and it would be easy for non-Muslims who are seeking ways to deal with extremism to team up with us and manage the problem. However, we end up frustrated arguing and defending ourselves from Westerners who, without an ounce of actual knowledge about Islam, keep telling us that Islam is evil and that ISIS is practicing true Islam. Hard to blame the average person who is mostly a victim of brainwashing and propaganda that is American news and entertainment.
Religion is not the problem. People who believe anything strongly enough are routinely manipulated to commit acts that are unjust and evil. Nazism, Communism or even Americanism.
Just look at the last 100 years. Were WWI and WWII fought over religion? Why did the Americans kill upwards of 1 million Vietnamese? People will fight over anything they believe in strongly and if it isn't religion it will be something else. European soccer fan(atic)s have been known to kill each other over a soccer match. I was actually caught in a riot in Vancouver, Canada once when the local hockey team lost in the finals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Stanley_Cup_riot
People resort to mindless violence for anything they believe strongly in whether it is their religion, country or favorite sports team. People are willing to kill those whose beliefs are different then their own. It doesn't matter if the beliefs are political or religious. Communism in the USSR was the first large scale experiment in a godless society and was not only a complete failure but ended up causing an almost unbelievable amount of misery and number of deaths in a very short period of time.
Certainly, it is true that the history of man drips with blood. Sometimes that blood was spilled in the name of honor or revenge or supposed wrongs or the search for food or even the search for world domination but often the blood of man was shed in the name of the Creator. Religion, which is supposed to teach man to be civilized, has been used as an excuse for all sorts of violence. It would be wrong to suggest that religion itself is the cause. Those who perpetuate brutality in the name of religion are either anti-religious or people whose religion is corrupt.
In the Quran we have the following conversation between God and the angels when God informs them about mankind:
"And when the Lord said to the angels, 'I am about to place a viceroy in the earth', they said, 'Will Thou place therein such as will cause disorder and bloodshed? - and we glorify Thee with Thy praise and extol thy Holiness.' God answered, 'I know what you know not.'" [Quran 2:30]
