ISIS does not represent Islam no matter what anyone thinks.

[Act_of_Reparation]

8. You might consider rethinking some of that.

Maher and Harris were way off the mark in their position on Islam, but virtually everything you've said here is just plain... wrong.

The simple fact is many parts of the globe where Muslims are in the majority are not liberal democracies. Without civil rights, liberal democracies, and the rule of law of course religious extremism will exist and flourish. These governments pit these factions against each other to keep their governments up and running. If they had our sense of liberal democracies these religious extremists would not be allowed to get away with what they do in the ME.

Just think about it for a second: if liberal democracy "cures" religion of fundamentalist elements, why are there so many fundamentalists in our particular liberal democracy?

While it is true Muslims are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with their governments, the root of modern Sunni fundamentalism isn't a lack of liberal democracy. Jihaddi groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS, and the hardline Islamist clerics who are their ideological foundation, don't want liberal democracy. They see the concept of the modern nation/state as "Western" and inherently un-Islamic. Rather, they want a return to the Golden Age, to bring back the Caliphate.

To accomplish this end, they are actively working against the established governments in the Middle East, which they also view as being "Western" and corrupt. There is no divide-and-conquer going on here at all; if anything, ideologically-opposed opposition groups are working together against governments, like we saw in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia during the Arab Spring, not against each other as you seem to think they are.

And, let's not forget that while the Arab Spring was hailed as a great step forward toward liberal democracy in the Middle East, Tunisia was the only country that made even modest gains in that regard. In Libya, Islamists took power and implemented Sharia Law; now there is civil war. In Egypt, Islamists took power and tried to implement Sharia Law; now the military is in charge once again. In Yemen, Arab nationalists took power; 20% of the legislature is controlled by Islamists, and the Shia in the northwestern corner of the country are in open insurgency against the government. Civil war in Syria is still burning hot; while the overall war against Assad is failing, Islamists are leading the other opposition groups by a wide margin.

I think the "clash of cultures", combined with the hegemonic attitude America took towards foreign policy in the Cold War years, is a more likely explanation for the emergence of modern Islamist movements. Apart from Shia fundamentalism, which is a completely different beast than the Wahhabism we see in the Arab world, most of these movements can be traced back to Postwar Saudi Arabia, when Kings Abdulaziz and Saud opened the country up to Western oil companies. The influx of non-Muslims to the holiest of Islamic lands perturbed the Saudi clerics, who feared the corrupting influence of the foreigners. This was exacerbated by the longstanding relationship between the House of Saud and the Arabian clerics.

See, as a condition for their support in conquering the Peninsula in the 18th century, House Saud conceded control of all moral issues to the clerics. This means, in effect, there are not one, but two governments in Saudi Arabia, that for the past sixty or seventy years, have been moving in opposite directions. The royal family wants to modernize, the clerics want to regress. But, with the backing of the United States and other western allies, the royal family has been able to push modernization through regardless of the clerics' feelings on the matter. Feeling disabused of their former powers, the clerics have taken to hardline Islamism. Sunni terrorism, as a result, has taken up two very basic goals: scaring the west into breaking their alliances with House Saud, and the ultimate overthrow of the royal family in favor of... you guessed it, a Caliphate.

And, for the record, I think the same is true of our own religious fundamentalists here in the United States. I don't think they're fighting for greater representation in government, because they already have about as much as they can get. What they are fighting, however, is a culture they see to be moving away from the "pure" faith, and towards the "corrupting influence" of secularism.