As someone who has been a critical observer of Islam and its spread to Europe, I suppose I'll bring in my contribution to this thread.
First of all, let's get our definitions straight. When we talk about Islam, we are not talking about a race or an ethnic group. Perhaps less obvious, we are also not talking about the people who adhere to the religion of Islam. We are talking about the religion itself and its core dogmas. This is an important distinction. When criticizing the dogmas spelt out in the islamic holy texts, the Koran and the Hadith, we are not engaging in criticism of all Muslims. Instead, we are criticizing an ideology; an ideology, which at its core contains a plethora of beliefs about the world which are incompatible with Western values.
The main message of the Koran and the Hadith, as witnessed by literally hundreds of verses, is to kill, convert, or enslave the infidel. Martyrdom is viewed as an honorific deed. Antisemitism is openly promoted. Women are treated as second class citizens (at best), and are denied many basic rights. Homosexuality is condemned, as are blasphemy and apostacy. The punishment for such "crimes" is death, usually by means of stoning. Further, the Koran contains many scientific falsehoods, like mankind not being a product of evolution. It should be quite clear that such an ideology, whether religious or not, should not be taken seriously in the 21st century, and its promotion in our society should be repudiated.
An objection may be (and has been in this thread) that the core dogmas of the Christian and Jewish faith are no less obscene by the standards of our modern society. And that is evidently true. Criticizing Islam does not mean that other religions get a free pass, and where the bible stands in contrast to science and modern-day ethics it should be criticized just as much. However, there is a crucial difference. Christianity has undergone a much longer process of colliding repeatedly with modernity. Most notably, the enlightenment has tamed much of the dangerous nonsense we find in the bible. Its hideous moral teachings, such as killing people for imaginary crimes (like witchcraft or working on the sabath), the degrading of women, or the concept of hell, have had to give way to secular moral progress and a better understanding of the world around us. There are still plenty of inauspicious Christian views virulent in Europe, but in its whole Christianity has been mastered by secularism and a modern understanding of ethics. Islam, on the other hand, has not undergone such a process to this extent. Hence its teachings are much more pure and unscathed by modernity.
Of course not all Muslims take the Koran literally. If they did, we'd be facing problems of scope and scale a thousandfold bigger than the ones at present. But it cannot be ignored that many Muslims do take their scripture, or at least large parts of it, seriously. We are not talking about 10,000s of extremist terrorists - hundreds of millions Muslims over the globe have convictions we find at least problematic. It is no coincedence that in many European countries we are facing problems caused by the religious beliefs of Muslims. When British Muslims were asked whether the Danish cartoonist who caricatured the prophet Muhammad should be thrown in prison, 78% said he should have been. That's a huge problem.
If we are to defend our Western values, which were so hard fought for over the last centuries, such as tolerance, equality of the sexes, or freedom of speech, we must relentlessly oppose such dogmas which threaten to undermine these values. It is the great irony of our time that this necessary fight for such values is often displayed as being an act of intolerance, especially in the liberal press. Usually, those who rigorously criticize Islam in public are currently either our own crack-pot religious extremists or adherents to their own diversive and often nationalistic dogmas, who, for obvious reasons, do not make good allies. We must overcome this detrimental form of political correctness if we want to prevail in our struggle for ongoing human progress.
