Every time there is a terrorist attack by a Middle-Easterner - regardless of their backstory, any other factors that could attribute to radicalisation, or failings in our own security, there is a massive group of people who start blaming Islam.
I think we should be allowed to criticise religions, and it is my personal belief that the world would be a better place without any religion, or if all religions became lifestyle choices and non-political. But that is realistically not going to happen, so we have to work with the situation we are in.
But the line has been crossed. All of the disrespectful people on here and many other places hide behind the shield of 'freedom to criticise religion'. But constantly attributing Islam, and incriminating all Muslims with the actions of a tiny amount is not criticising a religion - that is hating the religion.
Hating the religion causes more problems, it alienates the malleable members of the community, which segregates them and essentially makes them more likely to sympathise with radical ideas.
Islam does say barbaric things, but going around persecuting ordinary Muslims who have the common decency to follow Islam while respecting our own culture is a part of the problem. In New York, two innocent Muslims were killed and I have seen disgusting people on this website telling me they deserve it.
We are genuinely going to be in a stage about 30 years from now where radical religious attacks are extremely common, and not because of Islam being extreme, its because people are too hateful to realise that the terrorists clearly and deliberately manipulate what Islam says to justify their own actions, and the remaining 1.6 billion decent Muslims ignore it.
I've been to the heart of Muslim communities where the children probably haven't even seen westerners before, and the adults hadn't left their country, and they are friendlier than the average white person in the UK, they offer food and hospitality and they did not run out with a meat cleaver trying to behead some of the controversially-dressed girls in my group of people. They are good people, and they don't deserve to suffer at the hands of both terrorists who don't care about the average Muslim, or the average racist and disrespectful moron who is too hateful to incriminate the people actually responsible for their problems.
Please, stop stirring up religious hatred every time there is a terrorist attack. You are not criticising the religion by instantly incriminating Islam with any Middle-Easterner doing an attack - you are plainly hating on it, these people don't just 'snap' and turn into killers because they want to defend Islam, they do it because something ****ty has happened in their lives and they want to harm as many people as possible, and they find comfort in radical / extremist Islam because it legitimises their hateful feelings.