I spent 5 years living as a minority white person in a majority Middle Eastern area (in a western country). My take on it is as follows:

Muslims in the west are literally like white Christians. Some are culturally Muslim but don't practise the faith. Others are strongly Muslim. Some are amazing people and some are bigoted. Among the religious ones you have the ones who use religion to do good and those who use it as an excuse to be bigots. It's the exact same I see in white people.

I would take my son, aged 3-4, into a really dodgy barber (this whole area is low socioeconomic). Drug dealers and unsavoury characters. My little blond-haired, blue-eyed son and me in a sea of black hair. And we would be treated exactly as what we were, a father taking his son for a haircut. They would give him a lollipop and call my daughter over to make sure she got one too.

For what I understand of Islam, there’s no final authority like the Catholic Pope. In Islam, authority is a matter of who has the most resources to make more followers.

Unfortunately the USA decided to bankroll the most reactionary sect, giving out the capacity to dominate the scene.

Imagine if Marcel Lefebvre had petro-dollars to back him...

Minor nit: there’s no final authority in Christianity either - the pope only matters to Catholics.

'Seventeen derivatives of jihād occur altogether forty-one times in eleven Meccan texts and thirty Medinan ones, with the following five meanings: striving because of religious belief (21), war (12), non-Muslim parents exerting pressure, that is, jihād, to make their children abandon Islam (2), solemn oaths (5), and physical strength (1).'[1]

So 29% of the evocations of jihad are about war.

Besides, there have been 20+ conflicts thought in the name of 'jihad' since 1980's [2].

I understand that you may have your own definition of what jihad is, but I guess not all muslims will think like you.

Besides, social care by islamic organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood [3] is used as a strategy to gain political power. Not only muslims do it, but when a political / religious group begins to substitute to the state, there is a strong susceptibility that the end goal is political rather than only altruistic.

[1]Al-Dawoody, Ahmed (2011). The Islamic Law of War: Justifications and Regulations. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 56. https://archive.org/details/islamiclawwarjus00alda [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jihad#Warfare_(Jihad_bil_Saif) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood_in_Egypt#So...