Can muslims not be religious fanatics or what do you mean? Sorry if I missed something obvious with your comment.

I think that he is implying they are "muslim fanatics" not "religious fanatics".

This is an important distinction if you are religious but want to pretend to yourself extremism only happens with muslims.

Right. Or if you're non-religious but also not a communist.

More importantly, the condemnation of "extremism" misses the point. No one's worried about Catholic monks. Yet they're some of the most extreme religious extremists around. Buddhist monks even more so.

Why speak like a politician when you're not one?

I believe he's asking that we not tar all religious people with this brush. But, then, exactly the same argument applies to muslims in general.

He means it was "islamic fanaticism", so it's islams fault, and those other types are not fanatics...

On the other hand the Sintoist Japanese did horrible attrocities in China and Korea back in the day, Israeli Jews can also be genocidal against Palestinians etc. And Christianity has had its share of crime, starting with the Crusades.

Budhists might be better, dunno.

The difference with Islam is that the Koran advocates for violent persecution of non-muslims and that is something that the founder, Mohammed, took a great part in including murdering people [in battle and after when they refused to convert] and taking their wives as his possessions. It seems to me that if you choose to identify as a follower of Mohammed you can't uphold him as a paragon and oppose violence, those positions are contrary.

Sikhism has violent elements in it's historical fundamentals too, from what I've read. But they have appear to me to have been 'editted' out to some extent (cf history of the kirpan).

Whilst Shintoist Japanese were involved in horrible atrocities Shintoism, at least Confucian Shintoism, historically was quite anti-war.

Simply being an adherent of a particular way or faith or religion and performing violence doesn't make that 'way' a violent one. There is a great difference between this and the foundation and fundamental teachings including violence.

>It seems to me that if you choose to identify as a follower of Mohammed you can't uphold him as a paragon and oppose violence, those positions are contrary.

Well, being contradictory is nothing that ever stopped people (religious or not). For example Jesus was all about piece, yet horrible attrocities have been done in his name by people saying their were for Jesus ideals (e.g. the Spanish Inquisition, the genocide of Latin American indians, etc).

You can use the New Testament and Jesus own words/actions to criticise the [Spanish] Inquisition whilst you can't do the same with non-abrogated ayahs or by demonstrating the contrast with Mohammed's model of life.

There's documentary evidence, via Wikipedia, to support 1250 being sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition over a 200 year period. The monarchy in Spain established that Inquisition: the people were tried for things like witchcraft but also child rape, bestiality and such which are still consider serious crimes today - though seldom is capital punishment legally applied for those crimes now. Interestingly none of the motives mentioned in the Wiki' article is "spreading Christianity": indeed IIRC the Inquisitions apply to those "baptised" in to the Catholic church [albeit baptisms were often under duress of being expelled from Spain it seems].

Whatever atrocities can be pegged on Christians I don't see how that stops the Koran and Mohammed from being supporters of violent persecution however.

Buddhists can be violent.

http://bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22356306

Yeah, after I wrote that it occured to me also that in the past the "poor opressed" buddhists of Tibet (with Dalai Lama as their spokesperson) actually ruled over the people there as dictatorial overlords, with slaves and everything...

Nope. Look at the behavior of the Tamil Tigers specifically, and generally the civil war in Sri Lanka.