Muslims on an individual basis are the same as everyone anywhere. As a general rule, they show more devoutness than your typical North American or European. Other than that they are as good as, bad as, charitable as, aggressive as, peaceful as, individuals from any other group of people.
We are all children of the same Eve, after all.
The important thing to note is that Islam itself is not just a different version of Christianity or Judaism, or even Buddhism, for that matter. It is an inherently political religion, modeled after the political religions that ruled its world at its founding, namely Byzantine Orthodoxy, and Persian Zoroastrianism. It is an inherently supremacist religion, with its own political legal system, an authoritarian form of governance, and rights of "citizenship", including mode of taxation, based on submission to the tenets of the politico-religious authorities.
America itself is based in the belief that we are all individuals who make our own individual choices. This would include Muslims or course. This is the same for Canadians too by the way, and Europeans, and Japanese, and anyone who has opted into the values of citizenship rights based on the equality of all citizens.
The Western form of civil society by its very character and beliefs accepts the truth that Muslims too are individuals and ought to be treated as such. Recognizing the primacy of the individual means not discriminating on more superficial qualities not inherent to who the individual is such as creed or color or religion.
What is missing in the West today is the self-confidence to assert that to become a member of Western societies one must first affirm that basic values are shared by those who seek out to become citizens. To accept supramacist values that are contrary to individual rights, in the name of individual rights, is the kind of moral insanity that only cultures that lack any kind of self confidence or sense of self worth engage in.
Personal experience with Muslims teaches us that, like anyone else, they are individuals. As individuals, they are more than capable of rejecting the values of the theocratic Islamist societies that they come from and accepting the Western values of our own societies.
That can never happen however, to the extent that we are rejecting our own, either our of liberal guilt that typifies our dominant culture, or the self-righteous disdain that typifies the contempt for the libertine culture as expressed by the religious counter-culture of our post-christian world.
Decadence, after all, is not what our societies are uniquely about. Decadence is what all societies since the Fall. Rejection of western values on account of decadence will not change a thing.
Islam is fundamentally weak. It is an archaic system, no more suited to modern systems that would be Byzantine Orthodoxy, or Zoroastrian Persia, or the Papo-romanism of the medieval church.
These are all defunct systems of governance.
The only reason that Islamist would come to dominate the world again therefore, is if Western civilization stops believing in itself.
That has nothing to do with Muslims and who they are, and everything to do with who we are.
