Good read that. As it frequently slated the military tactics of the west, I was curious what it was going to recommend. Interesting that it thought that the current tactics were close to the right ones, whether that's by design or chance on the part of those planning it.
To try and address CT's mixed mental illness/infection analogy:
All religious texts were written by the standards of the time, and I think you'd struggle to find much in them which would have been considered genuinely progressive when written. As an admittedly sweeping statement, I don't think strict adherence to any religious text is compatible with modern society. So I don't think you can call Christianity and Islam different strains.
I think partly the perceived difference comes from media coverage.* There have been recent school shootings in the USA, and other atrocities in the western world, which if you wanted to you could describe the culprit as a radical Christian. That's rarely the media line though, it's mental illness, or nationalism, or a lone wolf. They're never identified as being part of a wider movement. If the Westboro Baptist Church do something, it's never simply described as radical Christians.
But with Islam, the boundaries aren't drawn. You don't see the media describing attacks as being from Salafi Jihadists (a description that fits Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda and ISIS), they're branded radical muslim groups, or similar. The whole spectrum of Islam gets tarred with the same brush. We don't ask the Church of England to condemn the Catholic church for their position on something, or stick a microphone under the nose of the nearest Vicar and get him to criticise Anders Brevik. But the distinction isn't made when it involves denominations of Islam.
To me, it seems like there is a simplistic view of Islam propagated by the media*, that all Muslims believe exactly the same things, and differ only on whether they're prepared to carry things out or not. It's like saying Christians all agree with stoning homosexuals but just don't want to get their hands dirty. By treating Islam in this way, it breeds distrust of the wider Muslim community, leading to a lack of integration that can create the environment in which radicalisation can occur.
And when it comes to radicalisation, I think the role of Saudi Arabia in funding the spread of wahhabism has been under-criticised. As a country they're positioned as an ally of the West, which seems to make politicians reluctant to apply pressure over this. But by pouring money into educating people around the world in their Wahhabi principals, they turn people to a religious creed which much more closely aligns with what ISIS believe than it agrees with the progressive western world. But for some reason this is allowed to happen.
*I'm not trying to suggest this is always done for nefarious reasons, it can simply boil down to using terms their audience are familiar with. The population of Europe and the USA are in general much more familiar with the different denominations of Christianity, so it's less awkward to use more precise terminology. I would imagine most mainstream news outlets in "the west" are also more keen not to annoy Christians, as they most likely form a sizeable chunk of their readership.
