Richard Dawkins tweets:
They shouted “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30710883 … Some useful idiot will claim it had nothing to do with religion.
And,
No, all religions are NOT equally violent. Some have never been violent, some gave it up centuries ago. One religion conspicuously didn’t.
I find Dawkins' opinions irrefutable, as irrefutable as the historical thesis that the American Civil War was about slavery -- and not, more broadly, states' rights -- even though only a minority of Confederates owned slaves. Absent the superstructure of slavocracy's ideological religion, the vast carnage of that era would not have been possible, any more than ISIS's or al Qaeda's or the Taliban's carnage today. While only a minority of Islamists spill blood, a majority religious sympathy is often present throughout (see Pew), and that sympathy is indispensable to the violence's continuation.
To those who would inveigh against Dawkins's opinions, especially his second one, I would point out that even Vali Nasr, the Iranian-American Middle East scholar, has underscored the violence inherent in today's Islam. He does so from a historical point of view, in the sense that violence (or so he argues) is not yet a relic of Islam, as it is in Christianity. Christians had their fill of internecine carnage and the slaughter of heretics and religious foes centuries ago. Someday, Muslims will too, predicts Nasr.
I defy anyone to find religious bigotry in that. It's just objective analysis.