What I find frightening, Jack, is that some of the examples you point to seem to say that the killings were bad! But....
kidnappings are okay?!!

Mohammed Mahdi Akef, leader of Egypt's largest Islamic group, the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, said in general, kidnappings may be justified, but killings are not. He said the school siege did not fit the Islamic concept of jihad, or holy war.

"What happened yesterday is not jihad because our Islam obligates us to respect the souls of human beings; it is not about taking them away," Akef told The Associated Press.

To me, until these people denounce jihad altogether and agree to live like civilized human beings who don't kidnap, terrorize, threaten, treat women as belongings or enslave other people, etc., I will not entertain any notion that Islam is a 'religion of peace'.

I find frightening many of the same things that you do. What tempers me from saying "Islam is evil" is that I saw people who were nominally Christian in the South think that lynching people because of their skin color was perfectly acceptable and even to be encouraged. They used Christian religious arguments to justify their actions. Looking a bit farther back in the past, the Christian Holy Bible was used to justify black slavery in the United States. An entire population of millions was brutalized over two centuries by a people who called themselves Christian. This does not mean Christianity is evil.

Is there a difference in terms of the actions taken? Yes, there is, although more people died in slavery and more children were separated forcibly from their families in the United States during the period of slavery than have been killed by Wahabist nihilists even now.

I work with a large number of muslims, and in my discussions with these people, they do not subscribe to what the mullahs in the Middle East or the radical clerics living in non-Arab countries preach, and they are equally horrified at the acts perpetrated supposedly in the name of Islam. Should they be speaking out against these acts? Yes, but this is not the first time people should be speaking out and do not. History is littered with instances where people were condemned to death or other horrors because of the silence of others. It is also far easier to condemn others for not speaking out than it is to speak out yourself. Look at a recent post by Boudicia (I may have mis-spelled it, sorry) where she described a tirade by an alcoholic in Florida towards his wife because he couldn't buy beer. Should someone have spoken out in her defense? Depending on the situation, probably. Did someone do so? Not likely. Again, a matter of degree, but it illustrates my point. Unless we speak out against evil in our own lives, who are we to condemn others for not speaking out?

Fundamentally, my point is that Islam is no more a monolith than Christianity. If we condemn all of Islam based on the actions of a minority, then we should condemn Christianity for many actions taken by the church in the past 2000 years, for actions even more recent that used Christianity as a justification, and even for some of the events of World War II, where the church was found to have assisted Nazi Germany in their "Final Solution".

I prefer to condemn Wahabism, which is why I have a link to John's post on "Wahabism delenda est" prominently displayed on my blog. Wahabism is not all of Islam, just as the radical denominations of Christianity that insist that a wife "submit to and obey her husband in all matters" and force the women to wear dresses, not allowing them to wear slacks, are not all of Christianity. Wahabism is evil. Islam is not evil, and saying Islam is evil diffuses our effort at defeating those who are evil.