A meaningful controversy

As discussed in a previous post, Bill O'Reilly and the ladies of "The View" were involved in a bruhaha on air involving Muslims and the Ground Zero site proposed mosque.  Peter Wehner weighs in here with his thoughts with which I disagree here.  Wehner needs some serious historical background before sounding off on a subject about which he knows very little.  His critique of O'Reilly's analogy of the nation state of Japan and al-Qaeda is irrelevant and misguided.  He submits that O'Reilly's conflation of al-Qaeda with the Japanese war machine of WWII is wrong because Japan was a nation-state and al-Qaeda is simply an unaffiliated extremist element of Islam,  a peaceful mainstream religion with 1.5 billion congregants.  Is Wehner seriously suggesting that the unelected dictatorial military junta that led the Japanese people over the cliff truly represented the nearly 80 million citizens of that country who had no idea why they were being conscripted into the military and sent by force abroad to subjugate and murder foreigners? History is replete with examples of fanatics who in the name of  nation states (and in the name of religions) lead masses of people to tragic ends: Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Stalin in Russia, Mao in China, Castro in Cuba, and let us not forget the Crusades and the Inquisition.  At one time Christianity was an intolerant and yes, murderous religion dominated by a cabal of fanatics until the Reformation eliminated Christianity's dark side.  O'Reilly is right to have made the claim that Muslims were responsible for 9/11, and not "extremist" or "extremist Muslims".  When followers of Muhammed and the religion of Islam (Muslims) expose, denounce and eliminate the intolerance and fanatical elements in their faith, the virulent evil threat to mankind we now know as al-Qeada will die out and Islam will then be a religion of peace, like Christianity. Until Islam experiences its reformation, it is merely a religion that breeds intolerance and mayhem. Only Muslims can reform their religion and until they do they are a threat to the rest of the world that has to be contained.  No one should forget that the only theocracies in the world today are Islamic states: Iran, Saudia Arabia, Indonesia.  These are nations in which the church (Islam) and state are one and the same, a description of a totalitarian regime in which the people have only the rights conferred by leaders (the Mullahs) and and live by a code (Sharia law) that has some unacceptable strictures, such as stoning. For Muslims to live peaceably with westerners in the West,  Islam must embrace the western concept of separation of church and state and reform some of the more unacceptable dictates in the Quran.  Mr. Wehner is naive.