Lol, you love making excuses for Muslims don't you.

Number of Jihadists currently fighting in the world: hundreds of thousands

How many terrorists of other religions are currently fighting? How many Christian terrorists do you think there are in the world right now? 8? 10?

Are they still fighting in Ireland and former Yugoslavia? Did some ISIS-like force emerge there and take power with guns, and started raping and pillaging everything they see? Shouldn't rest of the world have done anything about the atrocities of e.g. Serbia, and their leaders?

English and Scots also hated each other and fought for billions of years, as did Germany and France. Somehow they just progressed from that even though they are confined inside the same "arbitrary borders" in UK. In Spain Basques have started to behave themselves and have an autonomous community. In USA lots of different kinds of cultures are confined in the same country and sometimes Texas seemed to want to separate from the rest of USA, but still mostly peaceful there too.

Why in some parts of the world the neighbours hate each other so much? Something about their culture, or something in their water? Heck even in Finland the Russian minority is doing ok even though we fought them in WWII, and our Swedish minority (who used to be our ruthless leaders centuries ago, sending us to die and fight their wars) are actually a privileged minority (best income, best jobs etc.), and it is not like we have lots of problems with the Saami people in the north either, nor the autonomous Åland. Wow we are great, so many cultures living happily together inside the Finnish borders!

So using your earlier arguments, shouldn't rest of the world have fought Hitler, trying to oust him?

And what happened after Hitler, did some ISIS like force emerge in Germany that took power with guns and started raping and pillaging everything they see? Or did they progress to something else?

I guess you are right you can't force people to free, democratic and civilized, if they want to live in the dark ages under despotic leaders. I guess there really are differences in cultures around the world in that regard.

Hm. After World War 1 having riddled the country with debt and making it pay for all the bad stuff it did, there was a reaction and Hitler came about. Not the same as ISIS, but I'd wager the reason either force could come to power has a link to a destabilised region and poverty / lack of opportunities. Of course the two forces are so utterly different in nature that a comparison makes little sense - but I'd argue the reason a society breaks apart into chaos and reactionary violence also always has shared reasons. As above - happy people content with their lot and their opportunities don't become terrorists. Or fascists.

After World War 2 and a so far unrivalled cash injection into Europe (not just Germany!) through the Marshall Plan ring-fenced, in many cases, to local companies, something stable, lasting and peaceful grew.

How much of the damage done to Iraq, to Iran, to Syria, to Lebanon do you think will ever be fixed through financial support? (Understandably, given how debt ridden Western economies are, there's little appetite for that - but it'll have consequences) How much money that had been invested in these region actually reached the local population, and how much went to foreign contractors after Western contractors moved in? Most of anything these regions have gotten since all those wars started were more bombs, drone attacks and little else. And mind you - terrorism in the West is on far, far lower levels than what occurs in those regions. Much as Hitler at first was focused on his own country and the violence only later becoming global.

Yet, Germany and Japan turned out pretty well even though they were bombed to middle-ages and "forced" to democracy and a civilized way of live.

But then we have something like Osama bin Laden who definitely had nothing to worry about in his life (a son of a Saudi billionaire), and also in western countries even people with good jobs have just become terrorists (e.g. in the former London bombings).

I think it is a poor argument to "justify" terrorism with people's poverty. The people in rural Thailand, Cambodia, Laos etc. are also poor people with little good opportunities in their lives, yet they don't become crazed terrorists who want to kill everything with themselves.

Somehow I feel this relates to the culture and even religion in the said areas.

Only one part of Germany did quite well and that was the one that got much financial and economical support through the Marshall Plan. Also the allied forces stayed in control for the first four years after war and stayed in the country for additional fourty years.

Cambodia might not be a very good example given the fact that the Khmer Rouge only surrendered a few years ago and were responsible for up to 2 million dead people.

I've never read of a Quaker mass-shooting, or Mennonite, or Yazidi. Heck, when was the last Kemetic shooting? Buddhist? Have the Taoists ever gone around throwing grenades at people? I haven't had any Hindus threaten my life. The Jews seem pretty cool with me. So yeah, I can think of a fair few.

And what lead to WW2? Germany did not turn out too well after WW1, did it? What was the difference to the WW2 aftermath? The marshall plan.

Cambodia is the perfect example for a country bombed to shit and turned into hell. Laos for some reason didn't. Now that is a question you should have asked. Why did Cambodia turn into hell after the bombings but Laos did not?

You guys should have done what the European blue bloods did centuries ago.

Move to South America and become transplanted royalty. Breed with the locals and marry your sons off to the chieftain's daughters. Rinse and repeat that for 100 years or so... you'll own your very own continent.

I don't think it's too late for the ex-patriot method, it's just that real estate costs have gone up over the years.

Almost all of your quoted religions (and Wicca) have in common the fact that they are very small minorities, and being very small minorities, are not prone to splintering off into different ideological schools.

Buddhism is the exception - contrary to popular views that all Buddhists are peace-loving hippies with shaved heads and orange robes, they have some pretty nasty and violent bastards among them. In fact, in Myanmar, Muslims are regularly subjected to violence and oppression by the Buddhist majority.

And Judaism is far from being universally peaceful: Mair Kahane, Jewish Defense League and other ultraorthodox militancy, particularly in Israel, ring any bells?

It's not the religion that's the problem. It's supremacism, be it racial, religious or national, and the ideological schools that promote this kind of supremacism. Look at almost any race, religion or nation and you'll find movements of varying influence that seek to achieve their supremacy under the yoke of all others. I suspect the only reason that we haven't seen "atheist terrorism" is that atheism isn't widespread enough and hasn't existed as a mainstream school of thought long enough to develop militant tendencies, but we've seen in people like Richard Dawkins that it is not immune to it. How long will it take before we see atheist bombings of churches, mosques and synagogues and state-imposed bans on religion?

The relative poverty of many Islamic nations means that extremist schools of Islam have the opportunity to gain considerable influence. What we're witnessing is the rise of a movement that emphasises Islamic and Arab supremacism and utilises disenfranchisement to attract followers to its cause.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_violence
http://world.time.com/2013/06/20/extremist-buddhist-monks-fight-oppression-with-violence/

There's been heavy civil wars and incursions in all those countries. Not on a global level, but locally certainly. Most Islamic terrorism happens in Muslim regions and targets Muslims. The global part of it, that which targets Westerners is but the tip of an iceberg.

And I am not using 'poverty` to justify, but to explain.. I am arguing against the notion that it is down to some weird quality that people from that region possess or conversely a quality we don't possess - that is a much more irrational explanation. It's happened the world over and there are conditions that make things happen - the specific why and how is more complicated though.

Ossama had the West's financial backing when he was opposing the Russians. He didn't appear out of nowhere. Nearly none of our `monsters' did. Hitler had massive support by industrialists - even outside Germany - for a time. The Saudi Regime is where it is because we continue to supply them arms, buy their oil and generally look away and don't hold them to account for human right abuses. Erdogan, just now, is another case like that - where even if, yes, he's a local actor he's so useful to us we set aside our values. How people like these get to where they are is complex and involves a lot of gray morality - there's hardly ever a single cause. The power hungry people are always there. The ones ready to abuse power, too. That's sadly a feature of humanity. No part of the world is immune to that.

But what is clear is that extreme ideologies only can gather support among the population if they are in a (real or imagined) extreme situation of disadvantage and alienation. It doesn't even have to be materialist poverty. Those advocating an extreme ideology only can gather followers if people are desperate [*}. We know - there's evidence from the social sciences I can go back to, dig up and reference if I must - that the more equal a society is, and the more equity of opportunity it provides, the more stable it is.

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[*] Even here in the West those that "fight for our countries" are predominantly recruited from disadvantaged areas. This not to confer that soldiers are terrorists, but that people in desperate situations are more likely to be recruited to a cause that includes them employing deadly violence and potentially being killed themselves. If people are desperate they can be recruited for causes they otherwise would consider morally abhorrent. And again - I am not conflating soldiers with terrorists, but the reason why army recruiters target disadvantaged areas is precisely why radical ideologists recruit their terrorists predominantly from the disadvantaged.

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

It had become a real religion now since it grow in popularity
http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/

http://www.venganza.org/join/

It has not committed any violence yet, but like all religion, if it grow and and have a huge following, someone would corrupt it for the benefits of oneself.
Just like any major charity group or goverment.

Religion that does not breed violence does not grow into mainstream, hence hardly any motivation to corrupt it.

Germany & Japan were stable states with a pretty united, coherent population. Their conflict was only with the outside world. There were no inner conflicts between different religious or ethnic groups. That makes pacification a whole lot easier than in the middle east.
And the horrors of the total war waged in Germany in the last year or so were much greater then what we see today. Any potential inner-german insurgence would have had a really hard time to recruit members for more fighting. And of course there was also no outside support for (potential) rebels. No money and weapons from Saudi Arabia for people to fight against the Russians.
Unlike in the Middle East the whole world accepted the situation/power partition in Europe in 1945.

I don't think the comparison (Germany<=>Middle East) is very helpful.

they're falling one by one.. :-/
no color or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun... :'(

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FC1yYSrE4g

When i was a kid, there were a group of teenagers training dogs to attack others. They were beating those dogs so they would be more aggressive. One day, one of the dogs bite one of those kids face. That guy is now 45 years old, wandering about with half face butchered.