I think few would disagree that religious scriptures can be used as a pretense or &quot;justification&quot; for violence, but I believe your comment cited the content of the Quran as the &quot;root cause&quot; of Muslim violence.<p>Given that people are always motivated by their beliefs, isn&#x27;t the reason that Muslims hold their beliefs the &quot;root cause&quot; of Muslim violence? You seem to argue that the reason is simply that violence is promoted by the Quran. But this begs the question of why they believe the violent parts of the Quran, while other religious groups ignore similar passages in their own holy texts.<p>I think those who disagree with you would claim that many Muslims hold to a fundamentalist interpretation of their scriptures for historical reasons unrelated to the text itself, Western misadventures in the Near East among them.