Jeez, some people here are really clueless about Islam. Minaret a sign of Islamic power? Muslims wanting to rule the world under one religion? Christians and Jewish people are infidels?
All these are as plausible as an Islamic person believing that the Jew Bear from the movie "Inglorious Basterds" eats Nazis and Palestinians for breakfast.
One of the major points I have learned from studying Islam is that they supremely teach that all religions (Judaism and Christianity) that worship the "one" god (iconoclastic religion) are brothers. The conflict between Christians and Muslims and Jews and Muslims aren't even that old and were started over disputes of land. (I don't know about you guys but I would be pretty pissed if Ontario was suddenly renamed in 1948 to Israel and became a new country).
Also, the infidels in the main book of Islam do not refer to Christians/Jewish people/non believers but in fact they refer to the people they were hunted down by from Mecha. These were "infidels" that believed in over 300 gods of stone, clay and man made material. They had many battles with them during the early years of Islam due to little choice of the matter.
The main problem that causes so much confusion amongst the religion is that people who KNOW the religion know that it is a very peaceful religion and has ideals higher than others (I've never read anything in a bible saying how you should treat other religions correct me if I am wrong). The people who misinterpret this book are people who can't read it or people who have higher agendas and use it to further their goals.
Imagine if today the bible was written in latin and on top of that when you translated it to English it would be word jumbled around a lot.
Although, one thing that is very different over there than over here is that here in the west we rank Country over Religion. But in the middle east countries could go to war over the simple fact of sect.
One of the odd things I found about the whole Israeli wars is that Egypt + other middle eastern countries wanted to reunite Palestine as a country again. The US was against this and thus supported Israel since it's birth in billions of dollars.
But this situation just happened again recently with Georgia trying to reunite with South Ossetia and the U.S. supported their mission to reunite their country after it had been broken up.
Confusing no?