As a Middle Eastern, Islam is around me most of the time. Elements of it have blended into my culture, and a good amount of my family tree is composed of Muslims. Being used to it, I don't feel the need to be afraid of it. However, the growing terrorist attacks in the west has caused many people to be afraid. 

Curious, but what do you all think of islam? Any general thoughts, ideas, or experiences with it?

This is not going to end well.

Just another religion abused by deranged idiots to justify murder.

It's like christianity without bacon.

This is exactly what it is, and blaming all Muslims / any individual race or religion is what the terrorists want. They want to tear society up and the best way to do that is to make us turn on each other.

a few crazies make all of them look bad.

It needs its reformation/enlightenment period, not unlike Christianity went through, long ago. And it needs to start accepting Liberal principles (capital L, not "liberal", like today's politics). Principles such as women's rights, freedom of religion, no death penalties for thought crimes, etc. and accept that there are other people in this world that don't follow Islam, so stop trying to spread Islam to......everywhere. Example.

As much as people like to point out "moderate Muslims" who are "peaceful", or say things like "there are 1.6 billion Muslims. If Islam was really about violence, we'd all be dead", they conveniently leave out some very chilling statistics:

Link to data, for the lazy: http://www.pewforum.org/files/2013/04/worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-full-report.pdf

I honestly don't know too much about it. When I was at uni, I went to a few seminars where they talked about different concepts within Islam (like the role of women in the religion), but, honestly, I just attended for the free pizza.

I have many friends who are Muslim, but none of them follow it strictly. They believe in their god and whatnot, but they didn't pray regularly, would drink alcohol, ate during the day during Ramadan, etc. I think this attitude is quite common of second and third generation Muslims in the UK - particularly in the middle class.

As for Islamic extremism, I hold two beliefs that are usually held by people on opposite sides of the argument:

1) You cannot say ISIS is not Islam, or that these people are not Muslim. You cannot say "no true Muslim will not do x, y, or z" when people who are Muslim do those things, and many other Muslims agree with those actions. This falls into the "No true Scotsman" fallacy.

Scottish person 1 - "No true Scotsman will put sugar on their porridge"
Scottish person 2 - "But I do"
Scottish person 1 - "Yes, but you are not a TRUE Scotsman".

2) Muslim people do not have any moral obligation to condemn Islamic Terrorism. This is something I see all the time from the "right" on this issue. Whenever there's a terrorist attack, there's an outpour of commenters on Breitbart and the like decrying all Muslims for not condemning these actions.

No sane person expects me to condemn the actions of a person because they're atheist, or straight, or white, or male. Just because somebody shares some characteristic with me, doesn't mean I have any moral connection to them.

When a white guy makes it rich, I don't get a piece of that. So I don't share their problems, either. It's the same with Muslims.

Don't let a few rotten apples to blame on the rest. As a proud Muslim I have respect for all other religions. And Muhammah SM is last prophet followed my Isa SM (others call him Jesus), is my prophet.

Me personally i dislike most religions and i rather be without them. islam im very bias against. Im not that fond of muslims overall even though i can respect them and be friends with them. Im no expert in Islam. But my conclusions are final. Im kinda against Islam overall. Even though it teaches some good morals perhaps