“We both wake up, get dressed, and say our morning prayers. The difference? I pick up a book and they pick up a machine gun.”

We were sitting at the gate for my flight back to NYC from Austin, TX after SXSW, sharing a plate of nachos, and discussing Islam, a conversation sparked by a BBC Breaking News Update about violence in the Middle East. My friend, a young female entrepreneur from Las Vegas who also happens to be Muslim, expressed her frustration that the small extremist minority of Muslims have become the ‘poster children’ of the faith for Western news outlets (Newsweek).

While we associate Mother Teresa with Catholicism, and The Dalai with Buddhism, Osama bin Laden is the face of Islam for many Americans. This sets a dangerous standard. Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and others are labeled as “safe” religions where extremism is the fault of the individuals, whereas Islam is innately dangerous and extremism is the eventual and unsurprising result of practicing it correctly.

A little bit of research shows this to not be the case. Religious wars and conflicts have been going on for thousands of years, starting basically at the birth of religion itself. Over the years, almost every religion has spent time as the instigator and the victim, a violent and bloody cycle. It is with the advent of modern media, that these conflicts have come to the forefront. Yet still, Muslim aggression is awarded headlines by news organizations in the U.S. while religious battles instigated by our unofficial founding religion, Christianity, and other non-Muslim initiated conflicts, are given significantly less coverage.

This may be because it is easier to focus on individual events by a single aggressor, such as terrorist attacks, than to breakdown the century old conflicts that are ongoing. In the Central African Republic, tens of thousands of Muslims have fled to neighboring countries to escape brutal attacks by Christian militias, but it would be unfair to leave out the fact that the Christian-majority led violence is just one part of a back-and-forth that has seen the Muslim-minority on top in the past (Washington Post).

Similar conflicts have long haunted the Muslim and Hindu communities in India, with peace rarely last long. The riots, resulting in thousands of deaths and injuries each year, have created deep social rifts that often seem irreparable (New York Times). Displacement of tens of thousands of men, women, and children, is followed by disease and death, further deepening the resentment and discontent, a well of frustration that cannot be kept from overflowing into further violence for long.

This is not to say that the conflicts in the Middle East, especially those involving ISIS (BBC) are less important or problematic because practitioners of other religions are doing similar things. Rather, the variety of conflicts across a wide range of religions should remind us that religion itself is only a tiny piece of what it going on here. There are far more pro-peace Muslims, my friend included, than there are those ready and willing to strap on a suicide vest. If the only similarity between the two groups is that they read the same book, we need to examine where we place the blame. Islam, like Christianity, Judaism, and I’m sure many others, is a very broad religion with many varied interpretations. This should come as no surprise as the Bible as been read by some to be a liberal text that is a general guide to life, and by others as a historical book of facts that bans, among other things, homosexuality and abortion. When I disagree with someone’s opinion, I am not disagreeing with the Bible itself, but rather their reading of it.

As we finished the plate of nachos and I lined up to board my plane, I couldn’t get the idea of two people waking up, getting dressed, reading the same book, but deriving such different meanings from it, out of my head. As we hear about ISIS-related violence in the news, remember to separate the extremists from all Muslims. If you don’t have a Muslim friend, consider the fact that some of America’s favorite celebrities and athletes, including Dave Chapelle, Shaquille O’Neal, Lupe Fiasco, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, are Muslim. These men, who are pillars of American pop-culture, are not extremists, are not condoning violence, and are not ‘bad’ Muslims for this. They are good Muslims and, more importantly, good and reasonable people who see Islam as a tool for personal improvement.

Some crazy people in the dessert should not and do not account for an entire religion. Strive to be tolerant, accepting, kind, and well informed, the very things that ISIS, and other religious extremist groups, are not. The ability to see the good in others will be our savior, and their downfall.

UPDATE 9/2/2014 1:25pm: Islamic State (also known as ISIS) has released a video purporting to show the beheading of Steven Sotloff, a US Journalist being held by the miliants. Sotloff disappeared from Syria in 2013. My condolences go our to Sotloff’s friends and family. It is more important than ever to remember that ISIS is not Islam.