Poll: is Islam a religion of peace or violence?

Long post but this is a topic that needs nuance and not knee-jerk emotional reactions.

The religion itself has violent passages. The followers, it depends, most religious people (not just Muslims) do cherry pick their religion, because their religion ends where their conscience begins.

When a terror attacks does happen, yes it does have something to do with Islam. It doesn't come from nowhere, there are parts of the religious text that support that. If we're also going to be 100% real, Muhammad was not a particularly good person by modern standards.

I think it's a marriage of religion and political power though. What Islam needs is secular reform like Christianity has had. There was a time when Christianity was doing gory public executions, blasphemy laws, witch hunts, conflict with other religions and what could be described as "terrorism".

So that does give me some hope Islam can change. However, it's going to need honesty and open criticism from a liberal/secular perspective. We don't need more attempts by pseudo-"liberals" at rescuing Islam and defending it from criticism, or attempts by the Western Right-wing at demonising an entire group of people when (at the core) they believe a lot of the same things in their own Christian/white identity politics, really. A good place to start is to give more platforms to the reformists (who do exist), the ex-Muslims and the liberal secular ones.