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I know about a dozen Muslims, not one of them has the slightest desire to make me live under sharia law. It's an absurd and offensive allegation that Muslims generally want to do that, that the desire to impose this extends beyond an extreme fringe.
I'm not sure why Peter wants to caricature me as a hater of Western civilisation, whatever that means. I'm perfectly happy living in Australia and I appreciate the freedom and wealth we enjoy. What I am opposed to is his insistence that Islam itself, as a religion, poses a major threat to us and that Muslim Australians are a part of that threat.
Peter's belief that extremist Islam derives from the creed itself unacceptably ignores the historical context within which that extremism occurs. We are looking at societies that have been severely fractured by imperialism and Cold War rivalry. Nations that were arbitrarily created by imperial powers and were still distorted by imperial domination long after nominal independence. Iran and Saudi Arabia, both sources of 'extremism', and the nations Peter probably has in mind, are both the products of these forces. It was the US that chose to destroy Iran's nascent democracy and install it's handpicked patsy Shah thereby ensuring an inevitable reaction and revolution and the victory of the ugly theocrats we see in power today. The vicious determination of the Western powers (Western civilisation?), backed up by military and economic coercion, to thwart self-determination drove subjugated people towards increasingly extremist opposition.
In the case of Salafist ideology it has its centre and bulwark in the Saud family autocracy, largely created by Western powers and maintained to this day by the US, despite Salafism being the soil Al Qaeda grew from and the involvement of many Saudis in 9/11.
All of the major religions claim to believe in peace, and in most of their manifestations, they can all fairly claim to live that much of the time. When there is a turn to violence we ought to be looking at what is going on within their societies, what are the external forces working on them, what is their history, not grabbing bits of scripture and saying that's the reason. That's frankly farcical.