A few responses to your points about Islam and terrorism:

You write:

I suggest you study the TRUE history of Islam to see where jihadist ideas come from, and how they’ve been in action for the past 1400 years. Does the West have a role to play? Absolutely. But it is nowhere near the primary cause of imperialist jihad. Imperialist jihad has been around for a long, long time, and its foundations can be located in the religious texts of Islam.

An analogy from recent current events comes to mind here. With regard to Charlottesville, it’s the neo-Nazis and KKK, etc. who are ultimately responsible for their own hateful ideologies, but at the same time, we can recognize that the regressive left’s obsession with identity politics in recent years has alienated and radicalized people who would not otherwise have become white identity extremists. We can recognize that aggressive identity politics is a horrible strategy for the left to pursue if what we want is racial harmony and fewer people joining the ranks of the neo-Nazis. So, now, let’s turn to the issue of Islamic extremism. Just like neo-Nazis, Islamic extremists are ultimately responsible for their own hateful ideology and for their own actions, but at the same time, we can recognize that the West’s (particularly, America’s) tireless intervention in and aggression against Muslim societies is radicalizing people and causing them to join the Islamic extremist circus. If your parents, your children or your neighbors were killed by American bombs, you’re going to be left with lots of hatred in your heart. If your democratically elected government has been overthrown and your country is being run by an unpopular American-installed puppet (e.g., the Shah in Iran back in the day), you’re going to become a perfect target for extremist would-be-theocrats, like the Ayatollah Khomeini. This is just common sense. Just as our non-stop cultural attack upon these poor white people in Red States is going to anger and radicalize them, our non-stop political and military attack against Muslims is going to anger and radicalize them.

You are also incorrect in attempting to blame Islam itself for the problem. It’s muddle-headed over-reach like that which results in making an entire religion the enemy and fighting a Holy War that feeds right into the jihadists’ hands, winning them converts by the thousands, because the more we say that Islam is the enemy, the more ordinary non-extremist Muslims are going to be tempted to join up in their own Holy War against us. I’ve read the Qu’ran, and I’ve read the Old and New Testaments from cover to cover, and the Qu’ran certainly has many passages calling for violence and jihad against infidels and apostates. But the Old and New Testaments are also chock-full of passages we would find violent, crazy and barbaric, judged by our current sensibilities. The important question is less the passages themselves and more how those passages are interpreted by actual practitioners of these faiths. Today, very few Jews and Christians interpret many of the more violent and extreme passages literally. We had the Reformation. But before the Reformation, we had the Crusades, our own analogue to Muslim jihad. Islam has also undergone its own transformation, and unfortunately, the transformation has gone in the opposite direction, where the literalist and hard-line Salafi/Wahhabi branches of Islam have proliferated en masse in the last two centuries. Note, however, that these are branches of Sunni Islam, which is why none of the terrorists within the past few decades (since the 1980s) have been Shiites. Though Trump keeps calling Iran a state sponsor of terrorism, it’s actually Sunni Saudi Arabia, not Shiite Iran, which is promoting and funding terrorism throughout the world. Same religion, and same holy book, but different interpretations, you see. Such things matter.

What this means to me is that we need to fight not Islam itself (which is a strategy that will just create more extremists and terrorists), but rather, the propensity of people to radicalize and embrace extremist and literalist interpretations of the Qu’ran. We need to stop financially and militarily supporting Saudi Arabia and, instead, incentivize that nation to stop spreading extremism throughout the Muslim world. We need to stop fighting dumb Middle Eastern wars. We need to end our uncritical support for Israel, which leads Muslim to believe we’re invariably against them (this has nothing to do with any anti-Semitism on my part, and it’s just about the nation of Israel, not Jewish people, but I don’t get and no one’s explained to me exactly what actual strategic political or military interest we have in pouring tons of money into Israel). And then we need to take much better care of our own borders and reform our immigration policy to prevent the kinds of disasters here that have happened in Germany, England, France and Belgium.

This brings me to this point of yours:

The idea that only poor, stupid people become radical jihadists is a total myth. In fact, a frighteningly large number of jihadists come from well educated and affluent backgrounds. You really need to re-examine your views on this.

First of all, that’s a controversial view, and you can find evidence supporting the connection between poverty and terrorism. But second and more importantly, the real point I’m making about admitting people who are skilled and educated and have employment lined up is that the main thing we want to avoid is what they have in Europe: big Muslim ghettos. The key to preventing terrorism is assimilation. Here is an article making this point succinctly. For example, Iranian immigrants driven to the U.S. by the Islamic Revolution have come here and disproportionately become wealthy, successful and well-integrated, so much so that they are one of the success stories discussed by Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld in their book The Triple Package, that deals with the qualities that make certain ethnic groups systematically more successful than others. These are the kinds of immigrants we want, whether from Muslim societies or elsewhere, and we want to absorb these people slowly enough that they have time to assimilate into American culture and norms because we don’t want veiled women walking around on our streets or arguing about whether they get to have their driver’s license photos taken with their hijabs and niqabs on. If you want to live like that, you belong elsewhere. So I agree with you about the need to be very careful with Muslim immigration because we don’t want to admit people into the U.S. whom we tolerate but who won’t return the favor. But there’s a difference between being careful and being stupid and antagonizing a whole religion, which will make the very problem we’re trying to address much worse.