Do you think Muslims will dominate the world again like they used before?

[Pat Mustard]

As Sam Harris has pointed out, if the number of dangerous radicalized followers of Islam is only 1% of the whole, that would still be around 15,000,000 people.

They may have numbers, but if you watched what happened when radicalized Muslims tried to take violent action against non-Muslim nations (aka September 11), the end result was heavily against them.  We pretty much overthrew the government they had in Afghanistan because of that attack and their leadership are pretty much gone.  I don't see them being an especially big threat, in all honesty.  I think the only real worry is fanatics picking us to death, piece by piece, with small scale attacks; the kind we really aren't paying too much attention to (but we'll pay a lot of attention to them when/if they hurt or even threaten wealthy or powerful people).  

In reality, I think a "takeover" by moderate Muslims is possible and it wouldn't be entirely a bad thing.  A stable democracy, with freedom of religion and freedom of speech, with a largely secular government, valuing education (especially scientific and/or business education) over dogma, where the majority of the population just happens to be Muslim.... other than having difficulty finding bacon in grocery stores, I don't see how this would be all that different for me from what we have now.

The Taliban weren't pally with al-qaeda by Sept 11 (in fact neither group were ever that close, often fighting each other during the civil war after the soviet invasion. Al-qaeda were closely aligned with the warlords who lost power when the Taliban won, and who regained it after the US invasion). In fact they were in the process of shutting down training camps in the country and hunting bin-Laden for deportation, as a matter of fact the taliban's response to the Twin Tower attacks was to offer to capture bin Laden and deport him to either Turkey or Kazakhstan where the US could extradite him. The Shrub administration wanted a war to bolster their numbers.