The very essence
There has recently been a lot of debate what exactly constitutes "True Islam". An old observation of The Danimal,
written years before the whole cartoon controversy, makes a rather
important point using an analogy to bars and alcohol. Most people are
able to enjoy their drink with moderation, just like most Muslims can
be good people, but there are structural weaknesses in the whole system
that guarantee that a certain subset of people will cause problems. As
The Danimal explains:
If all the customers only had one beer, the bar would not stay in business. So you've got a fallacy of composition there. The light drinkers are essentially freeloading on the heavy drinkers who keep the bar in business. If it wasn't for the heavy drinkers, there wouldn't be any bar for the light drinkers to enjoy.
Thus it's "quite possible" to enjoy a beer at the local without getting drunk and without being a drunk, but it's not possible for everyone to drink responsibly and have bars like the current ones to drink in.
It's also possible to be an honest lawyer, but the 97% of crooked lawyers give the honest 3% a bad name.
Similarly, it's possible to be a Muslim without being a terrorist, and a Catholic priest without being a pedophile.
But there are things about the structural reality of bars, the legal profession, Islam, and the Catholic priesthood which give rise repeatedly to those problematic behaviors, and which may, despite protestations to the contrary, be "essential" in the sense that if you made the changes necessary to completely stamp out the bad behaviors, the respective institutions would be so fundamentally altered as to have had their historic identity obliterated.
That is, if you found a way to make Islam unappealing to terrorists, the legal profession unappealing to lying crooks, the Catholic priesthood unappealing to gay pedophiles, and bars unappealing to drunks, you would basically have to destroy what each of those things is now.
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