Finally the analogy made by some with the Christians of Middle Ages (Obama included) is dishonest and fails to take in account the intrinsic capacities of Christianity and islam to reform in non trivial ways.
Wait. How do those analogies "fail to take this into account" as opposed to "base the entire premise of their argument on that very point"?
There's nobody who practices religion who doesn't cherry-pick the shit out of it in order to have it conform to whatever paradigms they decide they like. Middle-class Muslim bankers in Toronto have zero differences with middle-class Christian bankers in Toronto because they both have the ability to ignore whatever aspects of their religion they find inconvenient and reinterpret other parts into ways that end up having their religion become the basis of whatever ethical guidelines they decided were nice beforehand.
Christians don't have to quit their job if a woman gets hired as their manager, despite the clear conflict with very straightforward Biblical passages not allowing this because God meant that "in context". Muslims can have cake at an office birthday party during Ramadan because "Allah allows exemptions for special occasions" (seriously, that was the actual rationale). There are zero rules for religions that can't be relaxed or ignored if the people practicing the religion decide they don't like them. There is nothing special about Islam which makes it any different than any other religion in that regard.
It is, of course, the worst religion by a large margin that's around today. That's because of the current interpretations of the religion, though, not because of anything inherent in the religion.
