There's no question that the Muslim world is in turmoil. Lack of effective, stable democracy, refusal to adopt basic human rights and constant infighting has caused a disturbing number of Muslims to embrace radical interpretations of Islamic text. Whether or not a religious text can be considered "violent" is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is how the adherents of a religion act within the world. Relatively few Muslim countries have embraced secularism, transparency, free-market exchange, humanism, and many other sociocultural concepts that have led to an explosion in scientific knowledge, technology, medicine, and tolerance in the first world.

In fact, many Muslim countries still carry the death penalty for apostasy and homosexuality. Moreover, Saudi Arabia, the richest and most powerful Muslim majority country in the world, still beheads people for crimes such as witchcraft.

This is not to say that Muslims are inherently violent because of their religious beliefs, as many opponents of Islam argue. There is plenty of violent content in both the old and new testament, and holy texts throughout the world have been used to justify violence and war. But even the term "radical Islam" is considered taboo by many, as it can be used in an Islamophobic context. I consider the Christian crusaders of the second millennium to be radical Christians, so why shouldn't the jihadists of today be called radical Muslims?

Although many Muslim countries have yet to adopt humanistic values, several of them have become spectacularly rich in the last half century. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE are some of the richest Muslim countries, but they are also some of the most radical. Huge amounts of funding for salafists and radical Islamist militants come from these countries, and many wealthy donors and sponsors who live in war torn regions such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria either originate from wealthy Arab states or have ties to them.

Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Al-Nusra, Islamic State, Abu Sayyaf, Hamas and Boko Haram are all examples of radical Islamist militants and Jihadist organizations that regularly engage in guerrilla warfare, kidnappings, extortion, drug trading, slavery and attacks on civilian populations. All of them receive spectacularly large sums of money from wealthy Arab donors.

Shia Islamist groups, who are less prevalent in the world when compared to Sunni Islamists, are equally dangerous in many regards. They receive their funding and support from Iranian donors and from organizations such as Hezbollah.

There are currently 4.8 million Syrians who have fled Syria, but combined, the Arab states have accepted none of them into their countries. In addition, violence and chaos in the name of radical Islam reached an all time high only a year ago with the conquest of nearly 1/3 of northern Iraq and the subsequent Yazidi Genocide at the hands of the Islamic State, an organization that began as Al-Qaeda in Iraq, a radical Saudi-Islamist funded group which gained fame for its brutal terrorist activity during the US occupation of Iraq.

We can stop this. The world doesn't have to be this way. It will take generations to repair this problem, but it can be done. We have to cut our ties with the Arab states. The Saudi royal family and the kings and despots of other Arab countries walk, talk, and act like human beings, but they're far from it. They're animals.

As we speak, gay men and women are being thrown from rooftops, "apostates" are being brutally killed and heads are still rolling in the streets of Mecca. The Islamic world must embrace humanistic values in order to guarantee a reasonable and happy standard of living for citizens in that region.

We can't keep ignoring this or excusing it. If the Arab states don't accept these changes, and they definitely won't, we in the west must unite to peacefully introduce them. This doesn't just include basic human rights for homosexuals and others, it means totally restructuring the governments of these regions to allow for democracy and a rule of secular law.

Invasion and occupation has been a disastrous affair the last two times we tried, but other methods of coercion may prove fruitful. This means publicly denouncing the Arab states at the UN, imposing sanctions, halting Saudi exports and encouraging free speech and freedom of expression amongst the citizens of those countries.

Criticize western values and culture all you want, but those values gave you everything from the cell-phone in your pocket to the orbital platform 400 kilometers above your head. The west has seen an unprecedented period of civil liberty and equality, something that much of the world is starved of, and I think it's time for us to change that.