Well, let's examine the history to see where we are today...
In the lead up to World War 1, the various ethnicities within the Austro-Hungarian Empire (and Eastern Europe in general) all wanted autonomy or independence. All of them had a fairly obvious region for a new state to spring up except the Jewish people in the empire. The question of a Jewish homeland arose in the context of European nationalism at that time, and the concept of a Jewish state in Israel/Palestine became popular because it was logical based on history and it appealed to religious fervor. Even many Christians were enthusiastic about the idea because they believed the Jews needed to return to Israel to bring about the End Times and the Second Coming of Christ.
With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the war, most of the former ethnic minorities got their own state. The Ottoman Empire had also collapsed and been reshaped by France and Britain. The area of Israel/Palestine was under British control, and the Brits promised both the Palestinians and Jews a state there. European Jews had been immigrating to the area for a while, but under British control the immigration increased massively. Obviously, a huge part of the reason was the European anti-Semitism that met its fullest expression in the Holocaust.
The Palestinian Arabs had developed their own national consciencious through their struggles for independence with the Ottomans and British. (Some people try to downplay their distinctions from other Arabs, but if we follow that logic it's hard not to say that Ukrainians are just a kind of Russian). Their society was changing rapidly due to massive immigration of people with a Western lifestyle, and the Palestinians were afraid of losing control of their homeland to the newcomers. One of the major differences of course was religion. Conflict tends to bring those kind of differences to the forefront, and the Palestinians who felt like things were slipping away became more receptive to the extremist interpretations of Islam that were being pushed by the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia. The Wahhabi House of Saud had been given control of Arabia for helping to take down the Ottomans.
When the Palestinians were unhappy with the partition plan that created Israel, they fought back with the help of other Arab nations and were crushed. The entire Middle East knew it was under the thumb of the West, and so for a lot of people, appealing to Allah began to seem like the only way out. Wahabbism, extremist Shiism in Iran, etc. all became powerful forces in that environment, and the West's game (including the Russians) of arming various groups and playing them off against each other has only served to make an already bad situation worse. Propping up brutal dictators in order to get favorable oil deals has also been influential in turning public perception in the Middle East against the West.
So you may be saying, ok, I knew all that, but why is it important?
The Right insists that the only way to deal with the problem is to call it what it is: Islamic terrorism, radical Islam, extremist Islam, etc. And all of those terms do describe groups like ISIS and al Qaeda. They're right in that regard. But WHY do they insist on using those labels?
The reason is that the Right wants to put the problems with radical Islam today in the same context as historical struggles between the Islamic world and the Christian West from the Middle Ages. In other words, they let the terrorists dictate how we view the context. This allows them to completely dismiss our missteps, continue the same failed policies, and play off people's fears to paint the enemy as the big, bad Islamic bogeyman who has always been trying to get us. End Times theology and other Christian beliefs about God's relationship with the Jews also play a role in how a lot of Christians feel about the situation in the Middle East and what course we should take. And since we only see that THEY attacked US and we don't think they're ever going to stop, why shouldn't Israel just build another settlement in the West Bank? Why should we trust Muslims at all?
Solutions don't come from two sides trying to move to the extremes. Of course we don't want to find common ground with terrorists, but we need to find a way to truly develop a better relationship with the Islamic world and support liberalizing forces in the region. I hope we don't really need the end of the world to make the region stable.
