"The fact that "scores of civilians" protested, is a surprise. Perhaps like within the WTS, the Rank and File Muslim is getting sick to death of the f*cked up self-imposed hardliners trying to rule every single aspect of their lives and they're starting to fight back."
Does it not seem likely to you that this has been going on in the Islamic world for years? The WTS only contains six million people with virtually no recourse to dissent, which severely limits their ability to counter the control tactics used by a very small, central governing organ. The Islamic world constitutes over a billion people with no central governing organ, even if one could realistically be used to quash all the patterns of discourse and dissent that must exist in such a large group, and with multiple widely debated formalized sets of beliefs. I think it very likely that the rank and file Muslim is extremely weary of having his/her religion hijacked by fundamentalist hardliners, and has been for years.
But the key difference, I think, is in the informal mechanisms used by religious hardliners to impose control over Islamic societies. There are precepts in Islam for peace, tolerance, progressive thought, equality, democracy, and many other moral and philosophical tenets necessary to open societies - but they compete with traditional concepts of family, honour, government, and moral behaviour that predate Islam and have blended with it (and other cultural influences) to yield oppressive, theocratic, totalitarian societies. The question is how much more it will take before the more progressive social tendencies in the Islamic world begin to really counter the tribalism and despotism that run amok there. With all the "help" from the bullets and bombs manufactured in America, I tend to think... not very soon.