There is, I would opine, a strong tendancy to have violence where the Islamic group is in the violence driver seat characterised in purely or predominantly "religious" and clash of civilisation terms. On the Xian side, that is when a predominately Xian group is in the driver's seat, at least for Africa, it becomes "tribal." That is no longer the "Religion" with a capital R driving the violence, but rather local particularities, "tribalism" (or better, ethnic conflict as most things called tribes in Africa are not tribes but language based linguistic groups, although tribalism as in actual tribes is also a problem, but at a more granular level).

Lest anyone think I am suggesting some grand conspiracy, let me disabuse them. And let me add that in focusing on this, I don't want to imply that journalism in the Islamic world is particularly better in this area, indeed the analytical sins are suprisingly similar if not perfectly identical. Rather, I want to go back to my little term "Fallacious Framing" and to the issue of familiarity to highlight how superifical knowledge or understanding tied to familiarity misframes - of course that doesn't exclude pure hypocritical mendacity on either side of the equation by those parties that actively want to pimp conflict for own purposes.

I would suggest the difference arises from several almost trivial, but important factors.

On the side of familiarity, your average western journo is at least passingly familar with Xianity, if not in fact quite familiar indeed. As such, they generally find it easy - perhaps too easy - to hive off local particularisms from overarching "theoretical Xianity." That is certanly not the case for Muslim groups, or Islam generally. I am constantly annoyed at seeing journos repeating what are clearly local tribal/ethnic/particular group practices/beliefs as "Islam" in its wide theoretical sense (and of course while it may seem precious to do so, and I would agree often false, I am a believer in one standard for like things, such that hiving off local particularism for Xianity should be applied also to others). Now, of course, there is also the issue of Muslim groups, radicals or otherwise, having a far stronger tendancy to use "universal" language to justify their local particularism, even if it's purely rubbish.

The importance of this is the degree to which inter-Muslim/Xian conflict that is in the end not at all Islam versus Xianity in reality, but "Those Bastard Neighbours Who I Want A Nice Reason to Kill" - but the mistake of packaging it up as universal tends to feed into the generally universal aspects of the tensions and conflict, to no one's good but those of the bloody minded.