I feel guilty sometimes because I feel because I'm muslim I am responsible for the bad acts of Muslims. Because a lot of muslims do sometimes bad stuff and justify them with Islam. Can I be a Muslim and not think or agree with them? I don't want to be seen as someone who's a fake Muslim because I don't agree on all bad acts and geo-polical issues that are done in the name of Islam.
That’s understandable. It is similar to how some Americans feel guilt at the actions of other Americans or the US government, even though they themselves do not have anything to do with those actions.
The majority of Muslims have rejected the beliefs and actions of those Muslims not because we are fake Muslims, but because to us religion is about doing what is right and just and kind. If a religion asks you to do something that goes against your conscience, that religion is not worth following.
We read the Quran with our intellect and conscience, we build a vision of a way of life, of a moral philosophy, that always pushes us to be the best possible humans we can be, that teaches us to aim for the highest good of humanity.
That is the religion that the majority of Muslim thinkers and intellectuals follow throughout the world. You don’t have to be a fake Muslim to believe this, this is the most authentic Islam we have, that the majority of the world follows, coming from an unbroken tradition that goes back over 1000 years. So if a tiny minority of extremists do barbaric things in the name of Islam, instead of feeling guilty about their actions, we consider them criminals, outsiders, nobodies who have nothing to do with our religion.
Islamic terrorists are in the majority of cases funded and trained by different governments and intelligence agencies for their own political purposes, as I explain in my essay Why Most Terrorists are Muslim: An Introduction to the Origins of Modern Islamic Terrorism. It is not we who are guilty. it is those who fund them and train them.