Listen to this piece from NPR from about 45 seconds in, where they play a clip from the radio interview of Gingrich remarking on Obama and Islam. He uses the phrase, “consistently apologizing to Islam while attacking the Catholic church.”
There is a fundamental problem with the fact that in English we do not ordinarily differentiate between Islam the religion and Islam the civilization, as we can do in the case of “Christianity” and “Christendom”. The clip is significant because Gingrich did not say, “radical Islam,” “radical Muslims,” or even, “Muslims,” or other more specific designations.
Gingrich is not stupid. He relishes the equivocality of the word “Islam.” It gives him, and others like him, the cover to smear and attack people with the plausible deniability of saying (afterwards, if challenged) that he only meant radical Muslims, using the ambiguity of terms to pull this off.
Gingrich probably doesn’t have strong opinions about Islam as such, but he is playing to those who do.