All Religions Are Not Created Equal

Robert Spencer (Human Events Online) says what I wish I had said.

Are all religions equal in their capacity to inspire fanaticism and violence? In the wake of the Koran flushing scandal, Tom Regan of the Christian Science Monitor blog wrote a piece to that effect. Even though that scandal has faded from the headlines, the attitudes Regan expressed remain—and interfere with our ability to resist the global jihad. Taking issue with the assertion by Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe that “Christians, Jews, and Buddhists don’t lash out in homicidal rage when their religion is insulted” and “don’t call for holy war and riot in the streets,” Regan wrote that Jacoby had made “an interesting point. There’s only one problem with it—it’s wrong.”

“Unfortunately,” declared Regan, “even a cursury [sic] scan of the headlines from the past few years, or even this past week, shows how wrong it is. Shall we talk about the religious leaders in Israel who have threatened violence and riots, and perhaps worse, to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his supporters, if he goes ahead with his disengagement plan?”

Did Ariel Sharon flush a Torah? Of course not. These people are angered because they think his plan threatens Israel’s survival, not because they think Sharon has insulted Judaism.

Regan goes on to mention the “Jewish religious zealot, who believed in 1995 that there was ‘a religious commandment’ to kill Yitzhak Rabin,” the “whole decades-long situation in Northern Ireland,” the “Christian militias who murdered hundreds of people in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982,” and “Serbian Christians who murdered 20,000 Muslims in 1995.” Not one example, in other words, of Jews or Christians murdering innocents because they believed their religion had been insulted.

Read the whole column and check out these links:

Mr. Spencer is director of Jihad Watch and author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery -- a HUMAN EVENTS sister company) and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter); and editor of The Myth of Islamic Tolerance (Prometheus).