Once again the CIA and MI6 are publishing dire warnings of the vitality of Al Qaeda. Once again the Islamic world as a whole is being tarnished by association. US presidential contender John McCain is saying that America needs a leadership “to confront the transcendent challenge of our time: the threat of radical Islamic terrorism”.

Few, if any, in the Western leadership seem to make the point that Al Qaeda is a deviant phenomenon within the Islamic world, just as Hitler was a deviant phenomenon within the Christian world (commentators seem to overlook Hitler’s early speeches calling on Catholic principles). But Islam has a much better record over the ages of dealing with its deviants who take violence to excess.

Of course, there have been many incidents in the long history of Islam when there have been large-scale losses of life. The massacres and starvation of the Armenians in 1915 still stirs the waters of contemporary debate.

But Islam has never spawned anything comparable with Hitler’s systematic genocide of the Jews—indeed throughout its history Islam has been protective of the Jews, regarding them as “people of the book” to whom it had a special responsibility. Nor has it settled other parts of the world and systematically obliterated other civilisations as did Christian Spain with the Aztecs and Incas.

Nor have Islamic societies created anything equivalent to South Africa’s apartheid or the racist culture of the old American South. Unlike many Christian churches the mosque has never separated people by race. Even today Americans confess that nowhere is there more segregation in their society than at the Sunday noon hour.

Despite their relative poverty today, with great teaming cities like Cairo, Dhaka and Jakarta, criminal violence is much, much lower than in Christian-influenced societies. Muslim countries, according to the UN’s annual Human Development report, have the world’s lowest murder and rape rates.

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