Here Are the Facts to Prove It.

This is a slightly revised reprint of a post that
originally ran on Truthdig contributor Juan Cole’s
website.

Contrary to what is alleged by bigots like Bill
Maher, Muslims are not more violent than people
of other religions. Murder rates in most of the
Muslim world are very low compared to the
United States.

As for political violence, people of Christian
heritage in the twentieth century polished off tens
of millions of people in the two world wars and
colonial repression. This massive carnage did not
occur because European Christians are worse
than or different from other human beings, but
because they were the first to industrialize war
and pursue a national model. Sometimes it is
argued that they did not act in the name of
religion but of nationalism. But, really, how
naive. Religion and nationalism are closely
intertwined. The British monarch is the head of
the Church of England, and that still meant
something in the first half of the twentieth
century, at least. The Swedish church is a
national church. Spain? Was it really
unconnected to Catholicism? Did the Church and
Francisco Franco’s feelings toward it play no role
in the Civil War? And what’s sauce for the goose:
much Muslim violence is driven by forms of
modern nationalism, too.

I don’t figure that Muslims killed more than 2
million people or so in political violence in the
entire twentieth century, and that mainly in the
Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988 and the Soviet and post-
Soviet wars in Afghanistan, for which Europeans
bear some blame (the secular nationalist Young
Turks also committed genocide against the
Armenians during an invasion of eastern Anatolia
by Russia).

Compare that to the Christian European tally of,
oh, lets say 100 million (16 million in WW I, 60
million in WW II– though some of those were
attributable to Buddhists in Asia– and millions
more in colonial wars.)

Belgium– yes, the Belgium of strawberry beer and
quaint Gravensteen castle– conquered the Congo
and is estimated to have killed off half of its
inhabitants over time, some 8 million people at
least.

Or, between 1916-1930 Tsarist Russian and then
Soviet forces — facing the revolt of Central
Asians trying to throw off Christian (and then
Marxist), European rule — Russian forces killed an
estimated 1.5 million people. Two boys brought
up in or born in one of those territories
(Kyrgyzstan) just killed 4 people and wounded
others critically. That is horrible, but no one,
whether in Russia or in Europe or in North
America has the slightest idea that Central Asians
were mass-murdered during WW I and before and
after, and looted of much of their wealth. Russia
when it brutally conquered and ruled the
Caucasus and Central Asia was an Eastern
Orthodox, Christian empire (and seems to be
reemerging as one!).

Then, between half a million and a million
Algerians died in that country’s war of
independence from France, 1954-1962, at a time
when the population was only 11 million!
I could go on and on. Everywhere you dig in
European colonialism in Afro-Asia, there are
bodies. Lots of bodies.

Now that I think of it, maybe 100 million people
killed by people of European Christian heritage in
the twentieth century is an underestimate.

As for religious terrorism, that too is universal.
Admittedly, some groups deploy terrorism as a
tactic more at some times than others. Zionists
in British Mandate Palestine were active terrorists
in the 1940s, from a British point of view, and in
the period 1965-1980, the FBI considered the
Jewish Defense League among the most active
US terrorist groups. (Members at one point
plotted to assassinate Rep. Dareell Issa (R-CA)
because of his Lebanese heritage.) Now that
Jewish nationalsts are largely getting their way,
terrorism has declined among them. But it would
likely reemerge if they stopped getting their way.

In fact, one of the arguments Israeli politicians
give for allowing Israeli squatters to keep the
Palestinian land in the West Bank that they have
usurped is that attempting to move them back
out would produce violence. I.e., the settlers not
only actually terrorize the Palestinians, but they
form a terrorism threat for Israel proper (as the
late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin discovered).
Even more recently, it is difficult for me to see
much of a difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev
and Baruch Goldstein , perpetrator of the Hebron
massacre.

Or there was the cold-blooded bombing of the
Ajmer shrine in India by Bhavesh Patel and a
gang of Hindu nationalists. Chillingly, they were
disturbed when a second bomb they had set did
not go off, so that they did not wreak as much
havoc as they would have liked. Ajmer is an
ecumenical Sufi shrine also visited by Hindus, and
these bigots wanted to stop such open-minded
sharing of spiritual spaces because they hate
Muslims.

Buddhists have committed a lot of terrorism and
other violence as well. Many in the Zen orders in
Japan supported militarism in the first half of the
twentieth century, for which their leaders later
apologized. And, you had Inoue Shiro’s
assassination campaign in 1930s Japan.
Nowadays militant Buddhist monks in Burma/
Myanmar are urging on an ethnic cleansing
campaign against the Rohingya.

As for Christianity, the Lord’s Resistance Army in
Uganda initiated hostilities that displaced two
million people. Although it is an African cult, it is
Christian in origin and the result of Western
Christian missionaries preaching in Africa. If
Saudi Wahhabi preachers can be in part blamed
for the Taliban, why do Christian missionaries
skate when we consider the blowback from their
pupils?

Despite the very large number of European
Muslims, in 2007-2009 less than 1 percent of
terrorist acts in that continent were committed by
people from that community.

Terrorism is a tactic of extremists within each
religion, and within secular religions of Marxism
or nationalism. No religion, including Islam,
preaches indiscriminate violence against
innocents.

It takes a peculiar sort of blindness to see
Christians of European heritage as “nice” and
Muslims and inherently violent, given the
twentieth century death toll I mentioned above.
Human beings are human beings and the species
is too young and too interconnected to have
differentiated much from group to group. People
resort to violence out of ambition or grievance,
and the more powerful they are, the more
violence they seem to commit. The good news is
that the number of wars is declining over time,
and World War II, the biggest charnel house in
history, hasn’t been repeated.

m.truthdig.com/report/item/no_muslims_are_not_more_violent_than_people_of_other_religions_20151115#14491649344781&action=collapse_widget&id=0&data=

Can you quote any teachings or action of Christ that depicts violence? If not then anyone who engages in such is not a Christian

[quote author=Proffdada post=40660361]Can you quote any teachings or action of Christ that depicts violence? If not then anyone who engages in such is not a Christian [/quot

Read your bible very well

Not violent

They say war is a continuation of politics so is terrorism and violence people seldomly fight for religion. That's a fact overlooked by craze anti Muslim extremists.

People fight for power, resources and tangible things. Else we will have to conclude that hitler hatred for the Jews stem from the xtian teachings which then held all jews liable for the unjustified death of Jesus.

Issue of violence hardly gets properly assssed and because the media is built on creating binaries like good vs evil, us vs them etc real issues are not put in their proper context.