Reply #87: I would hardly claim that the Arab and Muslim world has been 100% innocent

[Douglas Carpenter]

and I certainly think that this most recent spat over the cartoon is not helping their cause one little bit. And they obviously have their own political charlatans who use religion for totally political purposes.

But we don't have to go back to the 1400's to find the Christian west murdering people of other faiths. It was happening in the 1940's. And it wasn't a few little ships. It was by the millions.

In the whole history of the Muslim world, I am not aware of anything remotely resembling the level of intolerance by Western Christians to non-Christians or even "not the right type of Christian" . The Muslim world has never reached anything even close to the level of the Inquisition,the expulsion of the Mores,the Protestant versus Catholic conflicts or the persecution of small religious sects.

For centuries now the Arab and Muslim world has been under either European colonialism and since the end of World War II; American hegemony. The degree of domination by the Western powers in the Middle East is far greater than the degree that British dominance over the thirteen colonies ever was. And we didn't like that very much at all and they were fellow Protestant Christians (for the most part) with the same or close ethnicity. Imagine if they had been a completely foreign society with totally different culture and religion. Imagine if foreign fire power surrounded us on all sides and was constantly threatening military action against us. Imagine if we suffered a long history of these foreign powers over throwing our own governments and installing ones to do the bidding of the foreign powers.

It can hardly be a wonder that there is resentment that sometimes boils over to irrationality. Resentment is not always rational when acquiescence means constant humiliation and "spreading democracy" is a euphemism for even great domination.