tothesource: We got a large number of letters from our readers. Some were full of praise, but many were outraged by your article Is Islam the Problem? You seem to downplay Islamic violence to Jews and Christians while picking on the Pope, Christianity, America, and Israel. One reader, William Payne, asserts that today Muslim radicals embody Koranic Islam and its early history better than the traditional ones or their secular counterparts. What do you have against Christianity and why are you whitewashing Islamic history?

Dinesh D'Souza Replies: I recall the Bible saying something to the effect that before pointing to the defects of others we should first take the mote out of our own eye. Some of these letters attempt to whitewash Christian history in an embarrassing way. One of my central points was that religious minorities were treated worse in Christendom than they were in the House of Islam. I agree with readers’ comments that “we know that this is not what Christianity is all about” and these acts were often not by official decree. Still, lots of people (both infidels and dissident Christians) were killed and tortured and imprisoned and banished during the centuries. Does the fact that these acts of violence didn’t happen before Constantine’s conversion (as one letter notes) lessen the harm that was caused? I don’t think so. The issue of persecution only arises when a religion has power. Christianity had no real power before Constantine and therefore it deserves no credit for abstaining from persecuting the Romans!

My point is that for about a thousand years, Christianity was more intolerant than Islam. You cannot measure this by seeing how Christians treated Muslims living under Christian rule, because as Princeton historian Bernard Lewis has pointed out, there were few Muslims living under Christian rule. But you can measure it by seeing how Jews were treated by Christian and Muslim regimes. A Jew would be much safer under the Abbasids and the Ottomans than under the Christian rulers, both Catholic and Protestant. Moreover, the Christians in the Americas (under Pizarro and Cortes) treated the native Indians vastly worse than the Muslims treated the Hindus under the Mughal empire which operated around the same time. Yes, these persecutions were a distortion of Christ’s teaching. Yet in many cases the persecutors operated with the blessing of the religious authorities of the day. I mention all this not to attack Christianity—I am a Christian—but in the spirit of historical accuracy and Christian humility. Cultural understanding first requires a willingness to be self-critical as well as critical of others.

tts: This weekend the West Bank headquarters of the Palestinian government was in flames as rivalry between Hamas and President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction erupted in violence. In Gaza, four people were killed and scores more wounded. In Iraq, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is instituting a new plan to stem sectarian violence that is now killing over 100 people a day. Yes, it is the radicals who are instigating most of this violence. But isn’t your project to disassociate the current turmoil in the Middle East from traditional Islam a hard sell when the region appears awash in human casualties?

DD: The issue of violence in Islam is a complicated one and again, some of the letters make glib assertions that simply cannot be justified. Let’s remember that Islam has been around for more than a thousand years, and the suicide bombings have been around for around 25 years. So by what calculus can the Koran or Muhammad or the religion be blamed for something that is only happening now? The reasonable question to ask is what is it about Islam today that has made it an incubator of fanaticism and terrorism? Yes, we all know that Islam was spread by the sword. But is this any different from how Christianity was spread in, say, Asia or Africa? My own ancestors were converted to Christianity by the Portuguese in India in the period of the Portuguese Inquisition. To be honest, I am very grateful that my ancestors were bludgeoned into the faith, because this is how I got to be born and raised a Christian. Otherwise the faith may have remained alien to me. So, as I say, I’m happy about the Portuguese Inquisition, although I’m not sure that my ancestors would have shared my enthusiasm! Now I fully agree that the New Testament utterly rejects violence and compulsion. Islam, while prohibiting force in converting other monotheists, permits force to bring other territories under the rule of Islam. Some writers continue to insist that Islam uses “forced conversion” but under no Islamic empire (Umayyad, Abbasid, Mughal, Ottoman, etc.) were the Jews and Christians forcibly converted. The Muslims ruled India for 200 years, so how come the vast majority of Indians are Hindu? The Muslims didn’t forcibly convert them any more than the British did. My point about the Pope’s comments was a) that you cannot approvingly quote someone to make your point and than deny responsibility for the content of the quotation, b) that even if what the Pope said was true, it was tactically unwise to say it because we don’t want to push traditional Muslims into the arms of radical Islam, and c) as a matter of historical fact what the Pope said was misleading because it did not apply a single standard of fairness in assessing the relative historical culpability of both Christian and Islamic empires.

tts: You can hardly call Israel a Jewish Empire, yet you claim that it too was established by violence. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Israel. It was established on May 14, 1948. More than one of our readers pointed this out.

DD: Imagine if tomorrow the United Nations passed a resolution declaring that America had been illegally seized by the Europeans and that the continent really belonged to the American Indians. Imagine that the Indians then proceeded to claim the land assigned to them by force and then to reduce the non-Indian population to the status of subordination and refugees. This may or may not have a historical warrant, since the Indians were here first, and one may even justify the action morally because of the sufferings and mistreatment of the Indians over the centuries. But would any sane person maintain that the bombings and wars and relocations that were used to restore America to the Indians did not constitute the use of force and violence? Israel was established in precisely this way. I have not even mentioned the terrorism employed by the Stern Gang of the Zionist underground in the 1930’s and 40’s which was not very different from the terrorism employed by Islamic radicals today. Even prominent neoconservatives who are staunch supporters of Israel have conceded that Begin was a terrorist. At the time the British described such political violence as “Zionist terrorism.” Though these attacks against the British abated during World War II, because of the threat posed by the Nazis, they resumed in 1944. The King David Hotel was bombed on July 26, 1946, killing 91 people, mostly civilians. Count Bernadotte, a U.N. mediator, was assassinated in 1948 because of his pro-Arab stance. As late as April, 1948, Begin led a commando attack on Deir Yassin, a village of about 750 Palestinian residents, and killed over 100 people, half of them women and children. Begin would later become Prime Minister of Israel. I am pro-Israel, but it is neither honest nor decent to deny these facts. Are we next going to claim that America was acquired from the Indians through honest treaty negotiations? No wonder that traditional Muslims think we have blinders on regarding the question of Israel.

tts: We suspect more letters will be coming.