The apparent contrast between the West and the world of Islam, in which the former appears much more tolerant, is due not to the sweetness and light of so-called “Judeo-Christian values”, but to the secular nature of Western society.

In recent years it has become commonplace, in politics and the media, to combine ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’ into an adjective denoting the social-moral values of Western society. It’s not difficult to see how this came about. By the mid-20th century Jews had moved into the mainstream of life in the West, and since the late 1960s the Jewish state of Israel has become entrenched as America’s staunchest ally after Britain. With the fall of the USSR the West acquired a new global enemy appeared - Islam. Nowadays the international constellation appears to be the Christian world, with the Jews solidly beside or within it, vis-a-vis the worldwide threat of belligerent Islam.

As a rule, people who use the phrases ‘Judeo-Christianity’ and ‘Judeo-Christian values’ are not Jews but Christians. Jews do not feel comfortable with the hyphened term. In Judaism, Christianity is regarded as adolatry, so much so that religious Jews in pre-war Eastern Europe used to spit - surreptitiously, of course - when they passed a church, a priest or a nun. Judaism rejects Jesus not only as the Messiah, but even (unlike Islam) as a prophet, and orthodox Jews refer to him in contemptuous terms.

It is amusing to hear people people (e.g., Paul Weyrich) saying that Judaism and Christianity, in contrast to Islam, are ‘religions of peace and tolerance’. If they were familiar with the Jewish religion (not just the Old Testament) they would have known that it is full of horrific fire-and-brimstone anathemas against the ‘goyim’, i.e., the Gentiles. Every morning orthodox Jews give thanks to God ‘for not making me a goy.’ The traditional Seder - the ritual Passover Eve dinner - includes hair-raising passages calling on God to destroy all the nations which do not follow him - i.e., everyone but the Jews. One especially grisly verse, taken from Psalms 137:9, says: ‘O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed, happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.’ The Kabbalah tells Jews that they are made of a sublime substance, while the rest of humanity are made of coarser material, and the two must never be mixed. Religious Jews mourn a son or daughter who married ‘out of the faith’ - let alone converted to another religion - as though they had died. I could fill many pages with descriptions of the zealotry, fanaticism, racism and intolerance that taint religious Judaism, though it should be emphasized that nowadays the great majority of Jews are so secularized that they themselves are unaware of this awkward heritage - or choose to ignore it - as they have adopted the values of tolerance that the secular West has been upholding for some time.

And while Judaism and Christianity are projected as natural allies with humane creeds, Islam is described as intolerant, violent and fanatical - and horribly anti-Jewish. To fall for this propaganda you need to be utterly ignorant not only about Judaism and Islam, but about history in general. So let’s take a look at history.

Christianity began with the deeply moving, humane texts attributed to Christ in the Gospels. But no sooner did the religion led by St Paul begin to spread through the Roman empire, than it formed sects and erupted in a series of schisms. Virulent hatred and violence raged over tiny variations in the creed and in the ritual - a type of conflict not known in polytheism. And though in the High Middle Ages Christianity brought light - along with Latin and some Roman law - to Europe’s barbaric northern shores, it had earlier darkened the windows in what had been the classical Hellenistic world.

In the 11th century the First Crusade was launched to liberate Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre from the Muslim Saracens, even though the latter were quite liberal towards Christian pilgrims and communities. En route to the Holy Land, the Crusader mob rampaged through Europe and killed as many Jews as they could find - mainly in Germany - as a foretaste of the massacre they unleashed in the Holy City itself when they captured it. There they slaughtered all the Muslims and Jews, and boasted that their horses waded through blood up to their fetlocks.

The first known and documented systematic genocide in Europe took place in the 13th century in the South of France, when hundreds of thousands of Christian ‘heretics’ - known as Albigensians or Cathars - were put to death on the orders of the Church of Rome.

Spain under Muslim rule was, for most of the time, peaceful, prosperous and tolerant. The three monotheistic religions coexisted in a harmonious way - to this day Spaniards speak about that period as their country’s golden age. In 1492, when the Catholic Kings Ferdinand and Isabella completed the re-conquest of Spain, they expelled the Jews and a few years later the Muslims. A dark curtain of fanaticism and obscurantism came down on Spain. It then spread its awful shadow over the ‘New World’, where devout Christians spilled rivers of blood in the name of the loving Christ. The tortured Aztec king Montezuma said before being executed that he did not wish to go to the same afterworld as his Christian tormentors.

The Protestant Reformation plunged Europe into bloody wars of religion, as Catholics and Protestants massacred each other in vast numbers, all in the name of Christianity.

In Africa, between the 17th and the 19th centuries, Christian European colonists plundered the riches of the lands they conquered, abducted millions of their inhabitants and sold them into slavery in the Americas. In the Belgian Congo, in the late 19th and the early 20th century, King Leopold, a good Christian, imposed a regime of horror that would inspire the Nazis.

The Russian, Ukrainian and Polish pogromists, who slaughtered Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries and willingly helped the Nazis to carry out the extermination of Jews before, during and AFTER the Holocaust, were all good Christians.

I think you get the picture.

As for islam - throughout its history it tended, by and large, to be fairly tolerant and liberal towards Christians and Jews, whom it regards as ‘people of the book’. It was far less tolerant towards the ‘idolatrous’ nations, and imposed itself upon them unhesitatingly, as prescribed by its tenets. It must be said that, while ‘rivers of blood’ have not characterized Muslim history, persecutions and oppression did occur in Muslim lands from time to time. A persuasive modern criticism of Islam as a world religion has been made by V.S. Naipaul, who pointed out in two important books that Islam is a form of cultural imperialism, erasing original native cultures and traditions and turning the inhabitants into ‘second-hand Arabs’.

Judeo-Islam

Unlike that chimera ‘Judeo-Christianity’, the resemblance between Judaism and Islam is quite striking. So much so, that Maimonides - the greatest Judaic authority after Moses - stated that a Jew should choose death rather than convert to Christianity; he did not say about Islam! In fact, it is believed that for a while he himself lived as a Muslim.

The reason is obvious - Islam observes some of the main tenets of Judaism: an absolute ban on graven images (which the Muslims observe even more strictly than the Jews); male circumcision; and the ban on consuming pork and blood - which is why kosher and halal slaughtering is identical. When the Muslims conquered Palestine in the seventh century, the Jews who lived there converted without much difficulty, because the new religion was so similar to their own. By contrast, to this day even secular Jews bristle at the slightest hint of Christian missionarizing.

Before you accuse me of being an apologist for Islam, I will note that one genocide was in fact committed by a Muslim nation against a Christian one. During the First World War, the Ottoman empire in its death throes massacred about a million and a half Armenians in various parts of the Near East. It was done not in the name of religion, but as part of the collapsing empire’s struggle against the European powers bent on destroying it.

During the Cold War, Western propaganda against the Communist Bloc took two distinct forms, aimed at different classes of people. For the literate, liberal ‘chattering classes’, it projected an image of the Communists as puritanical, dowdy, unsophisticated - the ‘Ninotchka’ image, endlessly recycled. The lowbrow public was regaled with lurid descriptions of the Communists as libertines who scoffed at religion and traditional values. The tabloids carried stories about orgies in special brothels created to serve the officers of the Red Army and the upper echelons of the Party, who were depicted as canny and evil enough to trap naive Westerners.

Today propaganda is less easily channelled to different classes. The image offered to all and sundry is of Evil Islam threatening the virtuous ‘Judeo-Christian’ West. No one can argue with the description of the Muslim world as lagging behind the West in many areas, especially in secularization. The West began to redeem itself from the worst religious oppression in the French Revolution, which launched the secular process more than two centuries ago. This has yet to happen in most Muslim countries, with the exception of Turkey. But today the Muslim world is in ferment and turmoil, and changes will surely come. It is important to realize that the real conflict raging in the world today is not due to ‘A Clash of Civilizations’, but to political and economic struggles. The religious guise is misleading and we must not fall for it. It is used cynically by interested parties in the West, and naively and murderously by fanatics in the Muslim world.

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