Muslims and Jews, the victims of the Crusaders, became the shadow self of the new Europe, symbolizing everything Western Christians hoped that they were not and also what they feared that they might become. Many of these distorted myths about Islam reflected buried worries about European behavior.

Thus at the time of the Crusades, when Christians were fighting brutal holy wars against Muslims in the Near East, even though Jesus had told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them, scholar monks argued that Islam was a violent faith that had propagated its message by the sword. This became one of the received ideas of the West, but it is completely at variance with the facts. Until the middle of the 20th century, Islam has been a far more tolerant faith than Christianity, for example, and the Koran is a pluralistic scripture, which sees all rightly guided faiths as coming from God.

No religious tradition has always lived up to its high ideals. In the West, the new Muslim extremism seems to endorse their inaccurate, medieval image of Islam, but the terrorism of 9/11 was politically rather than religiously motivated. All world faiths, including Islam, value peace, condemn violence, and preach the primal duty of compassion and respect for human life. Even violence speech and unkind, unjust speech is a religious failing. One might include the Pope’s remarks at Regensburg in this category. The religions also teach the duty of self-criticism.

As Jesus insisted, one cannot point out the splinter in your own eye, while neglecting the beam in your own.

Christians can only help to bring peace to the world if they first confront their own faults. Christianity has a long record of intolerance, inquisition, crusade and persecution. The way forward is to promote the ideal of compassion and loving kindness rather than making inflammatory and exaggerated remarks about another religious tradition, which will simply exacerbate the situation.