A review of Robert Spencer's Religion of Peace?-Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't, Regnery, 2007, 246 pp.

...sometimes by repeatedly putting fingers down the throat, but other objects are used including spoons, paint brushes, knitting needles, and plastic tubes before the swallower commonly progresses to a bent wire coat hanger. The performer must then learn to align a sword with the upper esophageal sphincter with the neck hyper-extended.

...resorted to claiming that the president used "double coding," through which he "signaled attentive Bible readers that he shared their private scriptural invocations -- using phrases from the revelation of St. John (6:15-17, about the wrath of the lamb) and Isaiah (about evildoers hiding in caves and the lonely paths of the godless)." Never mind that Bush never used the words wrath or lamb, and never mind that bin Laden and other al-Qaeda operatives actually do hide in caves. Why let the truth get in the way of a great theory?

He [Phillips] describes Bush as an "evangelical Christian missionary, " influenced by "heady talk about bringing liberty and freedom to new shores." But maybe, just maybe, Bush's real mission was not biblical at all, but an attempt to defend America from a second September 1, and he was seeing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the replacing of their tyrannies with democracies as part of this effort. Phillips and his ilk certainly have to stretch to portray Bush's policies in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of a Christian missionary enterprise; the constitutions of both contries give a privileged place to Islam, and the Bush administration has taken no special measures to halt the persecution of Christians in post-Saddam Iraq.

...the constitution of the new, post-Taliban Afghani regime stipulates that "no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam." Abdul Rahman's case showed that Islam's traditional classification of apostasy as a capital crime would be included in this. The prophet Muhammad regarded apostasy from Islam as a supreme evil, and one of the main reasons the punishment is so severe is because apostates were once Muslims but "turn renegade." Muhammad decreed that no Muslim could be put to death except for murder, unlawful sexual intercourse, and apostasy. He said flatly: "Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him." This is still the position of all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence, although there is some disagreement over whether the law applies only to men. Thus it was not at all surprising that the Afghan government, constituted so that no law could be made that contradicted Islamic law, put Abdul Rahman on trial. Yet Western analysts seem to have trouble grasping the import of Rahman's case...After an international firestorm, Abdul Rahman was released, and asked for asylum in Italy, which was swiftly granted. However, the Islamic law provision in the Afghani constitution remains today. But if this episode made anything clear, it was that the Bush administration had no interest whatsoever in defending the rights of a Christian prisoner in an Islamic state. American officials did nothing, after all, to prevent the approval of the constitution, despite its stipulation about Islamic law. If the American incursion into Afghanistan represented a modern-day Crusade or an exercise in evangelical Christian wish fulfillment, it was a singularly inept one.

In Iraq, likewise, the dire predicament of Christians facing jihadist persecution after the fall of Saddam Hussein demonstrated this point. If spreading Christianity was what Bush was after, he was doing a decidedly poor job of it...In Iraq, half the nation's prewar 700,000 Christians have fled the country since the fall of Saddam Hussein...Christian communities throughout the Middle East that date back to the dawn of Christianity are decreasing so much that they are on the verge of disappearing from the area altogether...Overall the Middle Eastern Christian population has dropped from 20 percent in 1900 to less than 2 percent today.

• Based upon its earliest inception by Muhammad -- an unabashed 7^th century military and political leader, the antithesis of the pacifist proselytizer Jesus -- through the present, jihad has been central to the thought and writings of prominent Muslim theologians and jurists. The precepts and regulations elucidated in the 7th through 9th centuries are immutable in the Muslim theological-juridical system, and they have remained essentially unchallenged by the majority of contemporary Muslims. The jihad is intrinsic to the sacred Muslim texts, including the divine Koranic revelation -- "the uncreated word of Allah". The Old Testament sanctions the Israelites conquest of Canaan -- a limited domain -- it does not sanction a permanent war to submit all the nations of humanity to a uniform code of religious law. Similarly, the tactics of warfare are described in the Old Testament, unlike the Koran, in very circumscribed and specific contexts. Moreover, while the Old Testament clearly condemns certain inhumane practices of paganism, it never invoked an eternal war against all of the world's pagan peoples, as, for example enjoined by Koran 9:5.

• In opposition to the Judeo-Christian conception of God as a God of reason, the Koran (5:64) makes clear that Allah's hand is unfettered -- he was not bound to govern the universe according to consistent and observable laws -- which has had profound implications for the (arrested) development of the natural sciences in Islamic societies, and Islamic ethics.

• Spencer cites Professor Rodney Stark's observation that Islam lacks "a conception of God appropriate to underwrite the rise of science...Allah is not presented as a lawful creator, but is conceived of as an extremely active God who intrudes in the world as he deems it appropriate. This prompted the formation of a major theological bloc within Islam that condemns all efforts to formulate natural laws as blasphemy in that they deny Allah's freedom to act." Not surprisingly leading historians and sociologists of science have concluded "...it is indisputable" that modern science -- an organized, empirically directed effort to explain natural phenomena through theory construction and testing -- that modern science "emerged in the seventeenth century in Western Europe and nowhere else".

• Moreover, even notions about supposed Islamic contributions to pre-modern science and philosophy -- fostered by the triumphalism of the jihad conquests -- are purely mythical. Despite taking credit for the invention of algebra, the Arabs did no more than copy the treatises of Diophantus of Alexandria, who lived in the fourth century. The numerals commonly referred to as Arabic, and the system of notation which bears the same name, derive from Hindustan. The Arabs themselves called arithmetic "Indian reckoning," and geometry "Indian science" (hendesya). Arab knowledge of botany was obtained either from the treatises of Dioscorides, or from Hindu and Persian works. In chemistry, or rather alchemy, they were the pupils of the Alexandrian school. Djeber and Rhazes, the latter an Islamized Persian, did no more than copy the works of Alexandrian Hermetism. There is the same absence of invention regarding medicine. Greek physicians, from the third century of the Christian era, made their way into Persia, where they founded a celebrated school which soon became the rival of Alexandria. But earlier it was especially at Alexandria that Greek medicine emerged from empiricism and assumed a truly scientific character. Aaron, a Christian priest who lived at Alexandria in the seventh century, compiled and translated into Syriac the treatises of Galen, under the name of Pandects of Medicine. This Syriac version was translated into Arabic in 685, becoming a major source used by Arab physicians, most notably Serapion, Avicenna, Albucasis, and Averroes-whose own Koullyat is merely a translation of Galen.  Rhazes best known work, the Kanoun, is a compilation of the treatises of Galen, from the Syriac versions.  And the Arabs left the doctrines of Aristotle (and of the Jewish and Christian philosophers) just as they were transmitted to them by various non-Muslims-reproduced, but neither invented nor improved.

• Finally, the unique persistence of chattel slavery in Islamic societies, and both the brutal oppression of Muslim women (including widespread polygamy, wife beating, honor killings, and clitorectomy/genital mutilation), and non-Muslim minorities, are living testimony to the continued failed paradigm of "Islamic ethics", as sanctioned by the Shari'a-a seemingly immutable obstacle to modern conceptions of human rights, which evolved exclusively in Judeo-Christian societies.

...but to state fact-a fact that many Muslims cheerfully and proudly avow. Christianity is a religion of peace, and it is a religion without a jihadist movement. Islam is a religion of the sword and there are, by even the most conservative estimates, more than one hundred million active jihadists seeking to impose sharia not only in the Islamic world, but in Europe and ultimately in the United States. And they will succeed, in time, if Westerners continue to delude themselves that Western civilization is uniquely responsible for the evil in the world, that Christianity is just as inherently violent as Islam, that all cultures are equal in their capacity to inspire magnanimity, nobility, generosity, and greatness of soul. This is a suicidal myth.

Whether one believes in Christianity or not, it is necessary now for all lovers of authentic freedom to acknowledge their debt to the Judeo-Christian West, to the Judeo-Christian assumptions that built Europe and the United States, and to acknowledge that this great civilization is imperiled and worth defending.