1. The West is much more violent than the Muslim world. Millions of Arab civilians have been killed since colonialism began.

The great French historian and politician Alexis de Tocqueville was a passionate champion of the freedom of the individual. For him, it always took precedence over equality. Inequality, he wrote, comes "directly from God." So it is no wonder that, like most of his contemporaries, this enlightened statesman did not think highly of racial equality.

In his major work "Democracy in America", published in 1835, Tocqueville made a remark that characterized the era: "If we reasoned from what passes in the world, we should almost say that the European is to the other races of mankind, what man is to the lower animals; — he makes them subservient to his use; and when he cannot subdue, he destroys them." For the liberal thinker there was "consequently no reason to treat Muslim subjects as if they were equal to us."

And that is precisely how the West has treated the Muslim world for the past 200 years. During the colonial period in Algeria for example, Muslim families were hunted like "hyenas, jackals and mangy foxes." The strategy that the 19th-century colonial rulers adopted to break resistance to their "civilizing mission" was to "ruin, hunt, terrorize" (Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison). In Algeria entire tribes that had sought refuge in caves were "smoked out" ("enfumades").

The French colonel Lucien-François de Montagnac wrote in a letter from Algeria in 1842: "We kill, we strangle. The cries of the desperate and dying mingle with the noise of the bellowing, bleating livestock. You ask me what we do with the women. Well, we keep some as hostages, others we exchange for horses, the rest are auctioned like cattle… In order to banish the thoughts that sometimes besiege me, I have some heads cut off, not the heads of artichokes but the heads of men."

Louis de Baudicour, a French writer and settler in Algeria, described one of the many massacres: "A soldier cut off a woman's breast in jest, another grabbed a child by its legs and smashed its skull against a wall." Victor Hugo reported that soldiers would throw children to each other in order to catch them on the tips of their bayonets. They would get 100 sous for ears preserved in brine. The bonus for a severed head was higher. The bodies of Arabs were sometimes turned into animal charcoal (Oliver Le Cour Grandmaison).

Napoleon III nonetheless saw the hand of God at work: "France is the mistress of Algeria, because that is what God wanted." The Algerians saw it differently. They had to pay a very high price for their freedom. In the war of independence from 1954 to 1962, 8,000 Algerian villages were destroyed with napalm bombs by the French air force.

The Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) also committed gruesome acts of terror, as Albert Camus rightly pointed out. But in terms of numbers there is no comparison between those acts and the violent deeds committed by the colonialists. During their 130-year "civilizing mission" they killed well over two million Algerians, according to Algerian sources. French estimates say more than one million Algerians and 100,000 French nationals were killed.

The Iraqis, colonized by Britain, did not fare much better. When they rose up against British oppression in 1920, Winston Churchill accused them of "ingratitude" and used chemical weapons against them - "with excellent moral effect," as he noted.

'Bomber Harris', the spiritual father of "moral bombing", reported proudly after a bombing raid: "The Arabs and Kurds now know what real bombing means. Within 45 minutes an entire village can be practically wiped out." In Iraq, bombing raids were also considered an effective way to persuade people to pay their taxes. One Royal Air Force officer, Lionel Charlton, resigned in 1924 after he visited a hospital and saw the mutilated victims of such a raid. He could not know that his country would again bomb Iraq 80 years later.

In Libya, the colonial power Italy dropped phosgene and mustard gas on both rebels and civilians. Tribal leaders were taken up in airplanes and thrown out. More than 100,000 civilians were deported to camps in the desert; half of them perished. Libyan girls were kept as sex slaves for the colonial troops. During the Kabyle rebellions in Morocco Spain also used chemical weapons - to equally horrible effect.

The model for the treatment of the Arabs was the strategy adopted to wipe out the indigenous peoples of America. The mad ideas about racial and cultural superiority prevalent at the time knew no bounds. Gustave Le Bon, founder of mass psychology and opponent of the "superstition of equality," divided mankind into four classes: the native Australian and American peoples he termed "primitive races;" "Negroes" he classed as "inferior," Arabs and Chinese as "intermediate," and the Indo-Europeans as a "superior race."

Since the Second World War as well, the West has often treated the Muslims as subhuman beings on a "level with the superior apes" (Jean-Paul Sartre). This is true of the wars against the colonial powers, interventions to secure supplies of raw materials, the question of Palestine, and the sanctions against Iraq, which were pushed through by the United States and Britain. According to UNICEF, these punitive measures against Iraq, which the Vatican called "perverse", caused the deaths of more than 1.5 million civilians, including half a million children.

The current Iraq war also shows a breathtaking contempt for the Muslim world. Thousands of civilians were killed as U.S.-led forces marched in. Countless numbers were crippled by bombs, some of which contained uranium. A study conducted by independent American and Iraqi physicians and published in the medical journal The Lancet estimates that more than 600,000 Iraqis had met with violent deaths by June 2006 as a result of the war and the chaos caused by occupation forces.

It says 31 percent were killed by U.S.-led coalition forces, and 24 percent as a result of sectarian violence and suicide attacks. Responsibility could not be attributed in 45 percent of the violent deaths; according to The Lancet, the high number of gunshot victims suggests also here a "direct involvement of the U.S. military."

A study by the independent British research institute ORB in January 2008 estimates that until then more than one million Iraqis have been killed and around the same number injured. It reports that in Baghdad almost one in two households has lost a family member. According to Human Rights Watch, Saddam Hussein was responsible for the death of 290,000 Iraqi civilians in the course of his 23-year rule.

Since fall 2007, the number of fatalities has declined in Iraq. But according to experts' conservative estimates, in the summer of 2008 more than 3,000 Iraqi civilians were still dying each month in the chaos of the war. That is as many as perished in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

The people of Iraq are worse off now than they were under Saddam (according to Kofi Annan). There will not be many Iraqis who say: "Great, our country has been destroyed; more than a million people have been killed; four and a half million have been made refugees; the child mortality rate is one of the highest in the world; electricity, water and medicine are scarce; unemployment and inflation have risen to 50 percent; one can hardly go out onto the street; in Baghdad people are living in walled ghettos, since ‘good fences make good neighbors,’ as U.S. general David Petraeus put it - but it was worth it, Saddam is gone." The only beneficiaries of this disaster are Iran and radical Islamism.

Does it then come as a surprise, that according to a survey conducted by the BBC and ABC, 86 percent of all Iraqis, no matter whether Shiites or Sunnites, demand the withdrawal of the US-American troops?

Over the past 200 years no Muslim state has ever attacked the West. European powers and the United States have always been the aggressors and not those under attack. Since the beginning of the colonial era, millions of Muslim civilians have been killed. When it comes to killing, the West is leading by a ratio of more than ten to one. The current debate about the Muslim world's alleged propensity to violence is a mockery of the historical facts. The West was and is much more violent than the Muslim world. The problem of our era is not the violence of Muslims but the violence of some Western countries.

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