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I suppose you would consider it appropriate for all Christians to be judged by the actions of those who are the most extreme and violent.

May I ask how many Christians you know who have committed such attrocities???

1968 Robert Kennedy assassinated - Islamic Terrorist

1970 (?) 4 airliners hijacked, 3 airliners blownup in the Middle East in single operation - - Islamic Terrorists
1970 Jordanian citizens attacked, murdered (by PLO) - - Islamic Terrorists

1972 Munich massacre of Israelis - Islamic Terrorists

1975 Raid on Entebbe, Uganda - Israeli plane hijacked, Israelis murdered - Islamic Terrorists

1983 Lebanon Marine Barracks attack - 250 murdered - Islamic Terrorists

1985 Rome Airport murders - Islamic Terrorists
1985 TWA Flight 847 hijacked, U.S. Navy diver murdered - Islamic Terrorists
1985 Achille Lauro hijacking, murder - Islamic Terrorists

1986 Germany, Disco Bombing, U.S. military personnel murdered - Islamic Terrorists

1988 Pan Am 747 Flight 103 Bombing, Lockerbie, 100's murdered - Islamic Terrorists

1993 Khobar Towers attack - Islamic Terrorists
1993 World Trade Center attacked - Islamic Terrorists

1998 U.S. Kenya Embassy blown up, 100's murdered - Islamic Terrorists
1998 U.S. Tanzania Embassy blown up, 100's murdered - Islamic Terrorists

1999 Plot to blow up Space Needle - Islamic Terrorists
2000 USS Cole attacked, many U.S. Navy sailors murdered - Islamic Terrorists
2000-2002 Intifada against Israel - 100's dead and injured - Islamic Terrorists

2001 4 Commercial airliners hijacked, 250+ murdered - Islamic Terrorists
2001 World Trade Center attacked, 2800+ murdered - Islamic Terrorists
2001 Flight 93 murders - Islamic Terrorists
2001 Pentagon attacked, 180+ murdered - Islamic Terrorists

2002 Reporter Daniel Pearl, kidnapped and murdered - Islamic Terrorists
2002 Philippines American missionary, Filipino nurse killed - Islamic Terrorists
2002 July 4, El Al attack Los Angeles LAX, several murdered - Islamic Terrorist
2002 Bali bombing - 200 dead, 300 injured - Islamic Terrorists
2002 Yemen, French Oil Tanker attacked - Islamic Terrorists
2002 Marines attacked / murdered in Kuwait - Islamic Terrorists
2002 Washington D.C. sniper - Islamic Terrorist
2002 Russian Theater attacked, 100+ dead - Islamic Terrorists
2002 Nigerian riots against Miss World Pageant, 200 dead, dozens injured - Islamic Terrorists
2002 Mombasa Hotel Attacked, 12 dead, dozens injured - Islamic Terrorists
2002 Israeli Boeing 757 attacked by missiles, fortunately no one injured - Islamic Terrorists
>p> PLO - Islamic Terrorists
PFLP - Islamic Terrorists
Black September - Islamic Terrorists
Fatah - Islamic Terrorists
Islamic Jihad - Islamic Terrorists
Hizbollah - Islamic Terrorists
Hamas - Islamic Terrorists
Yasser Arafat - Islamic Terrorist
Osama bin Laden - Islamic Terrorist

I've been rereading a book I've had in my library for about 8 years, entitled: The Last of the Giants...It's about the dangers posed by Islam. This is one portion dealing with the Butcher of Bahgdad and his henchmen:

"A primary manifestation of the spirit of Babylon is a preoccupation with fear, violence, death and the destruction of the human spirit---choice sacrifices to the invisible rulers of darkness. Perhaps nowhere on earth have people suffered so ferociously for so long. In earlier centuries, the unfortunates of Mesopotamian society were liable not only to be pitched into Nebuchadnezzar's infamous fiery furnace, but also to have their 'lying tongues' pulled out by the Assyrians---a race of studied executioners who also burned, flayed, impaled and buried their victims alive.

During the Abbasid dynasty in the seventh century, the governor of Mesopotamia's Iraq province, al-Hadjadj, launched a reign that one historian has termed 'frank terror'. Upon assuming his governorship, he promptly executed all dissident rivals---an act that would later be emulated by Saddam Hussein. In full view of their severed heads, al-Hadjadj then delivered a public address that captured the spirit of Babylon. It contained these immortal lines that have been passed on to generations of Iraqi schoolchildren:

'I see heads before me that are ripe and ready for the plucking, and I am the one to pluck them, and I see blood glistening between the turbans and the beards'

If anything, the advent of 'modern civilization' has served only to make state-sponsored slaughter more efficient. From the early 1970's, Saddam Hussein and his immediate predecessors razed more than 4,000 villages, evicted at least 1.5 million people and killed upward of a quarter- million individuals. In the past decade (this was written over ten years ago), an estimated 35,000 people were executed for their religious beliefs alone. Thousands of others---primarily Kurds and Kuwaitis---were disposed of for other reasons.

In this unimaginably brutal land, it is possible to be arrested, tortured, even executed for such things as telling political jokes, failing to display the president's portrait, taking a picture of the Tigris River at sunset and accidently spilling coffee on a newspaper photo of Saddam. In the northern town of Sulaymaniyah, the bodies of victims were returned to relatives along with a bill for the bullets used in their executions. Others have been killed by rat poison, beatings, poison gas and hanging. In one particularly grisly episode, the government hung the mutilated bodies of several victims on Liberation Square while Radio Bahgdad summoned people to 'come and enjoy the feast'.

The footsoldiers of this terror are the members of Iraq's massive secret police apparatus. This four-headed monster includes the Amn al-Khass (State Internal Security), the Estikhbarat (Military Intelligence), the Mukhabarat (Baathist Party Intelligence) and the Presidential Affairs Department (Direct Presidential Intelligence). The largest and most dangerous of thses is the Mukhabarat, and agency that watches over the other police institutions and was active in the atrocities perpetrated in Kuwait. When the ranks of the secret police are added to those of the Border Guards, the Mobile Police Strike Force, the General Department of Nationality, the General Department of Police and the Armed Forces, an astonishing twenty percent of the Iraqi labor force is charged, according to al-Khalil, 'with one form or another of violence'.

In Stalinesque fashion, the Iraqi secret police have managed to place an effective mental straitjacket on much of the citizenry. Nearly everyone is afraid to speak for fear their words will be recorded by one of Saddam's ubiquitous hidden videocameras, a block watch informer or, worse yet, a member of their own family. In a 1977 publication, the Iraqi president wrote:

'To prevent the father and mother dominating the household with backwardness, we must make the small one radiate internally to expel it. Some fathers have slipped away from us for various reasons, but the small boy is still in our hands and we must transform him into an interactive radiating center inside the family...You must place in every corner a son of the revolution, with a trustworthy eye and a firm mind that receives its instructions from the responsible center of the revolution'

Nadhim Kzar, the first chief of Internal State Security under Saddam, reportedly ordered the torture and execution of several thousand people. In 1971, more than four hundred rivals were liquidated in the aptly named Qasr al-Nihayyah, or 'Palace of the End'. Famous for his habit of extinguishing cigarettes in the eyeballs of his victims, Kzar did much to nurture the widespread and sadistic foms of torture practiced today. A sampling of these methods have included roasting victims over flames, amputating noses, limbs and sexual organs, and hammering nails into joints. Children are tortured in front of parents, and suckling infants are held in cells next to mothers and denied food so that their cries will induce confessions. One survivor even reported that the entrance to his torture chamber was cynically marked with a mat that read 'welcome'.

It is also worth pointing out that the Iraqi regime has not reserved these horrors solely for its own domestic population. In occupied Kuwait, for instance, Iraqi soldiers and secret police tortured and summarily executed thousands of citizens before being driven back by advancing Allied troops. In oblique reference to the demonic nature of the carnage, General Norman Schwrzkopf could describe the participating Iraqui forces only as 'not of the same human race'.

Reflecting on the days of horror, Dr. Khalid Shalawi, head physician at Kuwait City's Mubarak Hospital, said he often wept over what had happened. According to eyewitness accounts from insiders like trauma nurse Basma Yusef, Iraqi torture vicitms were brought in with cigarette and acid burns, fingernails and facial hair torm out, holes drilled through their kneecaps and intestines inflated with air. Others were kicked in the stomach, electro-shocked on the genitals and suspended upside-down. One man had his ears cut off, while another was burned so badly 'he had no skin'. Scores were murdered with ax blows. 'The head is open and the brains are out', Yusef recounted. 'Some, their eyes have been taken out'.

Nor were women exempt form the nightmare. Newsweek reported that the Iraqis paraded one nursing mother before captured Kuwaiti resistance fighters. 'Here is the milk of Kuwait,' they taunted. 'Drink it.' Others, including countless rape victims, fared worse. Some were gang-raped and killed, their nude bodies stuffed into trash bins. Rasha Kabundi, a young mother of three, was shot four times in the chest and jaw before the top of her skull was removed with an electric saw. Her body, too, was found in a rubbish heap."