a religion of peace?

Perhaps you may also wish to learn more about the discrimination inflicted by Muslims and the religion of peace on non-Muslims living in their midst. Consider what the Muslim response would be to the kidnapping and forced conversion of Muslim children who were then sent back to their countries of origin as occupying soldiers (cf. Janissaries) and other acts of persecution (cf. Witnesses for Christ: Orthodox Christian Neomartyrs of the Ottoman Period 1437-1860 [Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2000] and New Martyrs of the Turkish Yoke [Seattle, WA: St. Nectarios Press, 1985].) Consider, too, the fact that Islam was spread primarily by the sword and expanded in a given region due to the systematic discrimination inflicted on non-Muslims under Islamic rule. Self-evidently relevant, too, are the following observations:


The overwhelming majority of fault line conflicts [between 'civilizations'], have taken place along the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims.

...In all these places, the relations between Muslims and peoples of other civilizations - Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Hindu, Chinese, Buddhist, Jewish - have been generally antagonistic; most of these relations have been violent at some point in the past; many have been violent in the 1990s. Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors. The question naturally arises as to whether this pattern of late-twentieth-century conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim groups is equally true of relations between groups from other civilizations. In fact, it is not. Muslims make up about one-fifth of the world's population but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization. The evidence is overwhelming.

...Three different compilations of data [provided in the original text - ed.] thus yield the same conclusion: In the early 1990s Muslims were engaged in more intergroup violence than were non-Muslims, and two-thirds to three-quarters of intercivilizational wars were between Muslims and non-Muslims. Islam's borders are bloody, and so are its innards.*

* [Huntington's note:] No single statement in my Foreign Affairs article attracted more critical comment than" "Islam has bloody borders." I made that judgment on the basis of a casual survey of intercivilizational conflicts. Quantitative evidence from every disinterested source conclusively demonstrates its validity.

- Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon and Schuster, 1997), pp. 255-258.

That's a long way of saying that what feels like 'humiliation' has more to do with the unrealized, politico-religious expectation within Islamic theology that Muslims should, by decree of God, defeat and dominate all non-Muslims than it does with anything the other 4/5 of the world is doing to humiliate Muslims. We are not Satan because your lust for power and domination have not been met; you are being treated far better than your ancestors treated the Christians in their midst, in the main.