Muslim apologists will point to these very few evil Jewish anomalies and scream, "See, Jews also commit violence in the name of their religion."

However, there is a difference. If somehow tomorrow a strange virus destroyed every single Jewish and Muslim terrorist, the world would still be facing a threat from Muslims but not Jews. A reader of the Family Security Matters article left this comment:

It's sad but true that retro Judaism is as bad as retro Islam in its stern moral code and male chauvinism. The difference is that Jehovah only wants Jews to live under his stern laws, not everybody, and wants Jews to enact those laws only inside their communities, not throughout the world, and only commanded Jews to wage what could be called jihad to win the future Israel, not a jihad from pole to pole like Allah commands Muslims to do.

I do not excuse Jewish terrorism but I do want to put things in perspective: more people die from bee stings each year ¹ than have died at the hands of Jewish terrorists ² in the past 50 years. If only we could say the same about Muslim terrorists.

Let's return for a moment to the idea of a world free of both Jewish and Muslim terrorists. I have written before that the danger to the civilized world is not from Islamic terrorists but from moderate Muslims. The US government has stopped more than a hundred plots by Islamic extremists, so we have a mechanism to remove that threat against our way of life. What we do not have is a mechanism to remove that other threat to our way of life, the moderate Muslim.

That seemingly nice Muslim co-worker, friend, associate, cab driver, deli-clerk who doesn't blow up schools or hospitals but who wants us to accommodate his religion, to remove from books illustrations offensive to his eyes, to remove from schools and workplaces food offensive to his tongue, to remove from the airwaves music offensive to his ears.

We have nothing in place protecting us against that fellow.

Notes

(1):

ABC News, 23 Jul 2009, When One Bee Sting is Your Last

According to government statistics, about 3.3 percent of adults will experience anaphylaxis after an insect sting and there are 40 to as many as 100 deaths annually from insect-sting-related anaphylaxis.

(2):

Wikipedia, Jewish religious terrorism

A number of violent acts by Jews have been described as terrorism and attributed to religious motivations:

Yaakov Teitel an American-born Israeli, was arrested and indicted for several acts of domestic terror, namely a pipe bomb attack against leftist intellectual Zeev Sternhell, the murders of a Palestinian taxi driver and a West Bank shepherd in 1997, and sending a booby-trapped package to the home of a Messianic Jewish family in Ariel.

Eden Natan-Zada killed four Israeli Arab civilians on August 4, 2005.

Baruch Goldstein an American-born Israeli physician, perpetrated the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in the city of Hebron, in which he shot and killed 29 Muslim worshipers inside the Ibrahimi Mosque (within the Cave of the Patriarchs), and wounded another 125 victims.

Yigal Amir's assassination of Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995 has been described as terrorism with a religious motivation.

[edited by Bernie for brevity]