There are many good people in America and around the world who are Muslims.  However, Islam as a whole still has issues with "infidels" and apostasy that Judaism resolved thousands of years ago and Christianity resolved several hundred years ago.  The latest example is a grotesque story out of Pakistan, where a mob of hundreds of Muslims lynched a Sri Lankan accused (accurately or not, because it never matters) of desecrating pictures of Mohamed.

VOA News provides the basic facts:

A Muslim mob in eastern Pakistan lynched a Sri Lankan man Friday before burning his body for allegedly insulting Islam's Prophet Muhammad.

Police identified the victim as Priyantha Kumara, saying he was working as an export manager at a private sports equipment factory in Sialkot, an industrial city in the country's most populous Punjab province.

A co-worker reportedly accused the slain foreigner of desecrating and removing posters from factory walls bearing the name of the Prophet Muhammad before informing others about the alleged blasphemy act.

Witnesses and area police officers said factory workers quickly gathered in large numbers and fatally attacked Kumara inside the facility.

"They later dragged his body to a nearby road and torched it," Hasaan Khawar, the Punjab government spokesman, told reporters, while sharing details of the incident.

[snip]

Blasphemy is a highly sensitive matter in the predominantly Muslim nation and mob attacks on alleged blasphemers are common, but such violence against foreigners is extremely rare.

Insulting Islam or the Prophet Muhammad carries the death penalty in Pakistan, where mere blasphemy allegations often provoke mob violence and lynching of suspects.

Critics of Pakistan's blasphemy laws say accusations of insulting Islam are often used to intimidate religious minorities and settle personal scores in the country.

To his credit, Prime Minister Imran Khan spoke out against the lynching:

The horrific vigilante attack on factory in Sialkot & the burning alive of Sri Lankan manager is a day of shame for Pakistan. I am overseeing the investigations & let there be no mistake all those responsible will be punished with full severity of the law. Arrests are in progress

— Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) December 3, 2021

The police rounded up 100 people and are using security footage to locate other perpetrators.  It remains to be seen whether any of the people involved suffers actual consequences for their acts.

At this moment, leftists and Muslims, in defense, are mumbling "crusades," "religious wars," and "Hitler," all of which do nothing more than prove that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.  Much as the left likes to forget this fact, the crusades were a defensive war to recover the Holy Land after Muslims had brutally conquered it.  Had the Muslims left the Holy Land alone, it's unlikely that the Europeans would have sought them out.

Image: Anti-American protest in London in 2012.  The sign reads "The followers of Mohammed will conquer America."  YouTube screen grab.

And yes, Europeans engaged in terribly violent religious wars after Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on a church door.  France was riven by religious wars for over thirty years, killing an estimated three million people from direct warfare, famine, and disease.  The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre alone, a five-day period in 1572, led to an estimated 10,000 Protestant deaths.

Europe's Thirty Years War (1618-1648) centered in the Holy Roman Empire and killed around eight million people.  England had a civil war from 1642 to 1651 that killed almost 225,000 people, both combatants and civilians, in the small land.

Thankfully, Christians learned from these massive failures.  Starting with the Enlightenment, Christian religious wars ceased.

It's true that Europeans were unable to keep the peace, since the centuries after religious wars ended witnessed the Napoleonic wars, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, World War One, and World War Two.  None, though, revolved around Christianity.

And contrary to a popular misconception, Hitler's quest for world domination and ethnic purity had nothing to do with religion.  Hitler's hatred for the Jews was socialist in nature.  He disliked the Church, believing that Christianity had enervated Germanic vigor, and wanted a return to muscular paganism and the occult.

Unfortunately for that Sri Lankan man, Islam is still in the late medieval/Renaissance phase of its development when it comes to religious wars.  Given sufficient numbers in a population, they will use religion as a justification for violence, something that is seen across India, Africa, and the Middle East.

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