Since the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, many Americans want to ban Syrian refugees from entering the USA, fearful that some of them might be terrorists. About half of the country’s governors have announced that Syrian refugees are not welcome in their states. Presidential hopeful Ted Cruz says that if he were president, he would accept refugees — but only if they’re Christian.

On the televised gossip show “The View,” Whoopi Goldberg took Ted Cruz to task, declaring that Muslim refugees are no more dangerous than Christian refugees. Then, she played the ever-popular Hitler Card. “There have been a lot of monster Christians,” she said. “Hitler was a Christian.”^[1]

Turning to someone who knows way more than Whoopi does, the noted Arabist and historian Juan Cole claims that “No religion, including Islam, preaches indiscriminate violence against innocents…. Muslims are not more violent than people of other religions. Murder rates in most of the Muslim world are very low compared to the United States.”

Professor Cole continues:

“As for political violence, people of Christian heritage in the twentieth century polished off tens of millions of people in the two world wars and colonial repression. This massive carnage did not occur because European Christians are worse than or different from other human beings, but because they were the first to industrialize war and pursue a national model. I figure that Muslims killed no more than 2 million people or so in political violence in the entire twentieth century, and that mainly in the Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988 and the Soviet and post-Soviet wars in Afghanistan…. It takes a peculiar sort of blindness to see Christians of European heritage as ‘nice’ and Muslims as inherently violent, given the twentieth century death toll I mentioned above.”^[2]

As Professor Cole notes, many of those tens of millions of people killed by Christians were other Christians. In the American Civil War, for example, over half a million Christians were killed by Christians.

Way back in 1927, the famous mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell said: “At all times, from the age of Constantine to the end of the seventeenth century, Christians were far more fiercely persecuted by other Christians” than by any other group.^[3]

Of course, we all recall reading in our school books about The Inquisition, for which Christians perfected the art of torturing other Christians, and also burning them at the stake, or quartering them into pieces.

So, does Whoopi Goldberg want to ban Christian refugees, as well — just to be safe?

Sources:

[1] TheFederalist.com

[2] JuanCole.com

[3] Users.Drew.edu