In his opinion piece in The West Australian (15 August), “Tough task gagging terror talk”, Brian Toohey reveals that Christians are in the hate talk business every bit as much as Muslims.

To illustrate the point, he likens the Christian cleric, Pastor Danny Nalliah, to the Muslim cleric, Sheikh Mohammad Omran. Yes, Sheik Omran has praised Osama bin Laden as a great man. But, more shockingly, Pastor Nalliah “has urged his followers to pull down ‘Satan’s strongholds’ including mosques, temples and bottle shops”.

Toohey asks: “Should it be a criminal offence only in the case of Muslims to incite people to commit acts of politically or religiously motivated violence? Or should a new law cover inflammatory
Christians like Mr Nalliah who is a cleric in the Catch the Fire Ministry …?”

As someone who has tended to overlook the connection between Christians and terrorism, I was challenged by Mr Toohey’s observations. Yes, I thought, chastened, it is time to come to grips with the fact that Christian fundamentalists are little less than terrorists whose hate-filled tirades have won the hearts of many an impressionable youth to their dastardly cause. Indeed, it is time to acknowledge that there is no distinction between Christianity and Islam, Christians and Muslims, when it comes to incitement to violence and involvement in terror.

Mr Toohey’s brave and insightful opinion piece brought me to my senses and set me on a whole new line of thought. And as I pondered and investigated the Christian-terror nexus, I came to realise that the situation is even worse than Mr Toohey intimates. I came to realise, in fact, that every act of terror committed by Muslims in recent years has been mirrored by Christians!

I realise many will instinctively deny the truth of my claim, but permit me to support it with a few irrefutable examples.

Consider the events in New York on 11 September 2001. Everyone knows that the first plane flown into the first tower was piloted by Muslims. But what about the second plane that flew into the second tower? My investigations have led me to believe that this plane was piloted by Christians. One of the bombers who hijacked the second plane left his luggage behind at the airport. The CIA controlledWestern media put it about that the misplaced luggage contained an Islamic will-cum-manual written in Arabic exhorting the hijackers to trust in Allah and to recite the Koran during their suicide
mission. But the truth is, the luggage contained a Bible and an Anglican Prayer Book, along with aletter expressing the bomber’s conviction that he would be rewarded with perpetual virginity in heaven for waging jihad in the name of Jesus.

And yes, Muslims blew up the trains in Madrid on 11 March 2004. But wasn’t it Christians who blew up the trains and bus in London on 7 July this year?

And yes, Muslims seized a school in Beslan, Russia, in September 2004, shooting little children in the back and so forth. But surely this was inspired by an earlier attack by Christian fundamentalists on the Oasis Compound in Saudi Arabia in May 2004! Have we forgotten already how the Christian terrorists slit the throats of Muslims but spared those who could prove their Christian credentials by reciting the Lord’s Prayer?

And yes, Muslim women dressed like the Grim Reaper smuggled explosives into Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow in October 2002. But what about that Catholic nun who concealed a bomb-belt beneath her habit and blew herself up in a subway station in Moscow in August 2004, killing nine and wounding 50?

And what can we say about the home videos of Christian suicide bombers in Palestine—videos made as testaments before the bombers set off to Israel to blow up children in buses and young people in cafés? Holding Bibles and wearing headbands declaring “the sword of the Spirit”, they stare into the camera and cry, “Jesus is Great!” After seeing one of these videos, can any one honestly deny that there is something rotten at the heart of Christianity?

A website called thereligionofpeace.com has posted “The List of Islamic Terror Attacks Since September 11th, 2001”. This “List” itemises over 2,700 fatal terrorist attacks by Muslims throughout the world in the last four years. But why hasn’t the website posted a similar list of Christian terror attacks?

Besides, some of the 2,700 listed acts of terror, I suspect, were actually committed by Christians. Take the Bali nightclub bombings in October 2002, for example.

Muslims took the rap for those bombings, but I am now convinced that no adherent to Islam, that great religion of tolerance and peace, was in any way involved. And it was Mr Toohey’s article that gave me the clue as to the identity of the true culprits.

Mr Toohey claims that Pastor Nalliah “urged his followers to pull down ‘Satan’s stronghold’ including … bottle shops”. And what is a nightclub if not an especially nasty bottle shop where bottles are uncorked and guzzled? Obviously, then, pastor Nalliah has encouraged his followers to pull down nightclubs. And let no one fudge the import of the pastor’s words by suggesting that he was speaking figuratively or “spiritually”. (In an uncharacteristic lapse into nonsense, Mr Toohey allowed the possibility that the pastor was merely “urging that the power of prayer be used to persuade God to pull down temples and mosques”.) No, no! Pastor Nalliah meant this “pulling down” literally and his followers took it literally. And the result was the Bali bombings.

Who can forget how the nightclubs burned after the bombings? They became infernos. And that is the giveaway. The towering flames were the appalling signature of Pastor Nalliah’s terrorist organisation, Catch the Fire Ministries (emphasis added). When Mr Toohey described Pastor Nalliah as an “inflammatory” Christian, little did he know just how truly he spoke!

Christians are up to their eyeballs in terrorism. They are implicated in terror every bit as much as Muslims. It is time for Christians to come clean on this. It is time to evict radical pastors from their pulpits and to close those hotbeds of sedition, the Christian schools. It is time for governments to add Catch the Fire Ministries, the Festival of Light and the Anglican Churchto the list of terrorist organisations. And it is time for governments to enact hate speech laws to protect the general public from Christian fanatics.

In our multicultural society we have long believed that one religion is as good as another religion. We must now acknowledge the corollary of this belief—namely, that one religion is as bad as another religion. We should not be surprised, then, to discover the equality between Islam and Christianity when it comes to expressions of hate and incitements to murder. In this fearful new world of terrorism, there can be no doubt that Christianity is every bit as dark as Islam. Thank you, Mr Phooey, for making all this clear to me!