Once again, the CIA and MI6 are publishing dire warnings of the vitality of al-Qaeda. Once again, the Islamic world as a whole is being tarnished by association. US presidential contender John McCain is saying that America needs a leadership 'to confront the transcendent challenge of our time: the threat of radical Islamic terrorism'. The words still ring in our ears from Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilisations, the book that in many ways triggered this paranoia that infects the politicians, the press and the public discourse. 'The underlying problem for the west is not Islamic fundamentalism, it is Islam,' he wrote.

Few, if any, in the western leadership seem to make the point that al-Qaeda is a deviant phenomenon within the Islamic world, just as Hitler was a deviant phenomenon within the Christian world. But Islam has a much better record, over the ages, of dealing with its deviants who take violence to excess. Islamic culture has never been tolerant of Nazism, fascism or communism. Christianity has spawned all three.

Of course, there have been many incidents in the long history of Islam when there have been large-scale losses of life. The massacres and starvation of the Armenians in 1915 still stir the waters of contemporary debate. But Islam has never spawned anything comparable with Hitler's systematic genocide of the Jews - indeed throughout its history Islam has been protective of Jews. Nor has it settled in other parts of the world and systematically obliterated other civilisations, as did Christian Spain with the Aztecs and Incas. Nor have Islamic societies created anything like South Africa's apartheid or the racist culture of the old American South. Unlike many Christian churches, the mosque has never separated people by race.