Well I ask the question was Islam being represented when the two Israeli army reservists took a wrong turn, were seized by a mob, had their eyes gouged out, and so on -- with the delirious crowd delighting in the murderers who appeared at the window of the second-story building where the murders took place, showing their blood-stained hans.

Nor was Islam being represented when two Israeli boys were being beated to death beyond recognition in a cave.

Nor was Islam being represented when a killer murdered Wasfi al-Tal, the Jordanian Prime Minister, and bent down to drink his blood.

Nor was Islam being represented when 68 tourists were massacred at Luxor -- and their Islamic killers killing them in the name of Islam and uttering Islamic quotations did not, this time, bend down but simply licked the blood from their hands.

Nor was Islam being represented when Iranian women were stoned to death, or Afghani women trampled to death not in secret, but by the Taliban in large stadiums, with crowds assembled to cheer.

Nor was Islam being represented when elderly writers were decapitated in Iran by enforcers of the Islamic Republic, or when Ali Dashti, author of "Twenty-Six Years," was tortured in prison, and then released to die.

Nor was Islam being represented when in the Sudan, even though the Shari'a was not then in full force, it was used to "fill in the lacunae" (in Ibn Warraq's phrase) of the Sudanese legal code, the aged famously peaceful Mahmoud Mohammed Taha (who in his own writings never could quite recognize the full effect of Islam, and indeed wished to spread it "peacefully") was executed for apostasy.

Nor was Islma being represented when throughout the Islamic world there were celebrations, raucous laughter in Beirut, sheep and goats being slaughtered for festive gatherings in Saudi Arabia, car horns being tooted in Cairo, and delirious dances of delight all over Gaza and the West Bank, when the fantastic news, the truly wonderful news, about 9/11 was reported all over the Muslim world. The protectors of the Muslim "image" could do nothing to keep the reporters from the Wall Street Journal (on Hamra Street, in cosmopolitan Beirut), or the BBC's Frank Gardner (in Cairo), or other reports from everywhere in the Muslim world (which Muslim world has tried to erase the memory of those celebrtations, those feasts, that car-honking, those dances). The only place, tellingly, in a Muslim country where there was any expression of sympathy was in Iran, and that came from those who had suffered from Islamic rule, from the Islamic Republic itself, and were disinclined to celebrate this heroic "victory" of Islam over the Great Satan, or at least some of the workers, in an office building, in the major metropolis located in that Great Satan.

"Nor was Islam being represented...."

No, you fill it in yourself. The mother and her four little girls executed at point-blank range, the murder of Sadat, the murder of Theo van Gogh, the attempted murder of Pope John Paul II (as leader of the Infidels), the beating to death of Hindus who make the mistake of passing by a mosque as Friday Prayers let out in Bangladesh, the murder of Christians in the Moluccas or East Timor --- fill it in yourself, with as much as you can remember. But of course, we only began to pay attention to these things in the last few years. And how much must have gone on, in the years, the decades, the centuries before, that no one paid attention to, no one televised, no one reported on. So it never happened.