This year is somewhat unusual. It’s one of those years that come around every now and again where three religions have their major and primary festivals at the same time. Easter and Passover are, as is often the case, celebrated at a similar time this year. There is often a calendrical match when Passover and Easter are celebrated because there are similarities between both festivals in that they are both spring festivals. Iconography about rebirth, new life, new starts are found in both Easter cards and other Easter materials for Christians and in the egg and the green leafed stuff found on the Seder Plate.

What makes this year different is that as well as having Christian Easter and Jewish Passover at the same time, there is also the matter of the Islamic Ramadan festival occurring at the same time. Ramadan moves around the civil calender because the Muslims never bothered to correct their wholly lunar calendar to ensure that Ramadan happened in the same season each year. The Hebrew calender was corrected to ensure that its spring festival stayed in the spring and didn’t wander around the year because of the disparity between the lunar and solar calendars. This is why Ramadan always appears at a different time of the year and is not fixed with regarding the Solar calendar.

The confluence of Easter, Passover and Ramadan this year gives us a chance to examine not what these festivals mean for each faith, but which faith has followers who are the most violent. As expected it is the followers of Islam whose festival, like their faith itself, can be seen as the most violent.

Neither Easter or Passover have elicited anything like the amount of religiously inspired violence as Ramadan has. Yes there are accidents and natural deaths and deaths by stupidity or circumstance that occur during Passover and Easter, but there is little or no violence meted out by either Christians or Jews because of the fact that it is Easter or Passover respectively. This wasn’t always the case as some of the more historically minded will no doubt point out and life for Jews at Easter in places like The Russian Empire under the Tsars for example was not good with Christians sometimes committing pogroms against Jews at Easter and being inspired to do so for religious reasons. However, that was then, a time that is now outside of living memory. Now things are much different. Neither Christianity nor Judaism have a massive religiously inspired death toll associated with their primary religious festivals .

Islam on the other hand. Well this is a different kettle of fish. Every year there is a death toll due to religiously inspired violence associated with Ramadan. It’s been higher in some years than in others but it’s always been there, at least in recent decades. Religious violence, something all but abandoned by modern mainstream Christians and Jews, is all too common for Islam. Ramadan especially seems to be a time when Muslims who have been religiously inspired to kill others, choose to do so, and kill they do, in the hundreds and sometimes thousands. The victims of Ramadan rampages are both Muslim and non-Muslim and none of them deserved to die at the hands of those who believed that Allah wanted them dead.

Over at the Religion of Peace site there is a sadly long list of Islamic religiously inspired atrocities along with some much needed muckraking into the world of those who would appease Islam and Islamic interests, for their own political or personal gain. Another useful feature of this site is their Ramadan death toll tracker called the ‘Ramadan Bombathon’. This is a running tally not just of the Islamic atrocities committed during Ramadan but also compares the Islamic death toll to those racked up by other religions and by political extremists. In every year I’ve been reading this feature I’ve never seen the ‘other religions’ or ‘political extremists’ death tolls go any where near the death tolls incurred by violent Islamic extremism. In 2020 the Ramadan death toll was 718, 2021 1103 deaths, 2022 1086 deaths.

This year, so far and at about the halfway point of Ramadan, the death toll is a relatively modest 427. We’ve got until the 21^st of April to go until Ramadan ends which is plenty of time for the worst followers of the worst parts of Islam to make their presence felt. The world might be lucky this year and the death toll for Ramadan might not rise too much above 427, or we could get more of what we’ve become used to which is a death toll approaching or exceeding one thousand. At this point we do not know how many Ramadan deaths there may end up being this year, but what we do know is that the Islamically inspired death toll will be far in advance of what other religions or even political extremists might achieve. On the other hand I’m pretty confident that the world will not see anything like the Islamic Ramadan death toll coming from members of either or both of the Christian and Jewish communities. This, unique among modern monotheistic religions, factor of religiously inspired mass murder that Islam has marks Islam out as different and let’s be honest here, it’s not a positive difference.

I’d love to see Ramadan as a festival of peace, but the reality is that it is not. It will not be peaceful until Islamic scholars and Islamic leaders put Islamic texts through the same critical theolgoical scrutiny as mainstream Christians and Jews have put their texts through. Until then Ramadan will be a time of death and destruction with the majority of victims being Muslims themselves.