There are no differences

With Pat Robertson calling Islam 'satanic' and Falwell making sure that all the world knows he thinks Jews are going to hell, you might be forgiven for thinking that the various monotheistic religions are at each others' throats.

However, you'd be wrong.

The simple fact is that fundamentalists all over the world, whatever the flavor of their creed, essentially believe the same things.

• They believe that their beliefs should be the guiding ideology of the state; this is one of the many areas where Al Qaeda and the RNC wholeheartedly agree.

• They oppose, at a very basic level, any societal effort to place men and women on the same footing or to give women autonomy of choice on any level; in Iran, this involves, as just one example, a mandatory chador to remove visible femininity from the public space, in America, it finds expression in laws that mandate forced pregnancy.
  

• They abhor attempts by the non-fundamentalist majorities in their respective societies to establish secular norms via the legislative process; in New York City, for example, the Hassidim are in an uproar over an attempt by the City to ban a practice known as metzitzah b'peh, which involves a mohel orally sucking the blood resulting from ritual infant circumcision from the cut penis. Aesthetics aside, this practice also spreads herpes and has killed several children; but the fundamentalist community wants it maintained regardless. In short, ritual trumps health, just as the bible trumps evolution to others.
  

• All of them believe themselves to be under attack by modernity; and since all of them cherish founding myths involving persecution, this carefully nurtured siege mentality serves above all to create internal cohesion and discipline, giving the various fundamentalisms greater influence in their societies than they might otherwise have.
  

• All of them hate homosexuals, period.

• Interestingly, all of them are working together at some level. In America, there was, for a long time, a deep divide between Evangelicals and Catholics; today, the former go to the mat to elevate the latter to an unprecedented majority on the Supreme Court. In New York City, the only neighborhoods to go solidly for Bush (a Methodist) were the Hassidic areas, voting as usual in a block. It's only a matter of time before this ecumenical harmony in the service of the reactionary party also includes fundamentalist Muslims. [Update: for example, the Bush junta recently worked with Iran and Sudan, among others, to stop the accreditation of a gay rights organization at the United Nations. There is a community of interest of fundamentalists, as this demonstrates.]
  

In short, I'd posit that the real front lines are not between islam and Christianity, or even between Islam and Judaism; they run, rather, between the secular modernist majority - which, in America, includes everyone who thinks evolution is sound science and who embraces the empiricist-rationalist explanatory model, in short, 85% of the populace - and the forces of obscurantism and regression, clinging to their past and their scripture at the same time as they're hyper-empowered by the technology created by modernity.

It has been argued, rightly in my view, that the Muslim world needs a Reformation and an Enlightenment of its own. That said, the same is needed in Crown Heights and Nea Shearim (fundamentalist Hassidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Jerusalem respectively) and certainly in South Dakota, Kansas and Mississippi.

There is, and in my opinion should be, a place for religion in modernity. It is not that described in The Nation thus: "Casual observers of cable television news programming might be forgiven for assuming that Christianity is a religion characterized by a toxic combination of ignorant belligerence and whiny self-pity." It is also not the place desired by the various fundamentalists, as the touchstone of the state.

The fight to keep religion in its proper place is the real battle. I suspect that even Pat Robertson understands this.