Late last week, the Dutch politician Geert Wilders released his highly controversial film, Fitna, on the internet. Wilders is a conservative politician who has called the Koran a fascist book and denounced Islam for its violent teachings.  Public figures in Europe and the Middle East denounced the film before it was even released, fearing that it would feature an overtly disrespectful view of Islam. That it does not do. What it does feature, though, are several oft-quoted passages from the Koran calling on Muslims to kill or terrorize non-Muslims, interspersed with imams and Muslim “men on the street” praising said passages, as well as pictures and videos of Muslims putting them into practice. Thousands of Muslims called for Wilders’ death after Fitna was released. LiveLeak, the website hosting the film, felt compelled to remove it after receiving several death threats. The collection of graphic images, as well as many Muslims’ responses to the film, drives home a point: many Muslims really mean it when they say that they won’t accept people not accepting Islam. I think we need to start listening to them.

This, after all, is not the first time that Muslims worldwide have reacted belligerently to people criticizing Islam. After Pope Benedict XVI observed in 2006 that Islam views Allah as being beyond reason and condemned the prophet Mohammad for his use of violence, Muslims around the world demonstrated against the Pope, culminating in attacks against Christians in Iraq and the murder of a nun in Somalia. A year earlier, Muslims around the world violently protested the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten’s, publishing of several political cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammad as a terrorist. The year before that, the Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, was assassinated for making Submission, a short film which was critical of Islam’s treatment of women. These are only a few examples. There are others.

This is not to say that all, or even most, Muslims are violent or use violence to advance Islam. Quite clearly, they do not. And it is not to imply that other major world religions haven’t been associated with violence or had violence done in their names. Radical Jewish terrorists blew up the King David Hotel to force the British to leave Palestine and to support the creation of a Jewish state. Ongoing Hindu violence against Muslims and Christians in India threatens that country’s stability. Catholic-Protestant violence in Europe killed thousands of people after the Reformation. And, of course, there were the Crusades.

Yet it seems hard to deny that Islam, more so than other major world religions, has a serious violence problem, because while these other religions are only incidentally violent, Islam seems to be essentially violent. By that I mean that if you separate Judaism or Christianity or Hinduism from the violence in their histories, the essentials of those faiths still remain intact. If you separate Islam from the violence in its history, however, it becomes a radically different religion — and perhaps not even a religion at all.

Islam was spread by the sword for almost its entire first millennium of existence. What started as the mystical experience of one man in Mecca soon spread, through Mohammad’s wars of conquest, throughout the whole Arabian Peninsula. After Mohammad died, his successors used war to spread Islam west through the Middle East, into North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, and east into the old Persian Empire as far as present-day Pakistan. For nearly a thousand years Christian Europe had to fend off attacks from the Muslim caliphates. But — and this is the important point — so much of the Koran and its authoritative commentaries flowed out of those wars of conquest. If you stripped those conquests from Islam you’d have little left that we’d recognize today as Islamic, because Islam probably wouldn’t exist as a religion.

This account of Islam likely confuses many people, however, since the very word “Islam” means “peace.” Even as radical Muslims engage in terrorism, we hear protests from Muslims and non-Muslims alike that Islam is a religion of peace, not war. Muslim organizations like CAIR (the Council for American-Islamic Relations) complain that Muslims reject terrorism, but are still stereotyped as violent. Many of us must wonder if this is so. We see that most Muslims don’t commit acts of terror and we’re told that a majority of them don’t support terrorists. Many of us may conclude that Islam simply has a perception problem, that it truly is a peaceful faith that has been hijacked by a coterie of radicals.

And yet, we still must square such thoughts with examples like Fitna — a seventeen-minute film which for its first nine minutes does nothing more than present verifiable facts about the Koran and Muslim opinions. We must reconcile them with the efforts to impose sharia law in countries like Canada, the UK, Denmark, and the Netherlands. We must reconcile them with Islam’s centuries-old commitment to proselytizing through violent conquest. And, perhaps most importantly, we must reconcile them with the disturbing impression that many Muslims’ first reaction when Islam is questioned or insulted is to threaten violence.

I’ve written before on this website about the Muslims who violently protest that their faith isn’t violent. While such responses are ironical in the extreme, they are not funny. They’re deadly serious. Others have written about the need to take the many calls to violence in the Koran at face value. I firmly believe that such thinking is warranted. Given the growing numbers of Muslims in the West, and the demonstrated hostility of many of them to criticism of Islam, it’s important that we take them seriously. We have to consider that when they warn us to respect Islam or die, they really mean it.