When I see that even now a great many Americans feel it’s their duty to parrot the lie that most Muslims are peace-loving people, I find myself wondering how many times these yokels have purchased the Brooklyn Bridge.

Nobody, after all, would suggest that every single Muslim in the world dances a jig each time jihadists tunnel into Israel with the aim of kidnapping and killing women and children or that they all celebrated the recent beheading of James Foley. But what proof do we have that they don’t? When you realize that Muslims in the west have never stopped donating to Islamic terrorist groups or stopped joining their ranks, why shouldn’t we suspect the worst of them?

I have been writing for years that people who claim to see an iota of difference between Nazism and Islam are fooling themselves, and the basis for their delusion is that they have been raised to regard one as a nationalist movement (profane) and the other as a religion (sacred). But in each case, they were a vile concoction of both, and both have sought world domination. Each boasted a bible (“Mein Kampf” in one case, the Koran in the other), and each was inspired by a loathsome degenerate (Hitler in one case, Mohammad in the other).

Speaking of Islam, I think it’s worth noting that the American-born Douglas McCain, who was killed while fighting on the side of ISIS, and the British-born Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, who apparently beheaded journalist James Foley, had both been rappers in their home country. Being a rap artist is not generally on the resume of those devoted to a cause that frowns on music, but I suppose you’d have to stretch the definition of music to its breaking point in order to include rap.

I knew that the difference between rap and crap is just one tiny letter, and that only illiterates would regard its lyrics as poetry. I also knew that it had the power to rot minds and destroy brain cells by the millions, but until Bary and McCain came along, I hadn’t realized that it could also lay waste to human souls.

What does it say about Islam that people born and raised in the nations that could boast of heritages that included Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Shakespeare, Dickens and Churchill, could produce such monsters? The silver lining is that McCain is dead and Bary very likely will soon join him. Then they can rap to their heart’s content for all eternity, competing to come up with new rhymes for “burning,” “fire,” “brimstone” and “Hades.”

Closer to home, we have our own problems. One of them is that we have an administration that saw fit to send three White House representatives to the memorial service for street thug Michael Brown, but not one person to the memorial for James Foley. But why would they? After all, they not only banished the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office, but snubbed the funeral service for Margaret Thatcher.

I was recently reminded that Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize even before he had time to move into the White House and unpack his autographed copy of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.” So far as the goofballs in Oslo were concerned, it was enough that he was a man of color and a left-winger who had defeated a Republican in a presidential election.

Some people were shocked that a man whose most memorable accomplishments as a state senator and a member of the U.S. Senate was setting records for voting “Present,” but not I. I felt he was every bit as deserving as such earlier recipients as Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Yasser Arafat. The fact is the easiest way in the world to tell if someone is a jerk is to find that he’s picked up a Nobel Peace Prize along the way. One can pretty much tell what Swedes think of Norwegians when you realize that the Peace Prize is the one they farmed out to them, while retaining Literature, Chemistry, Economics, Medicine and Physics, for themselves.

The sad truth is that the Norwegians always hand the Peace Prize to left-wing presidents, prime ministers, diplomats and high-sounding organizations, but the ingrates never gave it to the RAF or the U.S. military or to anyone, for that matter, who risked life and limb to rescue them from Nazi domination.

Even though Rand Paul is eager to cast himself as a clear-eyed realist and Hillary Clinton as a war hawk, my own take on the matter is that he’s a pinheaded isolationist who would have America remove itself from the world stage and allow the likes of Iran, Russia, ISIS, China and North Korea, to vie for world supremacy.

As for Mrs. Clinton, why would anyone believe anything she says about national defense? After all, not only is her contempt for the military legendary, but she now confesses that the only reason she supported the surge in Afghanistan was because her primary opponent in 2008 was opposed to it, and so, for purely political reasons, she felt it imperative to differentiate herself from Barack Obama.

Finally, I recently saw a 1994 movie on TV. It was “Corrina, Corrina,” and it starred Ray Liotta as the father of a young daughter who has just lost his wife, and Whoopi Goldberg as a housekeeper who fortuitously enters their lives.

The only reason the movie is worth mentioning is because at one point, Goldberg tells the seven-year-old girl that an angel took her mother to heaven. This enrages Liotta, who is a proud atheist. When his daughter asks him why he became angry, he tells her that talk about heaven and angels is the stuff that people tell each other to make them feel better. When she then says, “What’s wrong with that?” he has no answer.

Whenever I would hear professional atheists such as the late Christopher Hitchens debating such matters, my response was a big yawn. I mean, if a belief system gives people comfort at the very worst times in their lives and, oh by the way, helps to keep them morally centered, what is the downside?

Besides, it’s not something that Hitchens was in any position to debunk. In fact, once you got past the English accent and the polysyllabically-infested put-downs of Christians, it all came down to a way to pay for his booze and cigars.

In the final analysis, when it comes to deciding between doubters and believers, it can simply be a matter of aligning oneself with one group or the other. In other words, would you prefer to march into battle shoulder-to-shoulder with C.S. Lewis, Shakespeare, Bach, Voltaire, Descartes, Thomas Aquinas and G.K. Chesterton or join forces with such notable atheists as Brad Pitt, Mick Jagger, Jodie Foster, Jesse Ventura, Lance Armstrong, Howard Stern and Bill Maher?