Of course they fail to put the violent quotes in context. Mohammed was commanding his army of Muslims to kill, plunder and rape as they stormed their way out of the Arabian peninsula conquering new lands.
Via PJM:
A new “data-based” study published on Yahoo News, Huffington Post, and elsewhere purports to have proven that the Bible — including the New Testament — is more violent than the Quran.
From Tom McKay’s article about the study: “Fifty-eight percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Islam” thanks to a “laundry list of misinformation about the faith’s holy text, the Quran.” He continues:
“But a recent project by data analyst and research marketer Tom Anderson turns one common misconception on its head: that the Quran is more consumed by blood thirst than the Christian Bible. … Of the three books [Old Testament, New Testament, Quran], the project found, the Old Testament is the most violent, with approximately 5.3% of the text referring to “destruction and killing” — the Quran clocked in at just 2.1%, with the New Testament slightly higher at 2.8%…
According to Anderson, the findings challenge the popular notion among Westerners that Muslims subscribe to a particularly violent faith. Indeed, he concluded, “of the three texts, the content in the Old Testament appears to be the most violent.”
So this study suggests what Islam’s apologists have long claimed: that the Bible contains more violence and bloodshed than the Quran. That said, the intelligence and sincerity of anyone — including supposed scholars — citing this fact as proof that the Quran cannot incite violence more than the Bible is doubtful. For starters, this argument fundamentally ignores the context in which violence appears in all three scriptures.
Comparing violence in the Bible — both Old and New Testaments — with violence in the Quran conflates history with doctrine. The majority of violence in the Bible is recorded as history; a description of events. Conversely, the overwhelming majority of violence in the Quran is doctrinally significant. The Quran uses open-ended language to call on believers to commit acts of violence against non-Muslims. (See “Are Judaism and Christianity as Violent as Islam?” for my most comprehensive and documented treatment of this tired apologia.)