So, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, formerly Joseph Michael Hall, has been identified as the person who committed the shooting in Canada that killed Cpl. Nathan Cirillo. And it turns out that he is a recent convert to Islam.

But you know what? Forget about Islam and terrorism for the moment.

Think about Germany and fascism.

From the 1920s to the 1940s, fascism (in the form of Naziism) was big in Germany. This doesn’t mean all Germans were fascists, or that all fascists were German (many were Italian, for instance). Anti-Semitism also ran rampant there, even though lots of Germans didn’t loathe Jewish people and lots of anti-Semites were not German.

But it’s still the case that fascism and anti-Semitism were significantly more prominent in Germany than in most other parts of the world at that time. It’s not bigotry against Germans, past or present, to point that out. It’s just history.

Since then, things have changed. Germany today doesn’t come anywhere close to leading the world’s fascist or anti-Semitic movements. (Recently, one Israeli even prodded his countrymen to move to Germany for the lower cost of living.) It would be yet another hasty generalization to think that there are no German, fascist, anti-Semites around anymore, but it’s clear there’s been a change for the better in Germany.

And now back to the shootings in Ottawa, Canada’s capital.

Though details are still coming in, it looks like we’ll again be arguing about the link between Islam and terrorism. It would be great if we could just cut to the chase and agree that it’s like the link between Germany and fascism: it exists, but it’s not a complete overlap and it’s not eternal.

Not all Muslims are terrorists (in fact, it’s a mere fraction of a percent that are), and not all terrorists are Muslim. But the lion’s share of the world’s terrorism these days is done by people who claim to be Muslims and who commit acts of terror in the name of Islam. Terrorism just isn’t as prevalent among any other religion right now.

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