Last week, a group of Israeli rabbis signed a halachic statement -- the Jewish equivalent of a Muslim fatwa -- declaring that it is permissible for Jews to sell or rent houses to non-Jews. Ordinarily, this would not count as news, since Christians and Muslims buy and sell real estate in Israel all the time. But in this case, the statement comes as an important rebuttal to a rival group of Israeli rabbis, who recently declared that selling or renting land to non-Jews comprises an impermissible violation of Deuteronomy 7:1-2 (which instructs believers to "make no covenant" with other nations in the Holy Land).

The new halachic statement is welcome: Israel is a Jewish state, but it is also a pluralistic one in which Jewish, Muslim and Christian citizens live peaceably (for the most part) side by side. The religious ruling against transferring land to non-Jews not only urged an infringement on the rights of religious minorities, it also was an embarrassment to all those supporters of Israel (including this newspaper) who have stood up for the country precisely because it is a democratic, pluralistic society surrounded by Arab dictatorships.

Obviously, the question of who may buy and lease Israeli land has no direct impact on the lives of most Canadians. But the controversy is symbolic of a larger issue, which is why we have made it the subject of our first editorial of 2011. Tolerance of minority communities -- including not only minority religions, but also ethnicities and tribes -- is a defining quality of what we call "Western civilization." Areas of the world in which such tolerance is widely exhibited tend to be far more humane, peaceable and prosperous than those where it isn't.

This helps explain why much of the Muslim world remains mired in backwardness and warfare. Anti-Christian and anti-Semitic bigotry remain so common in many Muslim countries as to be taken for granted. As Martin Gilbert showed in his 2010 book In Ishmael's House, the Muslim nations of the Middle East and North Africa had a multitude of prosperous Jewish communities until the 1950s. Now, these countries are virtually Judenrien -- even as Israel has remained home to over a million Arab Muslims. Iraq, the West Bank and Lebanon have been hemorrhaging Christians for years. Sudan's Islamist rulers have shown themselves incapable of dealing with their country's Christian and pagan southerners as anything except slaves. Pakistan is an unsafe place for anyone who doesn't happen to be Sunni Muslim -- even as majority Hindu India remains a secure home for about 200 million Muslims, Sikhs and Christians.

It is true that, at their abstract best, all the great religions proclaim a similar message of peace and brotherly love. But in practice, not all religious communities embrace this message with the same conviction. This has been a special problem for Islam, which has institutionalized the persecution -- and sometimes the slaughter -- of non-Muslims in its lore and religious law.

Consider, for instance, the plight of Egypt's Copt Christians, 21 of whom were slaughtered on New Year's Eve in a suicide bombing attack against Alexandria's al-Qiddissin church.

The attack does not come in a vacuum. A few months ago, a high-profile Egyptian Islamist appeared on al-Jazeera and accused the Copts of "stocking arms and ammunition in their churches" -- all in furtherance of an Israeli conspiracy. Since his outburst, there have been numerous mass demonstrations against Copts in Egypt -- including one whose participants burned an effigy of the Coptic Pope, Shenouda III, while chanting, "Shenouda, just wait, we will dig your grave with our own hands." Such hate speech against non-Muslims is so common in Islamic nations that it barely rates a mention in Western news reports.

No religion is entirely free of incitement against non-believers. The aforementioned Deuteronomy 7:1-2, for instance, reads as follows: "When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee ... And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them." Like verse 9:5 of the Koran -- "fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them" -- these words can be taken by believers as a sort of divine licence to kill. But the vast majority of modern Christians and Jews no longer follow the literal meaning of such injunctions.

Nothing would do more to defuse the "clash of civilizations" than the emergence of an analogous reform movement among the followers of Muhammad.