"In the name of God, a Fatwa against Salman Rushdie. In the name of God, murder in the Balkans. In the name of God, the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. In the name of God, the siege at Waco. In the name of God, Hindus and Muslims kill each other in India. In the name of God, bloody warfare between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. In the name of God, Shiites and Sunnis at each other's throats in Iraq and Iran, as are Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. In the name of God, a doctor is murdered because he believed in a woman's right to choose."
"In the name of God, what is going on?" she asked.
I asked the same question recently of Hawaii's nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, Professor Emeritus Rudolph J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii.
Those conflicts aren't really in the name of God, he said, they are in the name of power. There always will be ethnic and religious rivalries, he says, but they are softened by democratic governments.
The death toll in Northern Ireland may be under 300 because the governments North and South are democratic. When totalitarian leaders start such wars the dead often run into the hundreds of thousands - witness Burundi, Rwanda, Sudan and Somalia.
"Power Kills" is the title of his summing-up book to be published this year. Democracies dilute power. It is that simple. They let their people be heard and that also dilutes violence.
The core of Rummel's work at UH over several decades is the compilation of statistics showing absolutely that democracies, for all their faults, are more benign than totalitarian regimes. Their peacefulness can be estimated on a sliding scale that assesses the degree of democracy within a country. The freer the country, the more peaceful it is. Freedom of the press is a good guide.
No two democracies have made war on each other in this century. Totalitarian regimes are the main reason this century has seen four times as many people killed by their own governments as were killed in wars - 170 million versus less than 40 million.
Yes, people are executed in America and blacks used to be lynched and the Branch Davidians were burned out at Waco but the total is minimal compared to what has happened in totalitarian countries. Citizens of a democracy are empowered to press for peace, for a better environment and to competitively create more productive economies.
RUMMEL believes our foreign policy necessarily must zig and zag in response to events but should have two constant thrusts. The first is to promote democracy and thus widen the world's "zone of peace."
The second should be to constantly assess the intentions of national leaders worldwide, so we can be prepared to resist those who would use arms against us. They won't be other democracies, he is sure - not even those who are nuclear armed.
Until the whole world is democratic, he said, democracies will need arms to defend themselves against totalitarian powers. Until then retention of our role as the only superpower is in both our interest and the interest of others as a world stabilizer.
We should not be deluded by "in the name of God" wars, he says. They really are in the name of power.