What? You'd condemn Holy crusades?

You understand, my painter friend? The crusades?

Since the Crusades, many strange things have happened here.

Leopold of Austria has seized King Richard on his return from the Crusades.

At first, Europe welcomed these uninvited newcomers, figuring that the gray rat would help exterminate the black rat, which had ravaged Europe since the Crusades.

Should one apologize for the Crusades, for the destruction of German cities by the armies of King Louis the XIV in the seventeenth century, not to mention the armies of Napoleon? Wouldn t the result simply be to turn history into a perpetual cycle of contrition?

The West is not trying, as it did during the Crusades or the Imperialist conquests of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to impose its religion or values on the Arabs. Instead, the West is defending common values, such as freedom, respect for human life, and the rule of law.

The opposite is also true. Religion has led people to commit a long litany of horrendous crimes, from God s command to Moses to slaughter the Midianites men, women, boys, and non virginal girls through the Crusades, the Inquisition, innumerable conflicts between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and suicide bombers convinced that martyrdom will lead them to paradise.

The conflict over the succession of religious leadership following the death of the Prophet Muhammad nearly 1,400 years ago is the origin of the split between Sunni and Shia Islam. The battles between the Fatimids and the Abbasids, the Crusades, the Mongol invasion, the Ottoman conquest, and, of course, Western imperialism all serve as points of reference for today s struggles.

In India, as elsewhere, there will always be a choice between a world of edicts and crusades, where orthodoxies rule and foreign heresies are ruthlessly suppressed, and a world in which the virtues of tolerance, dissent, and cooperation are recognized and practiced. As it goes to the polls, India, with a sixth of the world's population, should offer an instructive example of the latter.

As the medieval knight Antonius Block returns from the wild goose chase of the Crusades and arrives on the rocky shore of Sweden, only to find the specter of death waiting for him, Mr. Teszler sat in the dark with his fellow students. And as death opened his cloak to embrace the knight in a ghastly embrace, I heard Mr. Teszler's tremulous voice Uh oh, he said, This doesn't look so good.