Which is better?

Ramadan is the Muslim Lent. Muslims fast from June 6 to July 5 marking revelation of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad. Christians end their Lent in April with the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus.

The Islamic State urged Muslims to jihad this Ramadan. One Muslim in Orlando, Florida, took them up on it. He went to a gay bar, and opened fire with a semi-auto rifle and pistol on the patrons undulating to strobe lights and dance music. Most of them never knew what happened, but some were forced to lie in a bathroom, in the blood of the dead and dying, for hours before rescue by police.

The shooter was flagged from childhood for his violent actions. He worked for a large, multinational armed security firm, which gave him a license to carry weapons. He beat his first wife, but somehow that was not flagged or not enough to keep him from buying the weapons he killed with. He had a child with his second wife, but his hunger kept him going to gay bars, hooking up with gays in chat rooms, going out with a drag queen. His father, an expatriate Afghan politician, never knew about that side of him. He believed his son was straight, a trained marksman who went to mosque. His father supported the Taliban.

The Taliban now controls as much territory in Afghanistan as it did in 2002, when Bush 43 sent the U.S. military to knock it from the capitol and capture Osama Bin Laden. Members of the Taliban are Pashtun, one of many third world ethnic groups living in separate countries whose boundaries were drawn by the British a century ago. British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli invaded Afghanistan to probe the soft underbelly of the Russian bear. The British called harassing Russia the Great Game. Disraeli soon discovered Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. America is learning the same thing, as our 15-year war in that wasteland has produced nothing but dead and wounded warriors.

The Pashtun Taliban send young pubescent boys to seduce non-Pashtun police chiefs, warlords and generals, and lead them to their deaths. Under Sharia law, it is not easy for even a rich man to find a mistress. The powerful keep young boys hostage, often by parents’ permission, as sex slaves. They call it Bacha Bazi. The practice makes American troops sick, but they tolerate it, because we pretend to police the country for them.

The director of the FBI says his agency talked to the shooter twice and tried to seduce him with paid informants. An FBI informant can earn $100,000 for turning a Muslim into a jihadi. He wouldn’t turn for them, so they closed the book. Instead, the Florida bureau prosecuted a homeless man as a jihadi terrorist after filling his jumbled mind with dreams of killing crusaders. The score: FBI 1, real Jihadi, 102.

When they brought a prostitute to Jesus to be stoned, he said, “He who is without sin, cast the first stone.” When they brought prostitutes to Muhammad, tradition says he had them stoned. In Christian America, prostitutes are not stoned. Instead they are arrested and sometimes raped by police, and then cast out into the streets to work. Oakland and Richmond, California, are rocked by scandals involving police sex with underage prostitutes. In Sacramento and San Diego, websites that provided some safety for prostitutes to hook up with clients were shut down. That will force more to work the streets where violence by cops or johns is a greater danger.

War, religion, rape, sex and violence. Ramadan or Lent, it seems all the same.