Last night in Orange County I had one of my liveliest debates with atheist Christopher Hitchens and the Jewish radio host Dennis Prager. The debate--a sort of Christian-Atheist-Jew slugfest--was held at the Bat Yahm synagogue in Newport Beach. There was a sellout crowd of 1,500, with about 400 turned away.

The debate was unusual in that it involved not two but three different perspectives. Hitchens was particularly harsh in his exchanges with Prager, at one point accusing Prager of covering up for anti-Semitism. My exchanges with Hitchens were consistently sharp but also mutually respectful, and later Hitchens told me that I am one of the most formidable debaters that he has ever faced. I predict this debate will generate huge interest when it is posted on the web. After the debate Hitchens joined my wife and me at the bar where we downed two bottles of Pinot Noir and solved many of the world's problems.

Since our debate focused on God as understood from a Christian, Jewish and atheist perspective, missing from the event was a Muslim perspective. This is a pity, because one staple item of atheist rhetoric is the equation of Islamic extremism with Christianity. In my cross-examination I pressed Hitchens on this issue, and will let viewers watch our exchange for themselves and make up their own minds.

We find the equation between "Islamic fundamentalism" and "Christian fundamentalism" not only among the new atheists but also in the popular culture. Several weeks ago Christiane Amanpour of CNN did her special on "God's Warriors." The premise: The Abrahamic religions all lead to extremism. So Amanpour did three segments, one on Islamic extremism, one on Jewish extremism and one on Christian extremism.

Striking to the viewer, however, was the strained attempt to equate the three. Islamic extremism featured the 9/11 attacks, the Bali bombing, the London bombing, the Madrid bombing, and the list goes on. What about Christian extremism? Well, there was Christiane Amanpour in desperate search for the Christian Bin Laden, the Christian Al Qaeda, the Christian Hamas, the Christian Hezbollah, the Christian state currently run along the lines of post-Khomeini Iran.

Poor Christiane came up empty handed. So she was forced to locate marginal groups which would be repudiated by 99.9 percent of Christians and try to pass them off as the Christian equivalent of the Islamic radicals. I was especially interested to find out that there is an old guy in the hills of Montana who wants to blow up the world in the name of Jesus. Too bad he's broke and doesn't have any teeth. Still, one day he hopes to get a job and carry out his nefarious plans. I suppose this is the closest thing to a Christian Bin Laden. We are all supposed to be very afraid of this man!

One of the new atheists very cleverly termed 9/11 a "faith based initiative." But the witticism conceals an intellectual sleight-of-hand. Bush merely wants the government to be able to support faith-based charities on the same basis as it supports secular charities. What happened at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon seven years ago can hardly be placed in the same intellectual category.

Of late some of the new atheists are backing off from their fraudulent analogy between Islamic extremism and Christianity. This is a powerful blow to the new atheism, because so much of its relevance came from its ability to surf on the wave of current events and interpret modern terrorism as the expression of a generic religious impulse. In reality Bin Laden is more accurately compared to an atheist despot like Pol Pot. I realize the analogy is not entirely fair--to Bin Laden! After all, Bin Laden's death toll (several thousand killed over a dozen years) doesn't come closer to Pol Pot's 2 million killed in the space of three years.

Besides, Pol Pot was a Little League atheist compared to Mao and Stalin, whose death toll was in the tens of millions. When it comes to mass murder in the modern era, Islamic radicalism simply cannot keep up with atheism.