I’LL confess, I choked on my Wheaties when I heard Tony Abbott was calling for reformation and revolution in Islam. I choked on those things and spat them across the room.

I am more than usually certain he is not a recognised spiritual leader in that faith.

Should a Muslim leader seek to lecture a Christian congregation about, oh, I don’t know, institutional sexual abuse of children say? It’s hard to see how that would go down well.

But the more curious thing is that a conservative Catholic is now in favour of the Reformation, if only as a stick with which to beat Muslims.

The Reformation broke the Catholic Church’s monopoly on faith in Europe. But it did so at a staggering cost in loss of life.

Tens of millions died in a world with a population of around 500 million.

Let’s scale that up to the modern world. A wildly conservative Reformation death toll of 10 million is 2 per cent of 500 million.

The current population of the world is 7.3 billion, of which 2 per cent is 146 million people.

So reforming the Muslim faith with the same death toll as those nice Christians wreaked on each other (with pikes, swords, muskets and smoothbore cannons, no weapons of mass destruction, mind you) would see a death toll exceeding (I’m sorry but this really is the moment for block capitals) TWICE THE DEATH TOLL OF WORLD WAR II.

Completely disregarded by the former Prime Minister is that many scholars actually consider Islam to be in the middle of a reformation that began in the 18th century.

Compared to us Christians, they’re doing a relatively good job of keeping a lid on things. If you think of it that way, the current turmoil begins to make a lot more sense.

While it would be a good idea to put a thumb on the scale to help what we consider to be moderate Muslims in the struggle, let’s not forget how families react when passersby intrude into their fights.

Recently, we heard how Malcolm Turnbull had been confronted by SA submarine builders who wanted to know why the then-PM was such an idiot.

Malcolm reportedly explained that the then-PM was a Rhodes Scholar with multiple degrees and patently not an idiot.

“So why does he do so many stupid things?” came the reply.

One hopes that Mr Abbott has been caught up in the burblings of right-wing think tanks.

A more sinister explanation is that he’s trying to seed talking points to the bigoted wing-nuts of Australia, the ones Cory Bernardi recently described to Annabel Crabb as “whispering Australians”. Whispering because they’re afraid of consequences if reasonable people know what they think.

You can hear them now in their Facebook groups and the comment sections of Andrew Bolt and Piers Akerman.

“Oh, I’m tolerant, but those Muslims have never had a reformation.”

It sounds half smart to someone who doesn’t know much history.

In a world going apparently mad, it’s worth remembering the reported words of Germany’s Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck (all leaders could profit by applying a “What would OvB do?” test): “If Lord Palmerston sends the British army to Germany, I shall have the police arrest them”.

Rather than hectoring all Muslims, it might be better to let the police do their job with the tiny minority.