Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci interviewed Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. She wore a chador, the full-body covering required for Iran’s women at the time. As she debated the merits of this requirement with the religious leader, they both grew angry. Finally Fallaci pulled off the chador and said: “I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag now.”

Fallaci is almost 77 now, and she’s no less angry about the Islam religion. She has been so outspoken in Europe about the threat she feels Muslims pose to the rest of the world that she has faced charges under hate-crime laws. She has not backed down, according to a profile in last week’s New Yorker. She says she feels like a prophet. She believes that the high birth rate among Muslims, compared with the low birth rate among Europeans, means that the Muslims are invading with “children and boats instead of troops and cannons.”

Fallaci’s anti-Muslim sentiment got more fuel for its fire recently. In Canada, 17 Muslim men, some of whom are citizens of Canada, allegedly planned to behead the prime minister, shoot people on the street, take over media outlets and storm Parliament. The Associated Press reported that one suspect, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, gave hate-filled sermons at a Toronto mosque.

Muslim religious leaders in Canada immediately spoke out against the alleged violence plotted by young men claiming Islam as their religion. Sheik Husain Patel of the Canadian Council of Muslim Theologians told reporters that the accused were innocent until proved guilty, but that if the men are guilty it should serve as a wake-up call. Muslim leaders, he said, must better educate their young people that violence does not fit into the teachings of Islam.

After each terrorist act formulated or executed by Muslim men, religious leaders make statements that the terrorists do not represent the true Islam. Yet perception becomes reality. The tenets of Islam that teach hospitality, prayer and nonviolence are getting lost on the world stage. They are overshadowed by images of defiant young men being hauled into a Canadian courtroom. Conservative pundits and bloggers have taken on the mainstream press for failing to stress the fact that the men charged in Canada are all Muslims.

The perception that a majority of Muslims are violent could translate into immigration quotas and visa restrictions that make it extremely difficult for Muslim young people to travel throughout the globe in search of education and career opportunities.

As anti-Muslim sentiment spreads through conservative commentary and other sources – Fallaci’s anti-Islam books are best-sellers in Europe – religious leaders must be called upon to prevent violence as it brews within a minority of their young people. The terrorist suspects, though welcomed in Canada, which preaches and teaches tolerance, apparently felt the strongest kinship with their religion and not their country.

So Muslim religious leaders in Canada are wise to take the lead in educating their young people that violence runs contrary to the true teachings of Islam, and religious leaders in the United States and Europe should continue to do the same.

The religious leaders have the voice. They have the respect. Ultimately, they may be the ones with the most power to stop the madness that is terrorism.