This is going to be a short diary because I think it speaks for itself, and I have been writing too many of these diaries lately.
Chicken-Hawk-in-Chief Tony Blair who launched a war that was unprovoked, unsupported, and ended up killing hundreds of thousands of people almost ten years ago is a well known Christianist. So I was pretty flabbergasted when I read this:
‘There is a problem within Islam – from the adherents of an ideology which is a strain within Islam,’ he writes.
‘We have to put it on the table and be honest about it. Of course there are Christian extremists and Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu ones. But I am afraid this strain is not the province of a few extremists. It has at its heart a view about religion and about the interaction between religion and politics that is not compatible with pluralistic, liberal, open-minded societies.’
This man has literally no self-awareness. And there are millions of Muslims that live in the U.K. Can the actions of this one man be attributed to the entire Muslim community in Britain?
Glenn Greenwald on Bill Maher said it best with regards to these proclamations of Islam inferiority:
GLENN GREENWALD: How can you be a citizen of the United States, the country that has generated more violence and militarism in the world over the last five or six decades and say, 'Look at those people over there. They are incredibly violent.' We play a significant role in what is happening in the Middle East because we've been interfering and dominating that region is order to have access to their oil and protect Israel.
BILL MAHER: Well, I wasn't talking about violence, I was just talking about theocracy. That doesn't happen here.
GREENWALD: Okay, that doesn't happen here, but at the same time, Iran isn't invading lots of other countries and occupying them for a decade. Nor are fundamentalist Muslim countries like the United States is. These things are interlinked because we're continuously interfering in that part of the world. So to say --
MAHER: So it's all our fault?
GREENWALD: It's not all our fault, but when you send your military for 6 straight decades into other countries to bomb them, kill their children and women and innocent men, prop up dictators.
[snip]
GREENWALD: I don't think we should. I think we should take a lot of it. And there's been lots of bodies and corpses that have piled up in the name of Christianity and Judaism as well.
MAHER: Not recently.
GREENWALD: Have you heard about the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza for the last 50 years -- motivated in part by extremists views by Judaism? Or the wars in Europe? Or generals in the United States saying we have to go invade and destroy Iraq, a country of 26 million people, because our God is bigger?
Lots of religions, not just Islam, produce violence.
MAHER: Well, it's that silly liberal view that all religions are alike because it makes you feel good.
GREENWALD: No, it makes you feel good to say our side is better.
MAHER: No, it makes you feel good to put a crown on your head and say, 'I'm a good person, how do I prove that?'
GREENWALD: You get to ignore the responsibility that your own government has for the violence and instability in the world by saying, 'Look, it's that primitive religion over there that's to blame.'