Readers may recall that during the Vietnam War, US soldiers were wont to justify their presence in that country by claiming they were there to ‘kill a Commie for Christ’. 

Before attempting to unpack this phrase, let me suggest that it encapsulates the very essence of the relationship between religion and war. I also suggest that it offers at least a sliver of hope that the historically deeply intertwined relationship between the two might one day be severed.

In October 2011, Dylan Ratigan wrote an article for the HuffPost entitled ‘How Did Our Oil Get Under Their Sand?’ Written some eight years after the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Ratigan argued that ‘the only real consistency in policy-making is Washington’s commitment to war and oil, and increasingly often, war for oil.’ Suppose this is an accurate description of at least one of the US government’s major motivations for the Iraq War. In that case, it’s a far cry from the initial rationale for that war presented to the American people.

During an interview on CNN on September 8, 2002, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice infamously warned that Saddam Hussein could be close to producing a nuclear weapon. When asked just how close Saddam was to ‘developing a nuclear capacity’, Rice replied: ‘The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.’

In contrast to Rice’s assertion, Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, reported the same day that there was no ‘smoking gun’ inasmuch as the Bush administration had failed to substantiate its case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Ritter’s conclusion was later substantiated prior to the war by onsite inspections conducted by both the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency.  

Needless to say, the testimony of Scott Ritter and other reputable organisations did nothing to dissuade the Bush administration from invading Iraq on March 19, 2003. The result would be the violent deaths of between 268,000 and 295,000 people between March 2003 and October 2018. It also did nothing to dissuade many Christian clergy in the US from voicing their full support for the invasion. For example, Charles Stanley, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta and a former Southern Baptist Convention president, stated in a sermon broadcast internationally on TV: ‘Throughout Scripture, there is evidence that God favors war for divine reasons and sometimes uses it to accomplish His will. He has also given governments and their citizens very specific responsibilities in regards to this matter.’ 

Further, Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, noted that ‘Most evangelicals in America subscribe to the theological position called ‘Just War Theory,’ that it is morally justified to go to war under certain conditions.’ Similarly, Prison Fellowship founder Charles Colson, a Baptist, argued in 2002 that the classical definition of Christian just war theory should be ‘stretched’ to accommodate a new age in which terrorism and warfare are intertwined. Colson alleged that ‘out of love of neighbor, then, Christians can and should support a preemptive strike’ on Iraq to prevent Iraqi-based or -funded attacks on the United States or its allies. Colson was one of the signatories to the Land letter, a letter sent by several evangelical Christian leaders to Bush giving their ‘just war’-based support to the invasion of Iraq.

As the above quotations indicate, one of the most frequent justifications for Christian support of war, shared by Catholics and Protestants alike, is the belief in ‘just wars’. Christian just war theory, first developed by Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430) and later by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), was designed to provide a reliable guide for determining if a specific war was in accord with the teachings of Jesus Christ. Laying aside what Jesus actually said about the use of violence for the moment, just war doctrine clearly empowered the Pope, as Vicar of Christ on earth, to determine which war, if any, the faithful should fight (and die) in.

Just war theory, at its most basic, declares that a war must be fought for a just cause, i.e., it must correct a grave, public evil. Further, only duly constituted public authorities may wage war exclusively for the reasons set forth as a just cause. Arms may not be used in a futile cause or in cases where disproportionate measures are required to achieve success. Finally, force may be used only after all peaceful alternatives have been seriously tried and exhausted and the force used must be proportional to the injury suffered. That is to say, the harm caused by the war must not be greater than the harm to be eradicated.

If one believes that the use of force is sometimes unavoidable, it is difficult to fault just war theory, at least at the theoretical level. But what of historical practice? In the long history of the Roman Catholic Church, has the Church, i.e., the Pope, ever formally declared that even one of the numerous wars occurring since the adoption of just war doctrine is ‘unjust’? The surprising answer is ‘no’. No Pope has ever issued a formal declaration using their full papal authority to categorically label a specific war as unjust. Not even in the Second World War did Pope Pius XII see fit to formally declare that Nazi Germany, with its sizable Catholic population, was fighting an unjust war. That said, it is true that numerous Popes have used their moral and spiritual authority to speak out strongly against certain wars. For example, Pope John Paul II was strongly opposed to the Iraq War. Nevertheless, he, too, failed to issue a formal declaration explicitly stating that that war was unjust.

What of the opposite case, i.e., have any Popes declared that certain wars have been ‘just’? Here the answer is an unambiguous ‘yes’. Successive Popes declared the multiple Crusades of the late 11^th to 13^th centuries to be just wars. At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II framed the very First Crusade as a penitential act, a holy pilgrimage, and a just war to reclaim the Holy Land and protect Eastern Christians from Muslim rule. Urban further promised spiritual rewards, including indulgences (remissions of sins), to those who took up the sword and the cross.

Following in Urban’s footsteps, various Popes issued bulls (formal papal decrees) supporting and legitimising the Crusades. For example, Pope Eugenius III issued the bull Quantum praedecessores in 1145, calling for the Second Crusade, and Pope Innocent III issued Post miserabile in 1198, urging the launch of the Fourth Crusade. These papal bulls not only called for the Crusades but also outlined the spiritual benefits, protections, and financial support to be had by those who participated in them. They promoted the Crusades by emphasising themes of Christian duty, divine favour, and spiritual rewards, further reinforcing the just war narrative.

Today, thanks to a reconsideration of the historical relationship between Christians and Muslims set in motion by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the Church has undergone a major change in its outlook. In 1976, Paul Johnson, an English Catholic historian, described the Crusades as follows:

The Crusades were not missionary ventures but wars of conquest and primitive experiments in colonization; and the only specific Christian institutions they produced, the three knightly orders, were military… A Crusade was in essence nothing more than a mob of armed and fanatical Christians. Once its numbers rose to over 10,000 it could no longer be controlled, only guided. It might be used to attack Moslems, or unleashed against Jews, or heretics… The fall of Jerusalem [in 1099] was followed by a prolonged and hideous massacre of Moslems and Jews, men, women and children… In general, the effect of the Crusades was to undermine the intellectual content of Islam, to destroy the chances of peaceful adjustment to Christianity, and to make the Moslems far less tolerant: crusading fossilized Islam into a fanatic posture.

In short, over the centuries just war doctrine has been, at least in practice, little more than a moral fig leaf to disguise an age-old pattern, i.e., what we (the Church and its adherents) do is by definition ‘just’ (no matter how horrendous) and what others do is not. Just how far just war doctrine varies from, if not violates, Jesus’ teachings is clear when we turn to the New Testament. Jesus not only advocated non-violence but directed his followers to love one’s enemies. Key passages include the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ and urges his followers to turn the other cheek if they are attacked. These teachings were foundational for early Christians, with substantial evidence suggesting that early Christian communities leaned heavily towards pacifism. Early Church fathers like Tertullian (c. 155 – c. 220), for example, argued that Christians should not participate in military service, stating that ‘Christ, in disarming Peter, disarmed every soldier.’

Nevertheless, by the time of Constantine I in the 4th century, Christianity was becoming enmeshed with the militaristic Roman state. As a result, the Church’s stance on violence and military service began to change. It was this change that prompted figures like Augustine to a shift in thinking, accommodating the realities of Christians to the political power of the state. Note, too, that this shift not only led to Christianity’s acceptance by the Roman state, but it greatly enhanced the influence, prestige, and wealth of the prelates themselves.

As for Christianity and war specifically, one of the most momentous changes occurred when, in the aftermath of Constantine’s victory at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in October 312 (which he came to attribute to the support of the Christian God), he agreed to exempt Christian clergy (but not laity) from service in the Roman army, among other benefits. Constantine did this in exchange for the clergy’s commitment to pray for the victory of his soldiers. This marked the beginning of the military chaplaincy we have today and explains the origins of why in the UK and US, for example, chaplains remain unarmed even as they meet the ‘spiritual needs’ of soldiers on the battlefield.

The importance of the role of military chaplains is explained in the following article that appeared in the Associated Press in 2004 during the Iraq War:

As American troops cope with life—and death—on a faraway battlefield, military chaplains cope with them, offering prayers, comfort and spiritual advice to keep the American military machine running… Chaplains help grease the wheels of any soldier’s troubled conscience by arguing that killing combatants is justified.

Capt. Warren Haggray, a 48-year-old Baptist Army chaplain said: “I teach them from the scripture, and in the scripture I can see many times where men were told…to go out and defeat the enemy. This is real stuff. You’re out there and you gotta eliminate that guy, because if you don’t, he’s gonna eliminate you.” [Emphasis mine]

Note, too, that it is not just military chaplains who ‘grease the wheels’ of those who are engaged, directly or indirectly, in the killing business. That is to say, those who order soldiers into battle also benefit from Christianity’s alliance with the state. For example, at the time of the Spanish-American War in 1898, following Spain’s defeat and America’s takeover of the former Spanish colony of the Philippines, President McKinley invited a group of Methodist church leaders to the White House in 1899. He told them:

I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way—I don’t know how it was, but it came … that there was nothing left for the US to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift them and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly, and the next morning I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department (our map-maker), and I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States.

The Spanish, albeit Roman Catholics, had used the same ‘Christianizing’ mission to justify their own colonisation of that country from 1565. Nevertheless, none of the US Protestant clergy present opposed the colonialist decision of a president who had ‘went down on [his] knees’ to ask for divine guidance. In the Philippine-American War that followed between 1899 and 1902, the total number of Filipino casualties is estimated to have been between 220,000 and 250,000—all in the name of being uplifted, civilized, and ‘Christianized’ (i.e., ‘Protestantized’) by the US. The unity of Christianity and the state that began under Constantine has for many centuries provided both spiritual and material blessings for Christian soldiers, their political rulers, and their clergy throughout the world, and not only in the US.

At this point, I would not be surprised if some readers may be thinking, ‘Why is the author of this article so relentless in his criticism of Christianity? Wasn’t he once a Christian missionary in Japan? Is it perhaps because, now that he’s a Buddhist priest, he thinks Buddhism is so different from Christianity, i.e., a true religion of peace?’

While the author did once labour under that misapprehension, it is no longer the case, for like all world religions, Buddhism, despite its undeserved reputation as a religion of peace, is not substantially different when viewed in its actual historical practice. One of the first times I realised this was when I read a quotation from D.T. Suzuki, famous for his introduction of the (Rinzai) Zen sect of Buddhism to the West.

At the time of Imperial Japan’s attempt to colonise Korea, leading to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, Suzuki wrote an English-language article entitled ‘A Buddhist View of War’. He concluded the article with the following appeal to Japan’s soldiers:

When our ideals clash, let there be no flinching, no backsliding, no undecidedness, but for ever and ever pressing onwards. In this kind of war there is nothing personal, egotistic, or individual. It is the holiest spiritual war… Let us then shuffle off this mortal coil whenever it becomes necessary, and not raise a grunting voice against the fates… Resting in this conviction, Buddhists carry the banner of Dharma over the dead and dying until they gain final victory.

Simply stated, Suzuki was exhorting Japanese soldiers to simply die without complaint in ‘the holiest spiritual war’ since their deaths would ensure that the Dharma (i.e., Buddhism) reigned supreme. Placed within historical context, Suzuki’s admonition is unsurprising inasmuch as Suzuki’s own Zen master, Shaku Sōen, a Buddhist military chaplain in the same conflict, said essentially the same thing. In explaining the motivation for his service, Sōen wrote:

I wished to have my faith tested by going through the greatest horrors of life, but I also wished to inspire, if I could, our valiant soldiers with the ennobling thoughts of the Buddha, so as to enable them to die on the battlefield with the confidence that the task in which they are engaged is great and noble.

In the preceding quotation, if one were to replace ‘the ennobling thoughts of Buddha’ with ‘the ennobling thoughts of Christ’, I suggest you would have, at least doctrinally speaking, a nearly identical stance.

Further, when Leo Tolstoi, the famous Russian author and pacifist, sent a letter to Sōen asking him to sign a joint statement denouncing the war between their two peoples, Sōen responded:  

Even though the Buddha forbade the taking of life, he also taught that until all sentient beings are united together through the exercise of infinite compassion, there will never be peace. Therefore, as a means of bringing into harmony those things that are incompatible, killing and war are necessary.

In the following years, as Imperial Japan continued its colonisation of additional Asian countries, Buddhist support for this effort, on the part of all of Japan’s many Buddhist sects, became ever more strident. It reached the point that even the fundamental Buddhist precept proscribing the taking of life proved no impediment to those espousing support for Japan’s war effort. For example, in 1943, at the height of the Second World War, Sōtō Zen master Yasutani Haku’un wrote:

One should, fighting hard, kill everyone in the enemy army. The reason for this is that in order to carry [Buddhist] compassion and filial obedience through to perfection it is necessary to assist good and punish evil… Failing to kill an evil man who ought to be killed, or destroying an enemy army that ought to be destroyed, would be to betray compassion and filial obedience, to break the precept forbidding the taking of life.

Not content with advocating the killing of the enemy army, Yasutani, like the Nazis, found yet another group to demonise—the Jews. Yasutani wrote:

We must be aware of the existence of the demonic teachings of the Jews… They are caught up in the delusion that they alone have been chosen by God and are [therefore] an exceptionally superior people… The result of all this is a treacherous design to usurp [control of] and dominate the entire world, thus provoking the great upheavals of today. It must be said that this is an extreme example of the evil resulting from superstitious belief and deep-rooted delusion.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about D.T. Suzuki, Yasutani Haku’un, and the many other wartime Japanese Zen Buddhist leaders is that even today large numbers of Western Zen Buddhists continue to revere them as the very embodiment of ‘enlightenment’. And lest there are readers who think that statements like the above are limited to either wartime Japanese Zen masters or Japanese Buddhist leaders in general, we need only look at the more recent statement of Thai monk Kitti Wuttho who, in 1976 in the aftermath of a massacre of leftist protesters, claimed: ‘Killing communists is not killing persons because whoever destroys the nation, the religion, or the monarchy, such bestial types are not complete persons. Thus we must intend not to kill people but to kill the Devil (Mara); this is the duty of all Thai.’ Based on this statement, one can assume Venerable Wuttho would have had no objection to the statement ‘Kill a Commie for Buddha’.

Were space available, I could give examples of similar statements made by the leaders of all the world’s major faiths. With regard to Islam, for example, on 23 April 2004, the well-known Iraqi Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr encouraged his followers to rise up against the US occupation of Iraq. He said:

Tell America, tell all the world, tell the Governing Council, that I have God by my side and they have the devil by theirs, and to my followers, I say, do not think we are not powerful. We can fight and defeat anyone!

A few months later, he crowed:

The only reward for those who make war on Allah and on Muhammad, his messenger, and plunge into corruption, will be to be killed or crucified or have their hands and feet severed on alternate sides, or be expelled from the land.

Judaism, too, is no exception to religion-endorsed warfare, as revealed in the current mass murder of Palestinians being carried out by the Jewish state of Israel. While contemporary statements by Israeli leaders calling the Palestinians ‘human animals’ and the like are well known, it is important to recall that a denial of the shared humanity of Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews has long been the staple of some Israeli Jewish rabbis.

In a 2001 sermon, the now deceased Ovadia Yosef, then the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel and a founder of the ultra-orthodox Shas religious political party, exclaimed: ‘May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them… It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones.’ Twenty-three years later, Rabbi Yosef’s words are being enacted by the Israeli military in Gaza.

Finally, readers will recall that I found a sliver of hope in the phrase ‘Kill a Commie for Christ’. By this, I meant that history suggests that when we see the ‘other’ as an extension of, or a reflection of, our self, we cannot easily kill them. Instead, we must first believe (or be led to believe) that the ‘other’, in this case, the ‘Commie’, is the very incarnation of evil while at the same time believing (or being led to believe) that we are the ‘good guys’ (and increasingly ‘good gals’) killing for a ‘righteous cause’, e.g., on behalf of Jesus, the ‘Prince of Peace’.   

But what happens when soldiers discover that the enemy is actually an extension of themselves? That they are fellow human beings with the same wants, desires, fears, and, indeed, weaknesses? In this connection, I recall my own personal experience as a civilian college instructor in the US Navy’s Program for Afloat College Education. In 1980 I was assigned to teach on board the USS Kirk, a destroyer escort homeported in Yokosuka, Japan. In addition to the Japanese language, I taught a course on modern Chinese history as the ship patrolled the Taiwan Strait on a ‘peace-keeping mission’.

At the beginning of the course, my sailor-students expressed interest in learning more about their putative enemy, the ‘ChiComs’ (derogatory GI slang for Chinese Communists). Knowing of their prejudice, I chose Edgar Snow’s famous work Red Star Over China as the course text due to its sympathetic portrayal of the Communist guerrilla movement led by Mao Tse-tung (aka Mao Zedong). Sailors were shocked to learn, for example, that in the late 1930s, Mao’s opponent, Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist Chinese and a professed Christian, expressed his admiration for fascism and believed that it held potential for China’s future development. ‘So we’re here in the Taiwan Strait risking our lives to defend fascism?’ they asked incredulously.

Toward the end of the class one of the sailors, having long abandoned the term ‘ChiCom’, said:

‘You know, Professor, if I’d been in the position of impoverished, landless Chinese peasants, faced with the choice of supporting either Chiang and his landlord backers or Mao, I would have become a Communist guerrilla, too!’ Other students in the class nodded in agreement. Needless to say, the purpose of the class was not to create ‘Communist guerrillas’ but, rather, to understand what led impoverished Chinese youth to become revolutionaries.

For this reason, I was heartened to see that with the knowledge they had acquired the sailors came to recognize the humanity, and understand the motives, of those who heretofore had been presented to them as evil incarnate. However, following the voyage, I was fired from my teaching position at the direction of the headquarters of the Seventh Fleet in Japan. The headquarters wrote my employer, Chapman College, explaining that ‘Brian Victoria is considered a threat to military order and discipline and must never be allowed to teach on board a Seventh Fleet ship again.’ So it goes…

Readers of Part One will recall that I identified the ongoing ‘tribal mentality’ of Homo sapiens as the root cause of our willingness to kill the ‘other’ in ever more massive numbers and with ever more lethal means. While all of today’s major religions claim to espouse universal truth and promote peace, when push comes to shove, religious leaders, almost without exception, resort to a tribal mentality that endorses if not promotes the murderous actions of their tribe’s (aka nation’s) soldiers. In doing so, they provide both their political leaders and the soldiers under their direction with the belief that they are acting righteously, ethically, with worthy goals that justify the means, no matter how cruel and heartless they may be.

Religious leaders also typically assure soldiers’ next of kin that in the event their loved ones fall in battle, they will be rewarded with some form of an afterlife, e.g., eternal life in the heaven of Christianity or rebirth in Buddha Amitābha’s ‘Pure Land’ in the case of Buddhism. At the same time, religious leaders enjoy the respect and approbation of their tribe/nation, for even should ‘their side’ lose the war, religious leaders are there to offer moral support and comfort, eulogising the patriotic ‘selflessness’ of the fallen and assuring their loved ones that the fallen have gone to a ‘better place’ and are ‘at peace’. In short, whether the war is won or lost, religious leaders, who need not risk their own lives on the battlefield, typically end up as the ‘winners’.

Given this, is there any hope?

In light of the ongoing, and widespread, strength of the tribal mentality of Homo sapiens, there is only one solution. First, we need to educate both ourselves and others regarding the true nature of conflicts (almost always fought in the self-interest of the rich and powerful on both sides).  Thereafter, we need to educate as many as possible to see the same humanity in others as they see in themselves, regardless of differences in skin colour, ethnic or national identity, religious affiliation (or lack thereof), gender, gender orientation, etc. Should we fail to do this, we would be well to recall the words Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke in his Christmas Sermon of Sunday, December 24, 1967:

[We] must either learn to live together as brothers [and sisters] or we are all going to perish together as fools.

Related reading

White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser

Reproductive freedom is religious freedom, by Andrew Seidel and Rachel Laser

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

Secular conservatives? If only… by Jacques Berlinerblau

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp

Image of the week: Filippino Lippi’s ‘Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas over the Heretics’, by Daniel James Sharp

How the Roman Empire became Christian: Catherine Nixey’s ‘The Darkening Age’ and ‘Heresy’ reviewed, by Charles Freeman

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

The roots of political Buddhism in Burma, by Hein Htet Kyaw

Britain’s liberal imam: Interview with Taj Hargey, by Emma Park

The radicalisation of young Muslims in the UK: an ongoing problem? by Khadija Khan

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? by Ralph Leonard

Israel’s war on Gaza is a war on the Palestinian people, by Zwan Mahmod

The post Can Religion Save Humanity? Part Two: Killing Commies for Christ appeared first on The Freethinker.

All this, to my mind, underscores the need for a much more robust secularism in the UK. Perhaps we ought to start with the Church of England? The CoE, after all, was the original—and, thus far, the single most successful—sectarian religious group dedicated to imposing on the rest of us. Without such privilege enshrined in our law and state, other groups will have a much weaker foundation for their own claims to special treatment. ~ Daniel James Sharp, Editor

In his first address to the nation as prime minister, Keir Starmer promised that his government will ‘unite our country’.

This must be a priority for our new PM. The 2024 election campaigning and its result keenly illustrated why.

Rishi Sunak’s call for a general election predictably sparked a flurry of wishlists for the next government from myriad groups. But this election’s lobbying frenzy was overcast by a worrying shadow of sectarianism.

A coalition of Hindu organisations released a ‘Hindu Manifesto’ which said linking Hinduism to issues of caste and misogyny in India could be considered ‘Hinduphobia’, and that Hinduphobia should be criminalised.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews published a ‘Jewish Manifesto’ calling for future MPs to allow religious freedom to trump other rights, by protecting the controversial practises of ritual circumcision on baby boys and ritual non-stun slaughter of animals.

And the ‘Sikh Manifesto’ 2020-2025 from the Sikh Network called for a ‘code of practice’ on the right of Sikhs to wear religious items such as swords and recognition of ‘anti-Sikh hate’ in a ‘similar fashion to Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia’.

All three manifestos called for more support for state-funded, segregated faith schools for their respective communities, as did the Catholic Union. Interestingly, a newer Sikh Manifesto from the Sikh Network omitted this call—a step in the right direction.

All three manifestos also made some barbed references to sections of other religious communities. The Hindu Manifesto accused Islamist and Sikh extremists of ‘acts of violence’ against UK Hindus and suggested that the government is giving more support to Muslim and Jewish causes than Hindu ones. Conversely, the latest Sikh Manifesto says the government ‘needs to confront Hindu nationalist groups’ in the UK, while lamenting that Sikhs are under-represented in the Lords compared with Jews, Muslims, and Hindus. And the Jewish Manifesto expressed that ‘Islamist extremists’ are one of the ‘major threats to the immediate physical security of British Jews’.

These concerns are all valid. But their inclusion in each religious group’s ‘manifesto’ suggests that cracks between British religious communities are widening.

Meanwhile, a group of Muslim organisations launched ‘The Muslim Vote’, whose ‘high level pledges’ include adopting the contentious All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims’ ‘Islamophobia’ definition and ensuring school rules have exemptions to accommodate pupils wearing ‘religious symbols’ and attending Friday prayers.

A similar ‘Muslim Vote’ campaign has been launched in Australia, ahead of the next federal election. The country’s prime minister Anthony Albanese has spoken out against it, saying: ‘I don’t think, and don’t want, Australia to go down the road of faith-based political parties because what that will do is undermine social cohesion.’

He’s right. But in the UK, too many candidates have instead rushed to embrace faith-based politics. Some have publicly endorsed the various faith manifestos and posted pictures of themselves clutching them on social media.

And sectarian politics had significant success in this election. Despite its overall victory, Labour lost four seats to independent candidates backed by The Muslim Vote in Leicester, Blackburn, Birmingham Perry Barr, and Dewsbury and Batley. Other Labour MPs only just held on to their seats, including the new health secretary Wes Streeting, who retained his seat with just 528 more votes than the candidate backed by The Muslim Vote, Leanne Mohamad.

Sectarianism, particularly in connection to the Israel-Gaza conflict, also underpinned appalling campaigns of abuse and threats against candidates. Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi and Rushanara Ali were smeared as genocide supporters, Naz Shah was followed around and heckled by a man who called her a ‘dirty, dirty Zionist’, and Jess Phillips was heckled during her victory speech with cries of ‘free Palestine’. Phillips called it the ‘worst election’ she’d ever stood in, and that one Labour activist had her tyres slashed.

Starmer’s Labour government has inherited a country where most people have no religion, Christians are a minority for the first time in history, and other religions are growing in number and variety. But most of us don’t let religion divide us. During his campaign, Sunak called the UK ‘the world’s most successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy’. It is true that, in general, we rub along pretty well with each other, but the lack of separation between religion and state creates unequal citizenship and so undermines this claim.

The election has revealed powerful forces which threaten to split our communities apart and pit them against each other. And many of our representatives seem all too happy to help them, for the sake of votes.

This approach will not heal divisions. It will instead entrench the notion that religious communities should compete with each other, rather than work for the mutual benefit of all UK citizens of all religions and beliefs.

How will Starmer face this challenge? So far, not all signs have been encouraging. Despite his personal atheistic beliefs, Starmer is in danger of falling into the same trap by appealing to faith-based interests. He told Premier Christianity magazine that his government will work ‘in partnership with churches and faith communities’, using a ‘network of parliamentary faith champions’.

Starmer needs to ensure that this ‘partnership’ doesn’t lead to a balkanization of public services or become a vehicle for proselytising and religious privilege.

Before the election, Starmer said his government would be ‘even more supportive of faith schools’ than the Conservatives. An early test for Labour will be whether they resist Catholic bishops’ demands to continue with the Tories’ dreadful plan to abolish the 50% cap on faith-based admissions at free schools, paving the way for a new wave of religiously, ethnically, and socio-economically segregated faith schools.

If Starmer wants to make sure his vision for a changed United Kingdom doesn’t turn it into a divided one, he and his party must consider carefully their approach to religion. Rather than giving more and more privileges to religious elites at the expense of equality, cohesion, and fairness, the government should work to ensure our society is a level playing field based on shared values, where individuals of all religions and beliefs have the opportunity to flourish.

Let’s hope the change Labour promised is in the right direction.

Related reading

What secularists want from the next UK Government, by Stephen Evans

The case of Richard Dawkins: cultural affiliation with a religious community does not contradict atheism, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Faith schools: where do the political parties stand? by Stephen Evans

Circumcision: the human rights violation that no one wants to talk about, by Alejandro Sanchez

Britain’s liberal imam: Interview with Taj Hargey, by Emma Park

Cannibal Speaks Out, by Modus Tollens

Islamic identity politics is a threat to British democracy, by Khadija Khan

Three years on, the lessons of Batley are yet to be learned, by Jack Rivington

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

Bring on the British republic – Graham Smith’s ‘Abolish the Monarchy’, reviewed, by Daniel James Sharp

Secularisation and Protestantism in the 2021 Northern Ireland Census, by Charlie Lynch

The need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities: interview with Steven Greer, by Emma Park

The post Keir Starmer must bring the UK’s diverse but divided people together appeared first on The Freethinker.

Every couple of years, whenever he declares that he is a ‘cultural Christian’, Richard Dawkins provides a ‘gotcha!’ moment to a whole host of ideologues. That he has expressed this sentiment for at least a couple of decades should suffice in putting to bed the self-congratulatory notion that his latest LBC reiteration is a triumph of Christianity over nonbelief or the death knell for ‘New Atheism’. These claims have been made more frequently recently, owing to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s recent conversion from atheism to Christianity. In fact, her conversion prompted an open letter by the evolutionary biologist questioning her embrace of Christian beliefs.

Another reason why Dawkins’s LBC interview received backlash was that he set contemporary British Christian culture against Islam, declared his dislike of Ramadan celebrations in Britain, described Britain as a (culturally) ‘Christian country’, and noted that Islam is ‘hostile’ to, for example, gay rights and women’s rights. But again, there is nothing new about Dawkins’s singling out of Islam as being especially problematic today—even many Muslim thinkers concede this. Like Christopher Hitchens before him, he believes that Christianity was just as dangerous as Islam historically (he states as much in his open letter to Hirsi Ali).¹ Even so, Dawkins does not limit the simultaneous embracing of a cultural affiliation with a religion and staunch atheism to Christianity, even extending it to Islam in The God Delusion.

The idea that atheism and religious identity can coexist in an individual is hardly groundbreaking. In Sanatana Dharma, or Hinduism, the nirishvaravadi (one who rejects the notion of a divine supreme being) and the nastika (those who reject the divinity of Hindu scripture) not only have the freedom to self-identify as a Hindu, but also have the Vedic, or scriptural, permission to do so. Both Jainism and Buddhism stem from the nastika tradition of Hinduism, rejecting the notion of a creator—albeit still preaching the divine and the supernatural, thus underlining the fluidity of the Indic belief systems. However, while the combination of irreligion with religious culture is natural in syncretic polytheism, pantheism, and non-theism, it is more difficult to envisage in Abrahamic monotheism.

While Jews run the gamut from the ultra-Orthodox to the atheist, all of whom unapologetically lay claim to a Jewish identity, Christianity and Islam are the last bastions of monotheistic rigidity. It is no coincidence that these two became the two largest religions in the world, given the aggressive evangelicalism and the notion of one, absolutist, divine truth common to both. These strategies have since been coopted by political dogmas that establish themselves as quasi-religions, which in recent years can be seen in the rise of Critical Social Justice ideology or ‘wokeism’. The Christian uproar against Dawkins identifying with Christianity owing to his rejection of the Biblical doctrine is no different to the woke repudiation of Dawkins as left-leaning or progressive owing to his blaspheming against gender ideology, for which he has been duly excommunicated by the American Humanist Association. But, of course, these affronts carry a whole different meaning in Muslim countries and communities.

Not only is Islam unparalleled in how it explicitly names other religions as enemies, and in how it reiterates the negation of all other faiths and gods in its daily prayers, but most critically it today remains the only religion that codifies death and violence for thought crimes in numerous states. And yet, despite facing sharia-codified violence, many thinkers for centuries have managed to merge a communal Muslim identity with a rejection of Islamic faith, from Persian alchemists to Turkic physicians to Arab philosophers to Urdu poets in the Indian subcontinent. Granted that self-preservation has been a significant motivation for such thinkers, many also associated with religious culture owing to their desire for uplift and community. This invariably hinges on fighting theological dogma, for it is convenient for the fundamentalists to reject even indigenous voices that self-identify as being outside of the fold as echoers of alien ideas, an allegation customarily launched against the critical thought propounded by many prominent ex-Muslims in recent years.

Furthermore, those who establish theological belief as the definitive feature of religious identity ignore that only a fraction of humankind chooses their faith when they convert from one to another; for the rest, religious identity is just a coincidence of birth, not much different to nationality or ethnicity. Also, if belief were to be used as the determiner, its logical extrapolation would be to presume that all members of the community are adherents of all religious tenets, making all Christians homophobes and all Muslims violently misogynistic. The very reason many have championed a rethinking of the term ‘Islamophobia’ is that it conflates Islam and Muslims, a distinction that many, including Dawkins in his latest LBC interview, maintain is critical so as to protect the expression of critiques against the harmful ideas Muslims and ex-Muslims alike are born into.

Another much-regurgitated critique of Dawkins’s latest interview, which arguably he has walked into himself, is that by identifying as a cultural Christian, the atheist scholar wants to ‘reap the fruits’ of Christianity without believing in the tree that produced them. When Dawkins calls Britain a ‘Christian country’—regardless of the cultural or communal asterisks—to reject Islamic displays, he inadvertently echoes Christian nationalists and their relegation of Muslims, and members of other religious communities, as lesser members of British society, even if not in the eyes of law. Any secular state, which Dawkins has spent a lifetime advocating for, should neither be Christian, nor Muslim, nor affiliated with any other religion, which is perhaps best achieved by limiting all religious displays to their designated spheres.

This is the crucial difference between people formulating religio-cultural identities and states doing so. State secularism has been, and remains, more critical to human progress than any variation of theism or atheism, and it is the sole guarantor of coexistence for all belief systems and cultures, especially when implemented without any preference for the majority or minority. And it is in secular realms that all orthodox and heterodox identities, including nonbelieving members of monotheistic communities, can find their own spaces to express themselves.

1. Hitchens argued that all religions were evil, but not always in the same way or to the same extent at different times; he once said that if he had lived in the 1930s he would view the Catholic Church as the most evil religious force. He was well aware, too, of the many contemporary threats posed by Christian fanatics, and believed that ‘over space and time…[the threat of different religions] tremendously evens out… [And that all religions are] equally rotten, false, dishonest, corrupt, humourless, and dangerous, in the last analysis.’ ︎

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What role does religion play in the Israel-Palestine conflict? Two contrasting views have recently appeared in the pages of the Freethinker. Kunwar Khuldune Shahid argued that ‘[a]t the heart of the ongoing conflict…is the fact that different religious groups are claiming exclusive control over much of the same territory’. Meanwhile, the liberal imam Taj Hargey took the opposite view in an interview with Freethinker editor Emma Park: ‘[T]he root cause of this conflict is not between Islam and Judaism, between Muslims and Jews, but between Zionist colonial settlers and the legitimate Palestinian resistance. That is the fight.’

The land where so much blood is currently being needlessly spilled is the Holy Land, sacred to the faithful of all three major Abrahamic religions, who exalt it within their respective spiritual and theological practices and traditions. Moreover, religious fundamentalists on both sides—whether in the hard right Israeli government and the fanatical religious Zionist settler movement or the Islamist outfits of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)—continually invoke their sacred texts to justify their exclusive rights to the Holy Land. There is also a great deal of sensitivity when it comes to the use of religious sites like the Temple Mount/al-Aqsa. Given all this, it would be naïve to disregard the important part religion plays in this conflict—and it is easy to see why, in the face of such zealotry, one might see it as nothing more than a religious dispute.

Fundamentally, however, the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a holy war. Its roots lie not in supposed ancient hatreds or Quranic enmities but in modern and secular conditions. In essence, I would argue that the conflict is not, as Shahid claims, about different religious groups fighting for exclusive control of the same territory. Rather, it is a quarrel between two nations of roughly equal size—one Hebrew-speaking and predominantly (though not exclusively) Jewish, and one Arabic-speaking and predominantly Muslim, but with a significant and influential Christian minority—over who should be the undisputed master of the whole land.

In the original 1964 charter of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the words ‘Arab’, ‘Palestinian’, ‘homeland’ and ‘nationalism’ form a consistent motif. It does not refer much to religion, except in vague and ecumenical terms – in contrast, Hamas’ 1988 charter is replete with religious references. Moreover, in the 1970s and 1980s, the most prominent Palestinian nationalist outfit after Yasser Arafat’s Fatah was the ostensibly Marxist-Leninist (though ‘Stalinist’ would be a more apt description) Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Founded by George Habash, who came from a Christian background, many of the PFLP’s members were very secular-minded; many were even avowed atheists. It is mostly forgotten now, but when Hamas first arose in the 1980s, they would frequently clash with PFLP members, who they condemned as ‘apostates’. At that time, Israel, playing at the old imperial game of divide and rule, also implicitly backed Hamas, seeing it as a conservative counterweight to secular Palestinian groups.

The goal of leftist Palestinian nationalism is one secular democratic socialist state. This has been criticised as a Trojan horse for Arab ethnonationalist domination, but even if this was true, it would be an ethnonational, not religious, domination. It was only in 2003, under Arafat’s autocratic rule, that the constitution of the Palestinian Authority was amended to proclaim that Islam was to be the sole official religion of Palestine and sharia was to be ‘a principal source of legislation’.

On the other side, the founders of the Zionist movement, from Moses Hess to Theodor Herzl to David Ben Gurion, were, likewise, extremely secular, even anti-religious. ‘We shall keep our priests within the confines of their temples’, Herzl wrote in his infamous cri de coeur, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896. Zionism originated in 19^th-century romantic nationalism. It understood the Jewish predicament in a very particular sense. Jews were a nation in the abnormal condition of being the ‘stranger par excellence’, as the Russian Zionist Leon Pinsker put it in 1882: ‘They home everywhere, but are nowhere at home … [T]hey are everywhere aliens … [and] everywhere endangered’. Therefore the answer to the so-called Jewish question was to create a Jewish national home that would morph into a Jewish state in what they saw as the organic homeland of the Jews: Eretz Israel/Palestine.

Whether it advocated for a Jewish nation-state or a Jewish socialist commonwealth, early Zionist thought made its claims not in the name of the Jewish faith, but of the Jewish people.

Zionists heartily invoked traditional Jewish mythology and the Hebrew language, but these were subordinated to their project of national renewal. Among the first and most ardent opponents of Zionism were religious Jews who railed against the Zionist prescription of a Jewish state as a blasphemy against the Torah; in their eyes, only the Messiah (who was, as yet, still tarrying) could establish a true Jewish state. As the Israeli philosopher Micah Goodman has put it, ‘[S]ome of the main Zionist thinkers saw Zionism as a Jewish revolt against Judaism.’

Many Palestinians and Arabs find the notion of Jewish nationhood hard to swallow. To them, Judaism is just a religion; it does not denote a nation or a people. This position is also expressed in the PLO charter: ‘Judaism because it is a divine religion is not a nationality with independent existence. Furthermore the Jews are not one people with an independent personality…’ To acknowledge the secular fact of Jewish peoplehood and the depth of the historic and cultural attachment to Eretz Israel would be, to them, tantamount to legitimising Zionism, and, thus, the mass displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian Arabs in 1948 and onwards. The Israeli state’s own lack of clarity as to whether it sees Jewishness in either ethnic or religious terms exacerbates this confusion.

Zionism is not particularly unique in using religion as the external badge of nationhood. One can find a parallel (as Shahid astutely notes) in the Pakistani nationalist movement. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, its founding father, was firmly irreligious, and he argued that the Muslim population of South Asia was a particular nation that could not live as a minority under an India where the Hindu ‘nation’ was the majority. Therefore, Muslims required their own state.

Understanding the national foundation of the conflict means having a more nuanced understanding of the enmity towards Israel. Shahid claims that Islamic anti-Semitism is the ‘predominant motivation behind Muslim animosity towards Israel’. No doubt there is an element of truth to this. Religiously-motivated anti-Semitism has proliferated across many Muslim countries, as Hina Husain, for instance, has described in an article on her Pakistani upbringing. For jihadists like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, opposition to Israel really is about ‘Muslim imperialism’, as Shahid puts it. They do not care about Palestinian nationhood; for them, Palestine is nothing more than a province in a lost empire that they wish to resurrect.

But it would be wrong to see all Arab opposition to Israel as a result of eternal anti-Semitism. The Palestinian Arab enmity towards Israel, in particular, is rooted in the concrete reality of what Zionism in practice has meant for them: the takeover of their land by newcomers, guarded by an external imperial power, to create a new political order that they would be excluded from, thus necessitating their extirpation. In other words, settler colonialism.

‘The fear of territorial displacement and dispossession was to be the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism down to 1948 (& indeed after 1967 as well)’, observed the Israeli historian Benny Morris in his book Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. This antagonism would have been present whatever the identity of their dispossessors—because it is a rational and materially-based antagonism, rather than a result of hideous prejudice. This is not to say that genuine prejudice has not emerged among Palestinian Arabs, just that not all of their opposition to Israel can be dismissed as such.

In this sense, Taj Hargey is right to make his parallel with settler colonialism. But this point, rather en vogue at the moment, needs more nuance. Zionism is a peculiar form of settler colonialism, because it was also a national movement of an immensely persecuted people, who were not regarded as ‘of’ European civilisation. The means of settler colonisation were used to attain the end of an independent ethnonationalist state, and the Palestinians paid the price for that.

It is also true that in recent decades, the conflict has acquired a more overtly religious character. On the one hand, we have seen the rise of religious Zionism, culminating in the ascension to power of the increasingly sectarian Benjamin Netanyahu, and, on the other, the ‘degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad’ (as Christopher Hitchens put it in 2008). But even this does not negate the national basis of the conflict. It complements it. Nationalism, like religion, can be extremely irrational; it too can create ahistorical ‘sacred’ mythologies and inspire all sorts of horrors.

In essence, the Israel-Palestine question is partially an issue of settler colonialism and partially an unresolved national question. Religion is an exacerbating, toxifying factor. With the parties of God holding a veto—and exercising it liberally—over any peaceful settlement, religion has made the conflict even more intractable. One has to understand all of these dimensions as part of a whole to truly grasp the nature of the conflict.

It has become a truism to describe the Israel-Palestine conflict as ‘complex’, defying simplistic narratives. Certain things, though, such as the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas/PIJ commandos on 7 October, or the obscene bombardment Israel has inflicted on Gaza since that date, or the tyrannical Israeli occupation of the West Bank, are, however, very simple to understand and easy to take a clear position on. Still, this conflict demands a subtle yet principled approach that forthrightly opposes all racist chauvinism and religious demagoguery, whatever form it might take. Standing Together is a great civil society initiative within Israel, organised by Jews and Palestinian Arabs, seeking to promote Arab-Jewish solidarity and opposing both the occupation and extremism on all sides. This is a movement that any humanist could and should support.

Edward Said’s remark that the Palestinians are the ‘victims of the victims’ encapsulates much of the emotional intricacy underlying the conflict. In the 2015 novel The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which concerns itself with another protracted and deadly war, there is a passage that also sums up for me the tragedy of the Israel-Palestine conflict: ‘As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape.’ The scars of the Israel-Palestine calamity are very deep. They will not be healed any time soon. But the fact remains: Jews and Arabs are tied to a common future in the Holy Land—a land which both belong to. The task of creating a common civic society, in which both can live as free people on a free land, may be arduous. But that does not make it any less necessary.

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In July, President Joe Biden is likely to visit Israel and Saudi Arabia, as the two countries draw closer towards formalising the ties that have previously remained unofficial. The normalisation process that began with the Abraham Accords in 2020, when UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco recognised the state of Israel, will be extended, through Saudi, to the broader Sunni Muslim world. And Riyadh has been laying the groundwork to formalisation.

In Turkey, despite its seven-decade old relations with Israel and recent collaborations, Recep Erdogan is still capable of using Islamist rhetoric to muster hyperbolic outrage. Saudi Arabia, however, is financially incentivising Turkey to keep this rhetoric in check. It is also offering financial support to the unflinchingly Judaeophobic Pakistan; this should extend the normalisation process from the Middle East to South Asia.

While financial and geopolitical gains were a critical factor in the 2020 Arab-Israeli normalisation, they had to be complemented by a religious rationale for the Accords – hence the nod to Abraham in their title. Saudi Arabia, for long the self-appointed leader of the Sunni half of the Arab world and custodian of Islamic sites, knows that it needs a religious narrative to sell to the Muslim world, since the latter has long been taught Jewish hatred through Islamic scriptures, which display every kind of Judaeophobia, from asking the believers ‘not to take Jews as friends’ to ordering their genocide.

Post-postcolonialism

Since World War II, three generations of global leftist intelligentsia have endowed the Arab-Israeli conflict with immutable postcolonial narratives. The Western powers, which were primarily responsible for enforcing the new world order and the injustices that came with it, created Israel as a haven for the Jews whom it had actively persecuted, or as a colonial base to continue subjugating the locals in the Middle East. At least, this is how, for the past seven decades, the ‘progressive’ argument has gone.

The idea that any land should be allocated to a religious community owing to the claims of its canonical scripture would be preposterous for anyone not believing in that scripture. However, this happened with the new state of Israel, in a part of the world which was surrounded by states ethnically cleansing the very religious community from which it was formed. The same Muslim-majority states actively persecuted other minorities using Islamic scriptures. In a world brimming with religious injustices, only one succeeded in capturing the attention of many of those on the progressive Left, who have then spent decades dismissing suggestions that religion has anything to do with it.

For proponents of this view, Israel is touted as an ‘artificial’, ‘imposed’ nation-state. Yet this is in a region where the very idea of a nation state has been artificially imposed, and where regional borders are delineated according to spheres of control exercised by competing powers. Neither Jordon, Lebanon, Syria or Iraq existed as unified states prior to the interference by the West, which had also seen the African continent sliced up like a cake. Similarly, the parallels between Pakistan and Israel are innumerable: the creation of Pakistan resulted in the largest mass migration in human history, leaving significantly more people displaced than were by the creation of Israel. The fabrication of borders to create these states is as much a consequence of Western colonialism as their Muslim-majority identity is a result of Islamic imperialism.

But just as postcolonial ideologues have artificially expunged religion out of any examination of the Middle East’s difficulties, their narrative has also sought to sanitise Islam and diminish its imperialistic tendencies. For instance, Edward Said, the prophet of Middle Eastern postcolonial studies, in his staunch defence of Islam, castigated Western media for depicting Islam negatively – at the same time as many Muslim-majority states were carrying out gory, antediluvian punishments, such as flogging for extramarital sex and stoning individuals to death for exercising freethought about Islam, in accordance with Islamic law (sharia). Said’s ‘Orientalism’ has evolved into today’s cultural-relativist ‘Islamophobia’ narrative, in which the unflinching protection of 1,400-year-old ideas, which themselves codify violence in large parts of the Muslim world, is deemed the hallmark of intellectual progressiveness.

That many on the progressive Left have chosen to view certain issues through the narrow, selectively opaque lens of postcolonialism seems to have blinded them to the fact that others can be passionately attached to the same cause, but as a result of a completely different set of ideas – ideas which also invoke an ideology that actively seeks the destruction of much of what the progressives otherwise stand for. This has created a bizarre and perilous pact between the Islamists and the Left, who together try to minimise Islam’s role in any conflict in the region, including for the maintenance of the Arab-Israeli conflict and for the refusal to create a Palestinian state.

Religious roots

In addition to Islam, it is important to stress how the two other Abrahamic religions have contributed to the conflict in the Middle East. Just as Islam, from its onset, has explicitly condemned Christian and Jews, and rejected the fundamental beliefs of its predecessors – for instance by calling Jesus a prophet and not the son of God – Christianity too was keen from an early stage to distance itself from its Judaic roots. 

Biblical Judeophobia, which holds the Jews responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, oversaw the persecution and even pogroms of Jewish populations from western Europe to Russia. Pogroms were also carried out under the Ottoman Empire. There were cheerleaders aplenty in both Christian-majority and Muslim-majority countries when the Axis powers were preparing the grounds for the Holocaust. The latter was itself spearheaded by an ethno-supremacist Nazi ideology, the genocidal antisemitism of which was complemented by religionist Judaeophobia.

Yet Zionism, the movement for the creation of a Jewish homeland in the historic land of Israel which emerged amid the escalating Jewish persecution in the 19th century, has found many of its proponents aspiring to recreate ‘land of Canaan’ that would encompass the entire territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. The Biblical ‘Judea and Samaria’, today called the West Bank, was captured by Israeli forces after the 1967 war. The West Bank forms a large chunk of the Palestinian territory that was earmarked by the 1947 UN Partition Plan. Yet over the past 55 years, it has been inhabited by nearly half a million Jewish settlers, a vast majority of them Orthodox Jews looking to fulfil the canonical prophecies.

Jerusalem symbolises the common roots, and shared animosity, between the three Abrahamic religions and the expansionist empires that have conquered the city, from the Romans in the first century AD to the Arabs in seventh century. Each conqueror in turn aspired to assert its dominance atop the remnants of the vanquished religions. The Temple Mount is a symbol of intra-Abrahamic antagonism and the tangible religious root of the centuries-old conflict between them.

Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, built atop the Temple Mount, signifies the third holiest site in Islam. According to Islamic tradition, it was the first qibla (direction of prayer) sanctioned by Muhammad and the site of the fable that narrates his flight to Jannah (heaven). It is the Jewish occupation of this holy land that has outraged the vast majority of the Muslim world, and constitutes its main grievance against Israel – more so than Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. The animosity for Jews in Islamic scriptures adds Judaeophobic fuel to the Islamist fire.

Islamic anti-Semitism

While Jewish and Christian progressives largely denounce their scriptures’ contribution to the conflict, Muslim progressives have historically toed the leftist position on Israel: even those otherwise critical of Islamist doctrines have actively disassociated Islamic anti-Semitism from the broader Muslim denunciation of the Jewish state. Many have argued that the anti-Jewish bigotry in Muslim-majority states, which sometimes spirals into conspiratorial hysteria, is in fact rooted in the creation of Israel. This is a convenient, or deliberate, rewriting of the Muslim world’s history. Horrific massacres of Jews were being carried out centuries before modern-day Israel was born – from Hebron, Safed, and Petah Tikva in modern day Israel-Palestine to Damascus, Algiers, and Basra.

As far back as 628 AD, the Battle of Khaybar saw the conquest of Muhammad’s army over Jewish tribes; according to Islamic tradition, this involved the massacre and expulsion of the Jews. The Qatar-produced Ramadan television series ‘Khaybar’ alluded to the battle using the popular Arabic chant ‘Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud’ (Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning’). This chant is frequently heard in anti-Israeli rallies from the Middle East to Western Europe. There are many hadiths (sayings of Muhammad) that encourage killing of Jews. For instance, a quotation often cited by jihadists and radical Islamists asks Muslims to fight the Jews until the time when trees and stones tell the believers, ‘O Muslim! There’s a Jew behind me, so kill him.’ The charter of Hamas uses many verses from the Islamic scriptures to call for the extermination of Jews.

Over the past century, episodes of ethnic cleansing of Jews have been carried out across the Muslim world from the Middle East to South and East Asia. These have run in parallel with expressions of fear over Israel’s attempted elimination of Muslims in Palestine. The lack of a global Muslim push to establish a Palestinian state in West Bank and Gaza between 1948 and 1967, when the territories were under Jordanian and Egyptian occupation, also suggests that creation of another Arab-Muslim state was not as high a priority as elimination of the Jewish one.

At the end of the 1970s and in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, the siege of Mecca, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a schism between Sunnis and Shias, led by Riyadh and Tehran respectively, exploded. A newfound oil hegemony became the economic basis for a proxy jihad between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This led to the radicalisation of Muslim movements from Palestine to Kashmir; even the formerly secular nationalist strains of the movements were purged in favour of a monolithic Islamist narrative. Meanwhile, as Saudi Arabia peddled violent anti-Semitism through mosques and school curricula, it was simultaneously Israel’s ally in the US alliance that pushed anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s. Simultaneously, Iran, the hub of Shia proxy warfare, has actively allied itself with the Sunni jihadist Hamas to maintain its leverage in the Arab world. In turn, the jihadist takeover of the broader Muslim world in recent decades has meant that instead of rallying together over humanitarian grounds, even the officially secular Indonesia and Turkey have condemned Israel in an anti-Semitic way.

An Islamic rationale for Israel

New geopolitical realities, spearheaded by shared animosity for Iran, however, have pushed the Sunni Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, into publicly befriending the Jewish state which they have long threatened with destruction. As a result, the radically Islamised curriculum in Saudi Arabia has been revised to remove anti-Semitic texts. The highest Saudi clerics, who long called for the ‘annihilation’ of Jews, dubbing them ‘descendants of apes and pigs’, have now been increasingly asking Muslims to exhibit kindness to Jews. From TV shows based on Islamic history, to deliberations in academic conferences, there has been a swift turnaround in the Arab narrative on Jews and Israel, eventually culminating in the 2020 agreements. And since the promises of Israel’s demolition were rooted in Islam, so is the rationale for this remarkable volte-face. 

In his 2020 visit to Auschwitz, Mohammed al-Issa, the head of the Muslim World League, passionately vowed ‘this must never happen again.’ He insisted that fighting hatred against Jews is a ‘religious obligation’, and maintained that the Muslim World League would keep challenging anti-Semitism till it ceased to exist. ‘Political outlooks change over time but our values, our morals should never change,’ al-Issa said. And yet that is precisely what has been happening, thanks in large part to religion.

Apologists of the anti-Semitism in Islamic scriptures have long sought to contextualise, or dismiss, explicit calls for Jewish blood in the canonical texts that Muslims around the world are taught. In its condemnation of January’s jihadist attack on a Texas synagogue, the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) rejected anti-Semitism. However, it will be unlikely to address its own Judaeophobia and support for antisemitic jihadists like Aafia Siddiqui, who inspired the attack. In the aftermath of jihadist anti-Semitic manoeuvres, Muslim groups like the CAIR point to Islamic passages that urge tolerance and brotherhood, all the while refusing to address the passages that explicitly urge violence.

For instance, Jews are among the Ahl-al-Kitaab(‘People of the Book’) that the Quran refers to 31 times. According to Islamic tradition and jurisprudence, the ‘People of the Book’ were entitled to religious recognition under Islamic sharia, through being given the inferior status of dhimmi (‘protected persons’), which required them to pay jizya (tax) in return for protection. Islamic sharia also allows Muslim men to marry Christian and Jewish women, although not the other way round.

Today, a blend of theological guarantees for the Ahl-al-Kitaab and emphasis on the holiness of Al-Aqsa Mosque are the basis of the Islamic rationale used to justify the Muslim world’s normalisation of relations with Israel. Many even quote parts of the Quran to argue that Islamic scriptures in fact affirm that the land of Israel belongs to the Jews. The ostensible Islamic justification for Israel has been pushed by Saudi Arabia as it draws closer to normalising relations with it. A Saudi-led Arab influence over Al-Aqsa would further bolster Islamic tourism – which has also been spearheaded by Riyadh, as it increasingly looks to find substitutes for its revenue from the oil that is eventually going to run out.

This Saudi push for reformist interpretations of Islam, in other words, is not an offshoot of collective Muslim reflection, but a powerplay designed to reinvent Islam as the geo-economic foundation of an Arab world that is still just as invested in maintaining its totalitarian hegemony over its peoples. The Muslim world’s monolithic attitudes towards Islam, and the geopolitical conflicts where Islam has been imposed, could have evolved organically through permitting freedom of conscience and religion once again, after their centuries of suppression. Instead, however, the new interpretations of Islam are being forged autocratically by leaders, and while maintaining inflexible restraints on free thought among the wider Muslim populations. 

Suppressing free thought

The suppression of critical thinking means that Muslims around the world would have to arbitrarily accept Israel through Islamic legitimisation, just as they were previously pushed to support the Israel’s genocidal destruction through a different interpretation of the same canonical texts. What this also means is that much needed interfaith coexistence, regional peace, and Muslim intellectual progress will continue to be held hostage by the interpretation of Islam that best suits the geopolitical ambitions of the Arab monarchs at any given point. That is why, regardless of how reformist an interpretation of Islam the Arab states might be upholding today, they will not accept any allowance for challenging Islam itself. For instance, while the Hindutva regime in India has been actively targeting Muslims, and while its military has occupied the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir, the Arab countries only  criticised New Delhi over the perceived blasphemy by Nupur Sharma, the BJP spokesperson, against Muhammad, when she alluded to the marriage of Islam’s prophet to six-year-old Aisha as narrated in Islamic scriptures.

Whether in South Asia or the Middle East, regional stability and human progress have long been stymied by the interference of religion in policymaking. The millennia-old faultlines between Israel and Palestine, or their respective cultures, have long needed reconciliatory solutions that are based on pragmatism rather than religion. But the progressives who should be spearheading such movements have created an ideology that reflects the monolithism and dogmatism of organised religion.

Historically, the hard Left has cherished the Marxist aspiration of destroying Israel as a way of removing Western capitalism from the region. The ‘anti-capitalist’ movement calling for ‘illegitimate’ Israel’s eradication grew in parallel with Arab monarchies, whose own legitimacy was rooted in the historic triumph of their founders in tribal warfare, and whose fast-accumulating oil wealth gave them disproportionate influence on the global stage. After the dissolution of the USSR, the Left broadly acquiesced to a two-state solution, but its fixation with Israel, often in parallel to the abandonment of human rights abuses elsewhere such as Kurdistan, Balochistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, or Xinjiang, has persisted. While the Marxist-Leninist goal of eliminating of Israel during the Soviet era described the Jewish state itself as artificial and colonial, the heirs of those ideologies use the same labels for Israel, but have moved the focus of their campaign to the territories captured after 1967 depending on the audience.

The hard Left’s doublespeak in its position on Israel – shifting between condemning the occupied territories or the state itself as illegal – is similar to the way in which Israeli leaders and expansionist Zionists allude to the ‘state of Israel’, whose borders vary from the pre-1967 state to ‘between Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea’, depending on the setting of the discussion. Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent his entire political career fighting against the creation of a Palestinian state, before becoming the first leader of the Israeli right to concede the possibility of one in 2009, and then going on to spend the next decade or so in power persisting with his expansionist definition of Israel and rejecting any notion of a Palestinian state.

No one faction has a monopoly on duplicity: some Western media have suppressed free speech about Israel’s war crimes by depicting criticism of Israel as synonymous with anti-Semitism. Compare, for example, their contrasting coverage of Palestine and Ukraine.

Even so, my primary focus in this article has been on Islamists and Leftist opponents of Israel. This is not only because these two factions have bound Palestinians to their respective ideologies, all the while claiming to be their well-wishers, but also because criticism of Western media can be easily found in Western media itself, and denunciation of Israeli crimes in Israeli newspapers. In contrast, the Muslim Left has mirrored the Muslim Right by silencing any dissentient views on Israel, while globally, the ideological Left has suppressed divergent opinions, to the point of facilitating anti-Semitism within their own ranks.

Today, the prohibition on dissent among hardliners on the Left, and their enactment of their own blasphemy codes, can arguably be seen in the ‘woke’ cancel culture that religiously silences any challenge to the ideological status quo. Today, liberal women who express concern over hard-earned sex-based rights are being apostatised out of many progressive circles, and their refusal to conform to fast-evolving gender narratives is equated with bigotry against entire groups.

Unfortunately, this jettisoning of free speech, instead of allowing the open debate of ideas that are deemed ‘wrong’ or ‘offensive’ – the raison d’être of the right to free speech – has restricted their discussion. For the Palestinians, the historical silencing of viewpoints by their friends and foes alike has pushed the region today closer towards having a ‘solution’ arbitrarily imposed upon it. And it is the ‘progressive’ ideologues who have been willing to leave the Palestinians helpless in the face of autocratic religious leaders, and who have glorified the suffering of a minority as a way of legitimising their own puritanic views.

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