Hamas, Hezbollah, and Diffusing Radical Religion

The West fails to understand religious radicalism, even though we invented it.

This article has just been published in the May issue of the New English Review. If you ponder the logic, you may conclude that both sides in the Middle East are talking past one another and leading us to destruction.

Please visit the NER site, leave a comment, “like”, and circulate further. Thank you.

—SB

Radical religious movements have been a decisive feature of the political landscape for decades now: the recent Hamas attack on Israel; wars with Hezbollah (who could drag Iran and the United States into war); years of war and terror with ISIS and the Taliban; the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

So what is religious radicalism and why does it arise? Do not bother researching it, because western scholars and pundits will tell you little. They neither understand it nor expend much effort to do so. They dislike it, and that is what matters. To simplify: leftists dislike religious radicalism because it is religious, and rightists dislike it because it is radical. Between them, they are unhelpful in understanding one of the most consequential and dangerous political dynamics of our time. (…)

Read the rest: https://www.newenglishreview.org/articles/hamas-hezbollah-and-diffusing-radical-religion/

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Political Studies at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw and author of Not Peace But a Sword: The Political Theology of the English Revolution (Routledge, 1993; Wipf & Stock, 2018).  His book on the politics of the United States since early 2020 is forthcoming.