Religious extremism: The answer is more religion

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/06/22/religious-extremism-the-answer-more-religion/XI5McL6cDMV30JHFn3QYDK/story.html

By James Carroll | GLOBE COLUMNIST JUNE 23, 2014


Iraqi Shiite tribal fighters deploy with their weapons to fight militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a group that has taken over large swaths of Iraq.
AP PHOTO/ KARIM KADIM, FILE

ONE OF the Sunni extremist groups wreaking such havoc in Iraq, alongside the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, is called the 1920 Revolution Brigades. On its seal, the motto “God shall torture them by your hands” arcs across an AK-47. Rabid invoking of the Holy One in the thick of slaughter is a mark, once again, of astounding new levels of sectarian violence in Iraq. Last week hundreds of Shiite men were coldly massacred by Sunnis near Tikrit, and dozens of Sunni prisoners, in turn, were executed in a Baqouba police station north of Baghdad. The devils are loose: gunshots to the head of helpless captives, mass decapitation, even crucifixion (“Another day,” read one headline, “another ISIS crucifixion”).

When the 21st century dawned with a savage outbreak of religiously justified violence — those Al Qaeda hijacker-pilots driving jetliners into skyscrapers while crying “God is great” — many people were perplexed that such deeds were justified by appeals to the divine. The ferocity of criminal acts reflected the belief that bloodletting was required not because of an earthly power struggle, but by the will of heaven. “God” not only justified the killing, but redoubled its brutality.

In the nations of the North Atlantic, believers and non-believers alike were appalled by this. Many insisted at first that “true religion” could have no truck with sacred violence. But the 21st-century explosion of an expressly Islamic holy war prompted a closer reading of Western history, forcing Europeans to reckon with the barbarity of their continent’s own post-Reformation religious wars, and Americans to think twice about George W. Bush’s callow call for a “crusade.”

But the killer God is back, and not just in Iraq. In Kenya last week, Somali gunmen from the Al Qaeda-derived Al Shabaab terrorized townspeople by knocking on doors and demanding to know the religion of those answering. “My husband told them we were were Christian,” one woman said, “and they shot him in the head.” Dozens were killed in this way. The United Nations reports a dramatic recent escalation in “high levels” of overtly religious violence, afflicting fully half of the nations of the Middle East and North Africa. Lest one assume only Arabs and Muslims are culprits, in Myanmar and Sri Lanka Muslim and Christian minorities are attacked by nationalist Buddhist terror groups, including Bodu Bala Sena, a name which means Buddhist Power Force.

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