Re: I seldom agree with you

"I have always maintained that this is a religious war.... all three sides are motivated to fight based on their religious beliefs." The fact that two groups are characterised by divergent religious beliefs does not mean that their conflict has its source in those beliefs. Catholics and Protestants in NI were in conflict because of the socio-economic system which subordinated the interests of one group to the other. Religion was one of the principal ways of identifying which group a given individual belonged to, but it was not the source of the conflict between these groups, which lay in the different ways in which the two groups were treated by the state. Similarly, the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a religious conflict, but a political one, and has its source in the theft of land from one side by the other, supported by the secular ideology of what Finkelstein calls Jewish supremacism. To assimilate the conflict to a religious disagreement makes a false equivalence between the two sides, conveniently airbrushing the distinction between the oppressors and the oppressed.