How Religious Movements Prolong the Arab-Israeli Conflict

A Karen Armstrong post on CrossLeft:

Armstrong used the Christian Right as an example to support her thesis that fundamentalist movements are rooted in fear and humiliation. Fundamentalists share the belief that 'secularism and liberalism are attacking them,' that the 'modern world wants to wipe them out.' So, for example, she said that 'small-town America' feels threatened by the culture of 'Harvard, Yale, and Washington, DC.'

Fundamentalist movements, Armstrong said, are an 'expression of a great sickness of soul,' a sign that 'something is rotten' in the society that produces them. In making her case, she discussed Jewish fundamentalist leaders such as Rabbi Abraham Kook and Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kahane Chai movement recently had an appeal to remove its name from the U.S. State Department list of terrorist groups rejected, as well as Muslim fundamentalists such as Osama bin Laden and Sayyid Qutb.