Carlton Cobb

Karen Armstrong: How Religious Movements Prolong the Arab-Israeli Conflict


To a full audience on Capitol Hill, Oxford scholar of religion Karen Armstrong argued last week that fundamentalist movements within each of the three faiths involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, contribute to sustaining that conflict. Her talk outlined how the “Christian Right” in the U.S., Islamists such as Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon and ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel have drawn religion into what is “at base a political problem…, a secular problem over land.”