Islam.

Editor,

An observer who characterizes radical Islamists as a colonized people seeking national liberation would have a clearer understanding of the violence of militant groups in the Middle East than one who explains it as a reflection of scribblings in the Muslims' holy book.

The Middle East has a 4,000-year history of brutality on a scale that boggles the imagination, yet Islam came into being only 1,400 years ago; so the cultural bases for cold-blooded murder and all manner of interpersonal horror are endemic to the region and predate Islam.

Western culture is no less violent: WWII, for example, killed at least 50 million people, by some estimates many more, and Western violence continues on a scale that rivals if not surpasses the bloody history of the Middle East -- by which I mean the slaughter of millions of peasants in the global south by the USA and its proxies from after the end of WWII straight through to the present.

The Sykes-Picot agreement of 1915 -- with entirely arbitrary state boundaries that carved apart ethnic groupings that had existed in the region for thousands of years -- divided up the oil lands of the Middle East between the European colonial powers: Britain and France.

I have no sympathy for violent, homicidal, basically crazy people or movements of any description; but it does not take much imagination to understand that militant Islam perceives itself to be a national liberation movement whose "nation" consists of a cultural identity that coheres around Islam, a religious self-identification participants in that identity share.

Blaming on their religion violent behavior of a colonized people with a 4,000-year history of burning cities to the ground is pretty dumb.

Re: "Bill Maher Isn’t the Only One Who Misunderstands Religion" (10/9/2014)