They will never give credit where credit is due. But it truly doesn’t matter. The viral ideas spread. Even into enemy territory like the New York Times. And we know from whence they came:
It’s easy to think that ISIS is some sort of evil, medieval cancer that somehow has resurfaced in the modern world. The rest of us are pursuing happiness, and here comes this fundamentalist anachronism, spreading death.
But in his book “Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence,” the brilliant Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues that ISIS is in fact typical of what we will see in the decades ahead.
The 21st century will not be a century of secularism, he writes. It will be an age of desecularization and religious conflicts….
Sacks emphasizes that it is not religion itself that causes violence. In
their book Encyclopedia of Wars, Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod
surveyed 1,800 conflicts and found that less than 10 percent had any
religious component at all.
Actually, the correct numbers are 1,763 wars and 6.98 percent, half of which involved Islam. And, of course, Phillips and Axelrod didn’t actually do any such calculation….