Interesting Start the Week this morning. All Tom Sutcliffe’s guests have authored worthy tomes about religion and war.
Justin Marozzi’s well received “Baghdad” sounded fascinating, and so did Christopher Coker’s “Can War be Eliminated?”. But the primary focus of this episode was a book titled: “Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence” written by a woman whom Suttcliffe addressed as “Keiron”. It was only when she gratuitously introduced “Israelis bulldozing Palestinian homes” that I realised that Keiron was in fact Karen - Karen Armstrong, the former nun who ‘wants us all to love Islam’.
I have to say that Tom Sutcliffe hastily distracted her from the bulldozing, but she did get away with this, towards the end of the programme:
“Look at some of the images of the prophets. Of Jerusalem at The End of Time, with all the... but it’s still, even there.....this is peace for Israel and other people are being subjugated.”
Anti-Israel polemicists have a particular way of saying “Israel”, somehow imbuing the “Is” with venom. I will always think of her as Keeran.
