In Fields of Blood, Karen Armstrong defends religion against those who would blame it for wars, persecution, and the like. The crux of Armstrong’s argument, according to David Nirenberg, is that religion is only religion when it endorses behavior of which she approves. All cases of violence in the name of religion are thus really about power, oppression, and inequality. Nirenberg writes:

Perhaps we should not judge religions by the company they keep. Still, even (or especially) if we share Armstrong’s sympathies—that is, her view that religion is generally innocent as charged—we should want to ask why religion so often finds itself in arms with the wicked. . . . Divorcing religion from power might ease one’s conscience about faith traditions, but it won’t help us understand why those traditions have so often sought dowries from dominion, which seems to me precisely what we most want and need to know. . . .

Armstrong’s yearning to think of religion as separate from power is unsatisfying and unpersuasive, but it is also an exceedingly common position among Westerners today. Perhaps we should think of this tendency as the secularized form of a religious idea—namely, a particular self-understanding of Christianity as a persecuted and nonpolitical religion of love. This possibility points to another conviction common to Fields of Blood and much other writing on the topic of religion and violence: that it is easy to distinguish between religious and secular ideas, between religious and nonreligious motives for violence. . . .

It is not religion, but powerlessness and oppression, the argument goes, that motivate religious violence. This argument depends on a misplaced confidence in a moralizing distinction central to discussions of post-colonialism: the distinction between power and powerlessness. This is often conjoined with the conviction that the violence of the powerless is ethical or moral, that of the powerful unethical or immoral—and that a line can easily be drawn between the two. Once that line is drawn, it is but a short step to saying that the victims of violence by the powerless are morally more culpable than the perpetrators, because they are beneficiaries of oppression.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.