Juan Cole: O’Reilly’s Muslim-Hatred and Christian Terrorists

http://www.juancole.com/2011/07/oreillys-muslim-hatred-and-christian-terrorists.html

As for O’Reilly’s comments on the Norway massacre, Breivik is a “cultural Christian,” believing in a monocultural Christian Europe, and said he wants Protestants to return to the fold of Catholicism so as to present a united front. He also had a cult of the Knights Templar. I mean, it is not as if he is a Buddhist.

Ironically, Breivik’s form of Christianity is precisely like the “Islam” of many Muslim fundamentalists, who are only nominal Muslims but see the religion as a bulwark against Western dominance. Many of the al-Qaeda figures were not particularly pious. Thus, September 11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah was from a secular Sunni family (an uncle was a Baathist) and he had a live-in Turkish girlfriend, and danced at a wedding not long before his horrible mass murder spree.

It is darkly humorous to see O’Reilly annoyed at Christianity being tarred with the brush of Breivik; now he knows what it was like for Muslims who had nothing to do with al-Qaeda (i.e. almost all of them) to suddenly fall under a cloud because of the actions of a small number of militants.

So the “jihadis” are no more exemplars of believing Islam than Breivik is of believing Christianity. O’Reilly delivered himself of a self-loving and bigotted diatribe typical of the main themes of Muslim-hating in America, a discourse that is attended with inherent dangers of violence.