On Boston suspects: Maher To Defender Of Islam: Equating Christianity And Islam "Liberal Bullshit"

[Xithras]

245. The KKK wasn't a religious group?

The stated goal of the KKK, especially in the first half of the 20th century, was to establish the U.S. as a "white, Protestant Christian nation". Their meetings always began and ended with prayers, were full of Christian hymns, and they considered themselves to be doing God's work, as if they were God's own army. Religion was a core and driving part of their activities...there's a reason why they burned a CROSS. The religious aspects of the Klan did begin to fade in the 1960's, but it's still one of the ideals that the organization was founded on, and is still maintained today.

As as for the IRA, I do believe that there was a big disconnect between American IRA supporters like my grandfather (who sent vast sums of cash to the IRA to support their war before doing that was banned) and actual IRA members in Ireland. For IRA supporters like my grandfather, religion played a HUGE role. He used to say that the war wouldn't end until Ireland drove the snakes back into the sea. He wasn't talking about the kind that slithers, and he didn't care that most of them are historically Irish. To him, and most of the IRA supporters like him that I met, there was no room in Ireland for Protestants ANYWHERE. The war would end when the last Protestant was killed or driven out.


FWIW, Muslims don't usually kill because of faith either. Muslims, Christians, and Jews have lived together for millennia without the sort of terrorism we see today. Most of the "Muslim" complaints about the west aren't really about religious differences, but are about cultural clashes and western foreign policy (a form of ethnic nationalism). In that regard, modern Muslim terrorists are really no different than the KKK or IRA. They may cloak themselves in religion to justify their actions, and may use their faith to drum up support, but the underlying conflict isn't really about religion at all.