When Politics Drive Religion

Even though the cold war was an ideological war, the West decided to take it to religion rather than ideology. So, the political currents that use the religion as a political approach were escalated, during the Cold War, to fight against communism, as if the communist is a synonym for atheism, and as if the West was against the communism only for a religious reason.

The examples of these political currents are the Republican Party in the United States, the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, and the Islamist groups in the Middle East. The coalition between these currents was very clear in The Soviet–Afghan War, during the eighties of the last century, when the Reagan administration trained the Islamist groups there, and supplied them with weapons.

So, when the Soviet Union fell the ideological war was ended, to start the religious war. These political currents become savages. In America, the Republican Party sponsored the marriage between politics, religion, business, and media. This marriage gave birth to the corruption that we see every day, for example when arms factories paid a lot of money to Republican senators to oppose gun control bill. This corruption explains why the Republican Party stands against social and economic Justice, so it opposes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the health insurance (Obama Care), same sex marriage, gun control, and raising the minimum wage for ordinary workers. On the other hand, it defends only the big business men, and justifies wars by using the media that wears the mask of piety, faith and morals, such as Rupert Murdoch's media “Fox Network”.

In the Middle East, because of the absence of democracy, the Islamist groups could not impose their agenda in democratic means, like the Republican Party. So some of them took up arms and turned to terrorism and political assassinations.

The structural similarities between these currents do not appear only in the exploitation of religion to justify their political agenda. They clearly appear also when both justify their existence and extremism by the other's extremism. For example, Bush justified his extremism by Al-Qaeda's extremism, ISIS justifies their extremism by occupying Iraq, and Trump justifies his extremism by ISIS's extremism.

Despite these structural similarities, their ideological differences and the end of their common goal (fighting the Soviet Union) led to a clash between the Conservative Western currents and the Islamist groups.

But it seems that these currents started to burn themselves in recent years. For example, 80 years of political arrests did not perish the Muslim Brotherhood. But one year of fail in ruling Egypt perished them. Similarly, nominate a decadent businessman is a big fall that led to the defection of the Republican Party, division its leaders, and alienated a large number of its supporters.