Our crazies are better than yours

Amanda at Pandagon has a short piece that gets at something I've been feeling increasingly -- that ordinary citizens of both the US and Iraq are becoming victims of their local fundamentalist wackos. Both Christian and Muslim fundamentalists put the purity of their ideals above any human rights consideration or above the pesky arguments of fact, and both share a focus on authoritarianism and mysogyny.

If you look at it from that angle–that fundamentalist Muslims and fundamentalist Christians are just two flavors of the same patriarchal religion–then one thing becomes quite obvious. The winners of the Iraqi War are not the Americans and not the Iraqis, but the fundamentalists. On both sides of the conflict, fundamentalists have been able to use this war as leverage to make progress towards their ideal society–a strict hierarchy where the men on top of society have absolute power over other men and men have absolute power over women.

Hard not to agree...

(via Pseudo-Adrienne at Alas)

Update: as if on cue, Pat Roberston calls for the assassination of another nation's leader. Fatwah, anyone?

Update 2: evidence that the American Taliban is training its up-and-comers to use religious tests for all policy decisions.