Michael Burleigh SACRED CAUSES: RELIGION AND POLITICS FROM THE EUROPEAN DICTATORS TO AL QAEDA (HarperPress, 2006)
201.720940904BUR

WARNING: This book is a pretentious, woolly-minded diatribe, a wandery jeremiad, spraying in all directions. This is a crass, ill-tempered, humourless rant of a book. Inelegant, and clumsily written. Riddled with typos and redundancies. Studiously avoids any hint of criticising the Holy State, Israel.

It’s just a geographical quirk, an accident of birth, that means Burleigh is not defending Mao or Stalin or Pol Pot like he defends the Spanish Inquisition and Franco. Actually, we should investigate; maybe he DID defend Pol Pot, in accordance with his unquestioning support of the U.S. government...

Here is a selection of some of Burleigh's most crazed outpourings, with parenthesized, italicized comments by M. Breen...

81 In fact, the modus operandi of the Communist Party itself bore a marked similarity to the Spanish Inquisition, an arm of the Spanish monarchy rather than the Church, with the important differences that torture was an acknowledged and legal part of the Spanish Inquisition’s proceedings, whose overarching objective was to induce heretics to seek forgiveness for the sake of their souls. Only unrepentant heretics were ceremonially burned. [THEY WERE JEWS. THIS FOOL IS SLANDERING THEM 400 YEARS LATER...]

116 The Nazis intended to strip Christmas of its Christian associations, turning it into a general celebration of goodwill and the advent of the New Year, a goal pursued nowadays in Britain mainly by local government. [THE LAMENESS of this crack does little to alleviate the effect of extreme imbalance of this statement.]

377 ...wallowing in victimhood is an essential element in the Irish problem---as of so many other problems---providing as it does the emotional and moral “justification” for bullying, intimidating and killing others... [NO MENTION OF ZIONISTS DOING ALL THIS IN PALESTINE.]
... [He waxes indignant about] terrorist-politicians who regularly bring their little frisson of violence (and smirking evasiveness) to British television studios.

448 [Launches into a bizarre rant against Germany:] Its moralising neutralism towards the war in Iraq and solipsistic self-preoccupation also ensured that by 2000 it counted for less than Poland in the esteem of the Anglo-Saxon world. For the first time in thirty years, no one was much interested in anything its left-liberal intelligentsia had to say, with even their hand-wringing ruminations on the Nazis becoming a bore to many sophisticated people elsewhere.

458 ...Israel has been subjected to a murderous campaign of suicide bombings by the Palestinian terrorist organisation Hamas, in which bus drivers have emerged as unexpected heroes of a society under siege. British-born suicide bombers were responsible for one such attack, on Mike’s Bar in Tel Aviv, while another Briton---product of a minor private school in Essex and the LSE---killed the Wall St Journal reporter Daniel Pearl for being a Jew. The Iranian-sponsored terrorist organisation Hizbollah regularly fires rockets into Israel too. Every day, Allied coalition forces, and vaster numbers of Iraqis, come under murderous assault from remnants of the Saddam regime and from foreign Islamist ighters drawn to Iraq by anarchy and bloodshed. The bombs get bigger as the addicts of orange light require even greater explosions. At the time of writing, sixty Iraqis are being killed each day.

459 Hosni Mubarak and Pervez Musharraf...are personally very courageous. ...Other claims should not be taken uncritically either. The terrorists’, and their penumbra of passive supporters’, rhetorical claims that they are moved to kill by the plight of their co-religionists in Bosnia, Chechnya, Iraq or Palestine should be queried more than is the case. There is little to stop, for example, a British-born Muslim from working in a Palestinian hospital or orphanage rather than blowing up a Tel Aviv pub or an underground train in London.

477 Similarly, the wearing of head-scarves in schools has become an act of provocation, exploited by the militants who encourage schoolgirls in this choice of fashion. [AND THE KIPPA??]

478 Support for the US-led coalition in Iraq can determine (as it has already done) the fate of European governments, as witnessed by the fall of Spanish president Jose Maria Aznar, a man of courage and dignity, and the longevity (until 2005) of chancellor Gerhard Schroder, as the Spanish and German left played their anti-American cards in a climate rendered almost insane by the re-election of George W. Bush.

479 ...antisemitism---if that is what criticism of Israel is seen to be---...some would argue that that poison has lain within “anti-Zionism” all along. Bitter quarrels have erupted among American Jewish intellectuals, because the allegedly antisemitic view that Israel is complicating US foreign policy is as rife among their gentile colleagues in the US as it is in a Europe which some American Jews hysterically claim is synonymous with that malady.

480 The war and insurgency in Iraq (and the “war on terror”) have sent shockwaves through liberal ranks, causing bitter divisions between so-called “tough” liberals like Michael Ignatieff and Christopher Hitchens and those apparently less concerned with whether Iraqis and Afghans should enjoy the same rights as themselves. The erstwhile left is bitterly divided over such issues as torture. News of this novel trend has yet to reach celebrity actors, film-makers and playwrights, who are stuck in the infantile Noam Chomsky cum Harold Pinter view of the world...

Those with strong stomachs and/or a highly developed tolerance for the absurd can read more here....
https://morrisseybreen.blogspot.com/2017/12/michael-burleigh-sacred-causes.html