Karen Armstrong is a historian and "religion expert" who is a consistent apologist for radical Islam, and a frequent guest on TV programs. She has a lucrative career speaking and writing about religion.
In a recent interview, she makes this outrageous claim:
We’re piling all the violence of the 21st Century on the back of religion, sending it away, saying we have nothing to do with religion. While we still have to deal with the political situation. The supermarket attack in Paris was about Palestine, about Isis. It had nothing to do with antisemitism; many of them are Semites themselves. But they attempt to conquer Palestine and we’re not talking about that. We’re too implicated and we don’t know what to do with it.Are the kosher-consumer French Jews guilty because they support Jews living in their historic homeland, or because most of them will end up moving to Israel because of these types of attacks on their stores and schools and synagogues that have nothing to do with anyone hating Jews?
OK, maybe the "they" in that sentence referred only to Jews in general, or unnamed "Zionists." Her use of the incredibly stupid "they are semites themselves" argument shows that Armstrong has no intellectual honesty whatsoever.
Who knows what goes through her mind as she tries to justify widespread Arab antisemitism and incitement (as I have documented time and time again)? Clearly, Armstrong doesn't care about the human rights of Jews to make a statement like this.
When you use "scholarship" to consistently justify terrorism and tear down others, then it isn't scholarship.
(h/t Yair Rosenberg)