Pope Benedict XVI\u2019s recent commentary suggesting religion is being exploited to fuel continuing wars is a concept familiar to award-winning author Reza Aslan.<\/p>\n
Aslan, 35, who spoke Monday before a packed audience at the World Affairs Council in San Francisco to promote his latest book How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror, discussed religious ideology and extremism and its destructive impact on the world.<\/p>\n
According to Aslan, the former Bush administration\u2019s self-proclaimed \u201cWar on Terror\u201d was never about terrorism. If it were, Aslan argues, the war would have included terrorist groups like ETA (Basque separatists), or the Iranian group Mujahideen-e-Khalq, for example. Instead, the US war on terror is specifically targeting Islam and Muslims, in areas of the world where the US has oil and gas reserve interests.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is what it is. The war on Islam,\u201d Aslan said. \u201cThat is how it was deliberately conceived and it was how it was consciously propagated.\u201d<\/p>\n
ByFanny Dassie – Fogcityjpournal<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Aslan, 35, who spoke Monday before a packed audience at the World Affairs Council in San Francisco to promote his latest book How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror, discussed religious ideology and extremism and its destructive impact on the world…the former Bush administration\u2019s self-proclaimed \u201cWar on Terror\u201d was never about terrorism. If it were, Aslan argues, the war would have included terrorist groups like ETA , or the Iranian group Mujahideen-e-Khalq..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":-1,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[112,85,83,20],"module":[67],"ctype":[17],"blog":[109],"class_list":["post-2474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mujahedin-khalq-proxy-force","tag-hot-topics","tag-mujahedin-khalq-terrorism","tag-mko-news","tag-third-view-mek","module-news","ctype-story","blog-western-bloggers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2474\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2474"},{"taxonomy":"module","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/module?post=2474"},{"taxonomy":"ctype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ctype?post=2474"},{"taxonomy":"blog","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog?post=2474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}