DONALD Trump’s expletives-laced threats to Iran landed on Easter Sunday showcasing the abysmal vulgarity that his brand of politics increasingly wraps itself in, aided and abetted by religious and racial violence. It was Pakistani scholar Ahmad Javaid who drew a distinction recently between religious zealots and liberals of his country. It’s difficult to find a bigot who doesn’t take recourse to violence or abuse to assert their point. It was equally improbable to find open-minded agnostics to be abusive with their opponents, he said. Violence and abuse is the feature of groups such as Hindutva and Zionism, which binds them in an unequal relationship of mutually exclusive bigotry. Zionists are ardent opponents of idolatry, to which Hindu nationalists can do little more than to pocket the insults.

Open-mindedness has little to do with being religious or irreligious. The day Trump hissed his curse words at Iran, the Pope counselled him and his followers against waging wars in the name of Christianity. The Pope’s criticism was a clear response to Pete Hegseth’s hissing invocation of his Christian faith to rally the military in the unprovoked war on Iran he is supervising. It was in a similar vein that Marco Rubio urged European leaders at the Munich security conference, two weeks before deceptively attacking Iran, to discard their democratic pretence and return to the colonial-style conquest of the Global South in which Trump’s United States saw itself in the lead role. “Godless communist revolutions and anti-colonial uprisings” were the killjoys of the West.

Europe should look to the future of the........

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