My interpretation is that for the politicians involved, Religion and Political Ideology are nothing more than the means via which they manipulate other people in order to maximize their own personal upsides - the politicians playing the crowd have zero belief in those things and via their statements in those domains are merely using them as levers to be pulled in the mind of the common people to make them do what is in the interest of the patrons of those politicians.

As far as I can tell just about all that we’re seeing in modern politics is explained by the Sociopaths shamelessly using Tribalism and Religion (neither of which they actually believe in) as tools to move the public in order to achieve things that either make them wealthier or which they are being forced to do because they are being blackmailed by people who have proof of them having commited attrocious deeds in the past.

Unlike for a normal person, for a Sociopath the consequences of their actions being the deaths of tens of thousands of babies are entirelly irrelevant - they couldn’t give a rats arse about the suffering or joy of people who cannot pay them back for them making it happen, and for a Western politician Palestinian babies are definitely in the “whatever we do to them there will never be any payback” class.

All of this shit just feels outrageous and almost unimaginable to us because we’re not Sociopaths or Psychopaths and their way of relating to other people entirelly without feeling or empathy is so alien to us that we instinctivelly do not want to believe human beings will behave like that - for example, even though logically and intellectually I know that Trump doesn’t care for truthfulness or lack of it and just says whatever is convenient for him, and even given all that he has done so far, when I hear the guy there is still a part of me which wants to give him the benefit of the doubt, same as for everybody else out there, and just doesn’t want to accept that somebody doesn’t have a single redeamable trait. This is all me and nothing the guy: my emotional side simply doesn’t want to accept that a person, any person, will have no limits to how far they will harm others for their own personal goals (because that’s entirely outside my own experience), and this even while my intellect has logically conclude that they are indeed like that and even my instincts are ringing alarm bells about “dangerous untrustworthy asshole” from how he moves and talks.