SYSTEM OF A DOWN Guitarist Talks Politics, Religion In New Video Interview

During a recent interview with the Los Angeles radio station KROQ (see video below),SYSTEM OF A DOWN guitarist and SCARS ON BROADWAY mainman Daron Malakian shared his views on the upcoming presidential election and the role of religion in modern-day politics.

"Anybody who thinks that [President Barack] Obama was gonna come and fix that mess in three or four years is nuts," he said. "I mean, that by itself… You've gotta give him a little bit more time. I think he's doing an alright job. I ain't got no beef with Obama. But I'll tell you this much: he is a politician, like everybody else, and he's a damn good one. Because he can really make you like him. [It's the job of politicians] to bullshit people and to make them like you, and he is king at it. He might be a little better [at it] than [Bill] Clinton, actually."

He continued, "I'll be honest with you: politically, I have no issue with people, but my beef sometimes is with religion at the end of the day. And that offends people, I guess, more than telling people what to do. But I just think a lot of people… Politicians use religion and they get their troops riled up with religion. And it's not just here with Christianity, it's… Those dudes, like [Osama] Bin Laden [the founder of al-Qaeda, the jihadist organization responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States, along with numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets], these dudes are all politicians themselves. They use the simple-minded and the poor and they promise them things and that's how they rile up their troops using religion. And we don't see that as the same as our politicians, but they play the same games with their people over there as the politicians play with the people over here to get them riled up, to go to war… 'You're fighting for freedom.' I just think religion is something… It could be a beautiful thing for the individual, but when it becomes organized, that's when religion starts taking a kind of ugly turn to me."

The new lineup of SCARS ON BROADWAY made its live debut on September 22 at the Epicenter festival at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Irvine, California.