Reading Time: 6 minutes Hindu nationalism rises in Indian PM Narendra Modi’s first major political stunt of 2024, ahead of an anticipated April or May election: fulfilling a BJP vow that only exacerbates ethnic tensions against a long history of sectarian violence.
Religious Violence
Posted inWar and Peace
Blaming the Devil is a lazy excuse
Reading Time: 4 minutes When you denounce your enemies as allies of the Devil, it excuses you from the necessity of treating them as human beings with rights. That murderous logic has been used by Christians against Jews through the centuries, and now it’s arising to justify Israel’s war on Gaza.
Posted inWar and Peace
Taliban vs. ISIS: The endless wars of religious fundamentalism
Reading Time: 5 minutes When religious fundamentalists run out of enemies, they just make new ones. A case in point is Afghanistan, where two violent and repressive Islamist groups are now fighting each other.
Posted inCrime and Punishment
Despite ‘last stand’ bluster, Ammon Bundy turns tail and flees
Reading Time: 6 minutes Ammon Bundy escaped justice for the occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. Now consequences have found him in a different case, and when his bluster failed him, he lacked the courage to stand and fight.
Posted inWar and Peace
Netanyahu speaks the language of genocide
Reading Time: 4 minutes In the endless cycle of religious violence, ancient extremism begets modern extremism, as Israel’s Prime Minister cites the genocidal verses of the Bible to sanctify his war today.
Posted inWar and Peace
The allure of tribalism in dangerous times
Reading Time: 5 minutes Moral codes based on tribalism—defining the in-group and the out-group, whether by culture, religion or race—offer no solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict or any of the other wars wracking our world. The only path to peace is a morality based on empathy and universal humanity, yet it seems further from our grasp than ever.
Posted inWar and Peace
An ouroboros of hate: How religion makes peace impossible
Reading Time: 5 minutes The latest outbreak of violence in the Middle East shows why religion makes peace impossible. Israel and Hamas are in a fundamentalist deadlock, neither able to triumph, but neither willing to concede.
Posted inWar and Peace
Vladimir Putin’s holy war
Reading Time: 6 minutes Putin has enlisted the Russian Orthodox Church to justify his war on Ukraine as a crusade sanctioned by God, and the head of the church, Patriarch Kirill, has been only too happy to assist.
Posted inWar and Peace
Is the US headed for civil war?
Reading Time: 6 minutes A large majority of Americans fear that political violence is imminent. Are we doomed to make this a self-fulfilling prophecy, or will this dire vision motivate the nation to change course and regain its sanity?
Posted inHistory
Israel and the West: Western complicity in Middle Eastern trauma
Reading Time: 10 minutes Israel is a strange country—but then, what country isn’t? Canada is sometimes jokingly referred to as three mining companies in a trench coat. Nigeria only became formally independent in 1960, from the painfully divisive lines carved by British colonial rule at cost to a much older and more nuanced array of local nations. And the […]