Shiite and Persian nationalism are both myths

An interesting article by Kaveh Mousavi in which he presents the similarities in Shiite and Persian nationalism in Iran. He explains that both these nationalisms are flawed and, although considered antagonistic, they share a distrust of minorities, promote exclusivism and use myths and selective reading of history to glorify emperors and religious leaders who were responsible for the deaths or misery of millions of average Iranians. Some of the excerpts of the article are reproduced below.

And I reject both of these identities and consider them equally shitty. Here’s why:

1) Both of them are false myths.
Neither the Arab colonized Iran nor the Zoroastrian Iran before it were good periods.
In Iran, there’s a great tendency among the chauvinists to be proud of the nation’s cultural heritage. They proudly mention how great the country’s culture and civilization is, and what a great role Iranians had in the past. Whether they are in favor or against the current regime this fictional utopia in the historic past changes its time. To Islamists the period after the Arab Invasion on Iran and to Chauvinists (Pan-Iranists) the period of the Emperors of the ancient Persia are the epitomes of Iran’s cultural climax. But the truth is both the said historical periods are bleak and are marked with immense hardships for average folks, and at that time Iran was a colony of Muslim Empires, And both empires before and after the Arab Invasion were repressive bloodthirsty conquerors. Therefore we can say that the greatness of Iran’s culture is a lie. The Iranian “civilization” is nothing but a blank page on the wall, and the Iranian nation is a blind stupid old man praising himself (and indeed the Iranian nation is a “he”) for something which isn’t there.
Cyrus was an emperor conqueror. His “human rights declaration” only grants religious freedom to the people he’s conquering, provided they kneel before him and pay him money. While religious freedom might sound appealing to Iranians under theocracy, Cyrus is far from a democratic model and no person in 21st century should aspire to him.
But apart from that, both of these “identities” are equally equally divorced from the reality of people’s lives. There is no Iranian or Persian culture without Islam. Islam is so entrenched in every aspect of our culture that it can’t survive without Islam. And that is why they go back and create a fictional Persia in pre-Islamic era that no one cares or remembers. And the Islamists make the same mistake. Their own Islam has been Iranianized more than they think. Not only we are Shiites and not Sunnis but our Shiism is designed during the Safavid Dynasty and has nothing to do with Arab or global Islam. Nationalism and religion cannot be separated from each other.

2) Both of them come at the expense of excluding “Others”.
Islam excludes all non-Muslims. It excludes some non-Muslims in a way harsher manner than other non-Muslims. This is well documented. But the nationalists are no better.
Even if we ignore the prevalent anti-Arab and anti-Kurd racism that exists in many of nationalists, which we shouldn’t, the fact remains that Iran is a multicultural country with Arabs and Kurdish and Turkoman and Armenians and Turks and many other minorities. Even at its most benevolent and benign shape, Persian nationalism marginalizes other ethnicities because it makes Persian and Persian culture the “main” and the “real” culture of Iran, and it doesn’t matter if those minorities don’t share our culture and language. But oftentimes the racism is not benign or benevolent, it’s straight up hatred.
Iranian nationalists pay lip-service to democracy and human rights. But they support many policies that are outright fascist.
Personally, I have no problem with rejecting both. I’m an atheist, and I am also an internationalist, and I think both religion and nationalism are poisonous and immoral. I want to live in a world with no religion and one global democracy. That is my ideal and I fight for it.
There is Muslim prayer I like very much. It says Allah, let oppressors be busy in war with other oppressors. Indeed.

Although there are some parts of the article that I would not agree with (such as the following sentences), overall Mr Mousavi is presenting some uncomfortable truths and the article is elucidative.

Therefore we can say that the greatness of Iran’s culture is a lie. The Iranian “civilization” is nothing but a blank page on the wall, and the Iranian nation is a blind stupid old man praising himself (and indeed the Iranian nation is a “he”) for something which isn’t there.

The whole article Islamic Identity vs. Persian Identity in Iran, and Why I Reject Both can be read at Patheos.com. 

A rare combination of Persian and Shiite nationalism at the state level (one side of the 1950s coin depicts the last Shah and his queen while the other side has the invocation lā fata ʾillā ʿAlī; lā sayf ʾillā Ḏū l-Fiqār (Trans. There is no hero like Ali; There is no sword like Dhu-l-Fiqar), praising the first Shiite Imam (Ali) and his sword (Dulfiqar or Zulfiqar).

Source: Unicoinz

Some of the previous blog posts on Iranian nationalism are Iranian 'Persian-National' Identity, Afraid of Ahmadinejad,  Is Persian Identity rising again in Iran?, and More on the tussle between and merging of Islamic and Persian identity in Iran.

Serbian religious nationalism: Kosovo as Serbian Jerusalem

Israeli scholar Atalia Omer and Jason Springs in their book Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook talk about the myth of Serbian Jerusalem and about the interaction of religion and politics in the Balkans:

Consider, for example, the mythical conception of the small region of Kosovo in Southern Serbia as the Serbian Jerusalem. The image portrays the territory as uniquely sacred to Serbian history and national identity. it amplifies the significance of Kosovo as the homeland of the original Serbian Kingdom (dating back to 13th century), the birthplace of the Serbian Orthodox Church (14th century), and a landscape that remains dotted by the oldest Serbian Orthodox churches, monasteries, and relics. It contains the battlefield of Prince Lazar's defeat at the hands of the Ottomans. These and many other associations contribute to the characterization of Kosovo as the cradle of the Serbian nation, a uniquely sacred soil that has been sprinkled by the blood of Serbian martyrs (almost always, the legend says, at the hands of Muslims). It is just these significances of the Kosov territory that Milosevic mobilized and radicalized during his famous visit to Kosovo Polje (the Field of Black Birds) on Vidovdan (June 28, 1989), at the field of the Battle of Kosovo (page 22) ...

We have seen that religion pervaded nationalist and ethnic conflict in the Balkans through the selective retrieval and manipulation of symbols, ritual practices, and mythic histories by nationalist leaders and political elites. We have seen, as well, that religious associations and identities do not merely serve as instruments or superficial markers of divisions that are actually purely political. In fact, the complex dynamic character of religious nationalism is evident in the ways that religious symbols practices sometimes exert influences and meanings that reach beyond the interests and intentions of those political elites who attempt to manipulate them (page 24-5)...

Given the deep histories and prolonged conflicts in the Balkans, it may be tempting to claim that ethnic, nationalist, and religious divisions have always been the source of violent conflict in these regions, and that they always will be. It might be equally tempting of some to claim, by contrast, that sufficient political and socioeconomic incentives would make the ethnoreligious dimensions of these nationalist conflicts disappear. Both such approaches to understanding and addressing ethnoreligious nationalism in the Balkans insufficient. The challenge, then, is to historically and culturally contextualize the religious dimension of these conflicts and explore them thoroughly, rather than to attempt to bracket them or filter them out, or assume that, under conditions of successful globalization, religion will secularize itself out of the picture (page 25)...

The Serbian use of the martyrdom of Prince Lazar is comparable to how Jewish settlers in the Palestinian Occupied Territories interpret historical time in messianic terms. Both positions result from a framing that justifies ethnocentrism and chauvinism, and often leads to violence. In both instances, understanding of national identity interacts with conceptions of ethnicity and religion in ways that cannot be fully comprehended without a careful examination of relevant mythologies, theologies, and historical events and memories (page 26).

Fresco painting of Prince Lazar and his wife Milica in the Ljubostinja Monastery (1405), near Trstenik, Serbia

Source: Lazar of Serbia

Vjekoslav Perica (University of Rijeka) in his article "Serbian Jerusalem: Religious Nationalism, Globalization and the Invention of a Holy Land in Europe's Periphery, 1985-2017" destroys the myth of Serbian Jerusalem:

Although it sounds appealing and seductive, the nationalist discourse about Serbian Jerusalem, like most nationalist manipulations with the past for present purposes, is an invented tradition. According to Hobsbawm and Ranger, the invention of tradition involves “modern nationalist practices of using ancient materials to construct invented tradition of a novel type for quite novel purposes … the new traditions use old materials, invent new language or devices, extend the old symbolic vocabulary beyond established limits …” Applied to the uses of the past about Kosovo, Kosovo is not, to begin with, a “cradle” of the Serbian nation. Neither medieval nor modern Serbia were founded within borders of present-day Kosovo. Modern Serbia developed in what is today northern Serbia at a lengthy distance from Kosovo and other southern regions. The memory and later state patriotic myth about the medieval empire and its downfall at the 1389 Kosovo medieval battle are narratives and practices of nation building inaugurated in the nineteenth century.

Medieval Serbia, including both church and state, was founded in the thirteenth century in central Serbia, outside borders of the present-day Kosovo. Kosovo historically signifies the area of the later fourteenth-century imperial expansion of the Serbian state and temporary seat of the Church under Ottoman rule in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In short, the new Serbian nationalism since the 1980s has invented and magnified the importance of Kosovo to the proportions of a Jerusalem and a holy land of the Serbs. The purpose of revitalizing the medieval narrative of the lost pride and revenge was the post- Yugoslav and post-communist mass mobilization of Serbs for the Greater Serbia project. In other words, as the contemporary political discourse would put it: making Serbia great again.

From cradle to golden age: Imprecise Metaphors, Invented Traditions, Myths ofNationhood
Medieval Serbia originated in the early thirteenth century in the province of Rascia/Raška in present-day central Serbia. Almost a century later, the earliest Serb state later expanded to Kosovo (after the Field of Black Birds, later the Kosovo battlefield) and Metohija (denoting monastery-owned land) in the present-day Kosovo. This part of what would be later, when modern Serbia re-emerged at the northern capital Belgrade, called Old Serbia, is the actual “cradle” of Serbia. Because there, not in Kosovo, the princes and bishops of the Nemanjić dynasty established an independent kingdom and a self-governing Christian Church of the Byzantine rite and ruled there for more than a hundred years prior to the foundation of an imperial capital and a supreme church authority in Kosovo.

The principal shrine and historic monument where the Church independence was proclaimed is the monastery of Studenica in the village Studenica, Commune of Kraljevo, Raška District, Republic of Serbia. Established in the late twelfth century by Stevan Nemanja, founder of the medieval Serb state, Studenica is the largest of Serbia’s medieval monasteries. Its two principal monuments, the Church of the Virgin and the Church of the King, both built of white marble, enshrine priceless collections of thirteenth and fourteenth century Byzantine paintings. UNESCO posted Studenica on World Heritage List in 1986, two decades before any of the Kosovo monasteries. Another key sacred historic monument from this earliest period of Serbian statehood is the monastery Žića, located in the heartland of Serbia. Žića lies at the distance of about 300 kilometers to the west from Priština, the present-day capital of Kosovo, and about 250 km from the Kosovo town of Pećh (Ipek), the later seat of the patriarchate. At the Žića monastery built by King Stefan of the Nemanjić dynasty and his son Sava, in 1219, a church council proclaimed an independent archdiocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church electing Sava as the archbishop. The Žića monastery is the place of coronation of the first Serb ruler Stefan and six other Serb kings. There, the first head of the Church was enthroned. In short, the earliest and oldest, historically most important Serb monasteries are Žića, Studenica and Sopoćani. Hilandar, the most important Serbian holy place outside Serbia, is in Greece, built atop the Holy Mountain Athos in Greece.

The four holiest and historically most relevant churches and monasteries, and the indisputably major saintly cult of the church’s founder and the state’s co-founder, St. Sava, are all located in Serbia outside Kosovo. Although there are hundreds of more or less preserved Serb historic monuments in Kosovo, only two, namely the old Patriarchate at Peć and the Dečani monastery, possibly match the historical importance of the four holiest and oldest churches and monasteries of Old Serbia. The two, like the Gračanica Memorial Church at the Kosovo battlefield and other sacred historic landmarks of Kosovo, are relevant, yet they do not make Kosovo the place of the state’s origin and foundation or “cradle” of Serbia.

Most importantly, the old Serbia and its main shrines are associated with the highest Serb Orthodox saintly cult of Saint Sava (Rastko Nemanjić). Sava, the founding father of the state, church, and nation lived in Serbia, travelled to Jerusalem and Greece, died in Bulgaria, and probably never visited Kosovo. Sava mediated in dynastic feuds and obtained an independent church via diplomacy balancing between the Ecumenical patriarchate in Constantinopolis and Rome. Sava’s cult celebrates an independent statehood and church autonomy won by diplomacy.

The oldest preserved portrait of Saint Sava as the first Serbian archbishop is a fresco from the Ascension church of Mileševa monastery, foundation of Serbian king Vladislav, 1222-1228. This monastery was Sava’s original burial place yet his major memorial temple was built in Belgrade commemorating Ottoman Turkish ritual burning of Sava’s relics in the sixteenth century. St. Sava is also the founder of what would be later described as a “Serbian Jerusalem”—a chapel and guesthouse for Serb pilgrims to the Holy Land.

Painting of Saint Sava and his two brothers. Prince Sava helped reconcile his brothers who fought for the Serbian throne

Source:  Who are Serbs?

When the early Serbian kingdom was well established, the Church’s seat relocated to Kosovo, which signifies not the birth or foundation but the kingdom’s expansion into an empire. This stage developed under the emperor Dušan the Mighty who was the most powerful of all Serb rulers yet never became a saint of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The Church’s seat relocated to Peć (Ipek) in Kosovo exemplifies two things: first, the domination of Serbs over the neighboring Balkan peoples under Dušan the Mighty and second, the survival of some form of Serb self-government under Ottoman rule. Imperial Kosovo is associated with the rise of Stefan Uroš IV Dušan, Dušan the Mighty, King of Serbia, 1331-1346 and self-proclaimed Emperor of the Serbs, Bulgars, Romanians, Greeks, and Albanians, (1346-1355). Incidentally, Dušan came into a conflict with the Church and was never canonized. After the Great migration of Serbs in 1690, the patriarchate relocated from Kosovo to northwestern Balkans under Austrian Habsburg authority. If Serbia could have two national “cradles” or founding centers that could be only the earlier described St. Sava’s medieval state versus modern Serbia. Modern Serbia was created at the new church seat at Sremski Karlovci (in the present-day Vojvodina), relocated to the new political capital of Belgrade when Serbia became an independent state recognized and expanded at the Congress of Berlin 1878. In the nineteenth century, the Serbian state revived in official patriotic rituals and through schooling, the mythical narrative about the 1389 battle at the Kosovo Filed and the downfall of the empire. The narrative about the Kosovo battle and the lamentations over the lost empire have been since commemorated on state and church holiday—Vidovdan or Saint Vitus Day. Out of these commemorations rose a nation building ideology seeking expansion and restoration of the size and power of the medieval empire.

There are several references to Jerusalem as the Christian Holy City and Holy Land (in the Middle East) in Serbian folklore and history. Yet none of these references could be taken as the precursor to the contemporary meanings and connotations of the phrase “Serbian Jerusalem” referring to Kosovo. First, there is a mention of Jerusalem in the epic narrative about the 1389 Kosovo battle to suggest that the heroic Prince Lazar received a divine message from the Holy Land. Second, as mentioned earlier, there is the chapel and pilgrim’s guesthouse that St. Sava had built in Jerusalem for Serb pilgrims and therefore a “Serbian Jerusalem” (in the Middle East, not in Kosovo). Third, there is the expression of a “Serb Golgotha.” Church leaders sometimes described the Kosovo battle in which most of the Serb nobility perished, and the subsequent life under Muslim rule as a “Serbian Golgotha.” A similar phrase, namely, “the Albanian Golgotha,” emerged out of the First World War. The Serbian army suffered heavy casualties as it retreated to Greece across the Albanian mountains. Commemorating the First World War as martyrdom and heroism of the Serbs comparable to the Kosovo battle, Patriarch Dimitrije Pavlović in 1918 used the phrase “Serbian Jerusalem” referring to the island Corfu in Greece where the Serbian army retreated during the war and recuperated for the liberation of Serbia. The Patriarch urged Serbs for holy journeys to the isle with memorials and military graveyard, like pilgrims go to Jerusalem.

After the First Balkan War of 1912 when Serbia militarily acquired Kosovo, the Serbian state for the first time in history presented Kosovo to the world as a holy land of the Serbs in order to legitimize military conquest. Church historian Dimitrije Bogdanović (in a book published in the 1980s), argues that the idea of Kosovo as a holy land of the Serbs claimed by Serbia before the world powers, was articulated after three Balkan wars in 1912-1913. The 1913 international conference in London, seeking settlement for the post-war Balkans, heard the following claims based on the historic and cultural rights of the Serbian ethnic minority in Kosovo against the Albanian ethnic majority: "It was rightly said (in the Serbian Memorandum to the ambassadors of the European Powers in London in 1913) that this territory is a kind of "Holy Land" for the Serbian people… In the negotiations about territories and borders in Kosovo and Metohija at the 1913 conference in London, Serbia prioritized the historic, ethnographic, cultural and moral criteria...."Yet, the London conference was by no means fascinated with the Serb sacred heritage and the mythical history in Kosovo, as Bogdanović implies. Neither did the Western powers take seriously the historic and cultural rights of the Serbs in Kosovo to endorse the annexation of Kosovo by Serbia. On the contrary, the world powers pursued Realpolitik by recognizing fait accompli established by Serbia’s military occupation of Kosovo. Concurrently, the London Conference (i.e. Britain and France), took into consideration Albanian nationalism and the Albanian ethnic majority in the neighboring parts of the Balkans, to recognize a newly established Albanian national state, the Kingdom of Albania.

The first published verbatim quote of the phrase “Serbian Jerusalem” referring to Kosovo as a holy land of the Serbs, is most likely a 1939 newspaper article by general Milan Nedić, the World War I hero and later the chief pro-Nazi collaborator presiding over a puppet regime in occupied Serbia.In June 1939, on the occasion of the 550th anniversary of the Kosovo battle, General Nedić wrote an article in the daily Politika about the Kosovo legacy as inspiration for the present. Nedić hoped for a massive resistance to the impending Nazi invasion, so he urged Serbs to invoke the example of the hero Miloš Obilić, the sultan’s assassin amidst the Kosovo battle. According to Nedić, “today, as dark clouds gather in the skies of Europe, we Serbs are yet again returning to Kosovo, Serbian Jerusalem, and the eternal fountain of our vital stamina, to smell the red flowers on the heroes’ graves and inhale the fighting spirt of Obilić [who assassinated Sultan Murad I].” Nedić was no nationalist poet or writer; he was a military leader and he did not himself invent the “Serbian Jerusalem” metaphor. He probably borrowed it from sermons and speeches of the then increasingly influential religious nationalist and leading Serb theologian, later canonized saint of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Bishop of Žića, Nikolaj Velimirović.

To summarize, “Serbian Jerusalem” exemplifies the nationalist practice of the invention of tradition. The contemporary Serbian nationalist movement, focusing on the struggle for Kosovo as seeking weapons in history, religion, and tradition, presented Kosovo as a “cradle” of the nation and the original sacred center where medieval Serbian state was founded. Present-day Serb nationalism intentionally disregarded or “forgot” the primacy of the historic center of the medieval Serbian state which was outside Kosovo, and dwarfed the unquestionably major Serb saintly cult of Saint Sava, worshiped as the Church’s founder, the state’s co-founder and the religious mystic, Christian pilgrim, diplomat, and peacemaker. By contrast, contemporary nationalism, planning for mass mobilization, war, and the replacement of Yugoslavia by a Greater Serbia, prioritized the memory of the medieval empire, the militant saint Prince Lazar and the avenger of Kosovo, sultan [Murad I]’s assassin Milos Obilić. 

In addition to the invention of tradition, the contemporary Serbian nationalist movement operating within a globalizing world, espoused new religious practices such as notably religious nationalism. According to Roger Friedland, religious nationalism is “a set of discursive practices by which the territorial identity of a state and the cultural identity of the people whose collective representation it claims are constituted as a singular fact.”34 Religious nationalism calls for a new theocracy. It is an anti-liberal and anti-secular ideology influential since the 1970s that rejects the modern secular type of nationhood as a de-secularized community organizing state and territory according to religion and myth. Thus, according to Peter van der Veer’s research on contesting territorial claims and religious monuments in northern India, “sacred sites are the physical evidence of the perennial existence of the religious community and, by nationalist expansion, of the nation. … The history of shrines, as told in religious tales, and established by archeological evidence, is the history of the nation.” In the Balkans, religious nationalism, Dino Abazović explains, following the destruction of multiethnic Yugoslavia, assisted the formation of an ethnoconfessional type of nationality and based on this service, wants to influence politics to decide on the model of statehood and nationhood particularly opposing ethnoreligious pluralism and secularism.

In sum, Kosovo is not Serbia’s “cradle” but it symbolizes Serbia’s pre-modern “golden age.” The discourse about the “cradle” of the state that integrated the people and paved the way to nationhood combines two archetype nationalist myths: myth of ancient origins, and myth of rise and fall. According to Pål Kolstø’s 2005 study on ethnic nationalist myths in the Balkans, the key nationalist myths of the Balkan ethnic nations are the myth of antiquity (ancient origins, deep historic roots of the nation), and the myth of golden age (the state’s rise and expansion and In sum, Kosovo is not Serbia’s “cradle” but it symbolizes Serbia’s pre-modern “golden age.” The discourse about the “cradle” of the state that integrated the people and paved the way to nationhood combines two archetype nationalist myths: myth of ancient origins, and myth of rise and fall. According to Pål Kolstø’s 2005 study on ethnic nationalist myths in the Balkans, the key nationalist myths of the Balkan ethnic nations are the myth of antiquity (ancient origins, deep historic roots of the nation), and the myth of golden age (the state’s rise and expansion and if applicable, collapse and commemoration).37 The recent nationalist discourse needed both constitutive nationalist myths, namely the myth of the nation’s “cradle” (ancient origins) and of the golden age of its expansion and glory followed by a tragic yet not forgotten downfall, for contemporary purposes of mass mobilization aimed at reframing collective identity and restoring the past glory preferably within the boundaries of the medieval empire. The invention of tradition and the material evidence of the sacred heritage and religious symbols from the nation’s golden age, have overall served well the purpose of the Serb mass mobilization for the destruction of multiethnic Yugoslavia. Regarding the restoration of the empire (in contemporary parlance called Greater Serbia), the results have been less successful. The Serb republic in Bosnia-Herzegovina seems as the only palpable gain. Croatia emerged from the 1991-1995 Serb-Croat war militarily strong and furiously anti-Serbian with its Serb minority largely “cleansed.”

Kosovo eventually seceded from Serbia and the local Serbs have been largely “cleansed.” Although the sacred monuments are still there as reminders of the bygone empire and the enduring Serbia’s imperial ambitions, they could not prove that Serbs “got there first.” On the contrary, according to a number of impartial studies, the Albanians are presumably the indigenous residents of the Balkans, sometimes linked to the ancient Illyrians, whose ethnic name South Slavic nationalist movements had appropriated, settling in Kosovo and present-day Albania long before the Slavic migrations of the seventh to ninth centuries.38 However, the actual history is only one dimension of the Kosovo controversy. The Kosovo myth, as part of a “religion of Serbian nationalism” as Ivan Čolović describes it, have since the nineteenth century when Serbian secular and clerical elites began using it for state and nation-building, become an autonomous socio-cultural phenomenon creating representations of the past or present that often contradict reality.

Religious nationalism in the US is foundational and one should be wary of Trump's rise

Jack Jenkins's Historians of Christian nationalism are alarmed by its appearance in American pulpits

A lesson on the dangers to the United States article in Think Progress is informative and warns Americans about what can happen. Christian nationalism is nothing new to the US and countries, like Germany between world wars, have some similarities with the present day US, although there are certainly many differences as well. Following are few excerpts of the article:

Christian nationalism isn’t just common in America. It’s foundational.

At least that’s the argument Aeon editor and former Harvard Society fellow Sam Haselby makes in his book The Origins of American Religious Nationalism, in which he insists American Christian nationalism is an inescapable part our national political discourse. He points to some of the earliest revolutionaries as proof: A band of (apparently laughably bad) poets calling themselves Connecticut Wits were among the first to protest for American independence, calling for a society that was “hierarchical, theological, and anti-racist” in nature.

“[Christian nationalism is] an old debate, as old as the United States itself,” Haselby wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed.

Granted, the Connecticut Wit social framework didn’t win out against its eventual rival, the so-called Jeffersonian or Virginia model of American identity, which Haselby describes as ultimately “evangelical, egalitarian, and racist.” But like the savior they worship, religious nationalism would not die. As the United States evolved, Haselby says two Protestant Christian ideological frameworks — which he calls “national evangelicalism” and “frontier revivalism” — began to vie for power. Their intellectual dimensions are complex, but the result of their feud was the creation of a shared political rhetoric Haselby describes as religious nationalism, primary articulated through the lens of Protestant Christianity.

The scholar differentiates his definition of Christian nationalism from more contemporary iterations by pointing to three defining (but broad) characteristics.
“Abraham Lincoln called on his fellow countrymen to revere American revolutionaries and the U.S. Constitution as part of the ‘political religion of the nation,'”

The first is the almost sacred status Americans often bestow upon the Founding Fathers and the nation’s founding documents. In 1838, for instance, a 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln called on his fellow countrymen to revere American revolutionaries and the U.S. Constitution as part of the “political religion of the nation,” which he argued should be “breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe…taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges…let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls.”

Haselby says this reverence for historical figures is unusual when compared to other industrialized states in Europe, where “founders” in the American sense are an alien concept.

“There is no counterpart in, say, Britain,” he said in an interview with ThinkProgress. “The figure that comes closest to that is probably Winston Churchill.”
The second feature of American religious nationalism, Haselby says, is the fact that leaders of U.S. social movements often invoke what he calls the “Jeremiad” narrative, or the idea that their political cause is in keeping with the spirit of America’s founding. The third facet is the most obvious: The undeniable prevalence of religious rhetoric or “God talk” in political spaces, no matter which party is in power.

“There’s a lot of liberals and progressive people who theologize,” he said. “When it comes to nationality, Americans are people of the word. They’re textual exegetes, whether they’re liberal or conservative.”

It’s easy to find evidence of these tendencies—sometimes described as our country’s “civil religion”—in modern American political disputes. Fervent debates over what is “constitutional” have defined Trump’s young presidency, with advocates on all sides invoking founding documents in ways that can resemble a theological discussion. Trump supporters and “resistance” activists alike insist their movement carried the torch of liberty lit by the Founders. And appeals to the Almighty were present at both the RNC and the DNC this year, with the latter arguably more overtly religious than the former.

Moment of prayer after Trump's nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch for the US Supreme Court

Source: The US President official twitter account

Robert Ericksen, a historian and professor at Pacific Lutheran University, has written about Christians active participation in Adolf Hitler’s rise in his book Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany. Hitler was a product of Christian nationalism and Professor  Ericksen wants to learn from that era.

Direct conflations between Nazi Germany and U.S. politics are prone to gross hyperbole, and Erickson was quick to list a number of differences between the modern political moment and the rise of the Third Reich. 1930s Germany, for instance, was still reeling from a humiliating defeat during World War I while also enduring the Great Depression—neither of which are directly applicable to the United States in 2017. And while Trump-supporting Nazi sympathizers have made news in recent days, virtually none have any major institutional faith affiliation.

But Ericksen argues the past is meant to inform the present, which is likely why he was one of the first scholars to point to broad parallels between Trump’s Christian nationalist supporters and those that backed the infamous German dictator.

In a Huffington Post op-ed published in September of 2016, Ericksen observed that evangelicals were already falling in line behind the businessman despite his questionable ethics during the campaign—and observed similarities between their fervor and that of 1930s German Christians. Like modern American Christians, these Germans emerged out of a deeply Christian Europe, where religious nationalism was embedded in many cultures. Although obviously distinct from Haselby’s understanding of faith-fueled political discourse, fusions of faith and politics permeated German society in ways not altogether dissimilar from American “civil religion.”

“To be loyal to God and country was a very powerful emotion and a common slogan,” Ericksen said.
“There was a widespread belief in Germany among Christians that Hitler kept a copy of the New Testament in his breast pocket, and he read from it every day—which was completely false,”

There are also eerily familiar cultural factors that accelerated Hitler’s rise—including appeals to what modern observers might describe as “family values.” The infusion of women into the workplace during and after World War I altered traditional perceptions of gender roles, for instance, and the forced imposition of democracy on Germany as a byproduct of losing the war didn’t sit well with many citizens.
“All of these things were perceived by the Christian community as a moral breakdown,” he said. “Democracy we believed to have encouraged that moral breakdown, because democracy believed in political equality.”

What’s more, the relatively few residents who were able to celebrate aspects of the “roaring 20s”—dance halls, the emergence of the movie industry, and a “more open sense to people having a moral right to express themselves”—suddenly became targets.
“They were perceived as not accepting Christian values and standards,” Ericksen explained. “They were aggressively blamed for pornography and prostitution.”
The result was broad support for Hitler’s rise to power among German Christians and their leaders, some of whom took their devotion to an extreme. Hitler’s numerous flaws were often explained away or, in some cases, replaced with complete fabrications about his faith.

Interweaving authoritarianism with American-style Christian nationalism isn’t just theoretical: it’s happened before.

“There was a widespread belief in Germany among Christians that Hitler kept a copy of the New Testament in his breast pocket, and he read from it every day—which was completely false,” Ericksen said. “[Hitler] was happy to nurture or not confront those kind of misconceptions, because he wanted that kind of Christian support. And the Christians were so willing to bend over backwards — they accepted or in some ways maybe even invented explanations of how he could be a real Christian leader.”

By the time his power crescendoed, the difference between Hitler and religious leaders was almost nonexistent. The most extreme form of Christian nationalism had taken hold.
“There were a lot of comparisons to [famous theologian] Martin Luther, who was, up until then, probably the biggest German hero,” he said. “He saved Germany or created Protestantism by his response to the Bible and God’s word, and now Hitler had come along to save Germany in this time of need in a different way—but still according to God’s will.”

Ericksen pointed out that Christians did this even as Hitler exhibited behavior to contrary—much as Christian nationalists have publicly ignored Trump’s attacks on the press, democratic institutions, and other evangelical faith leaders. And even if Trump ultimately has little in common with Hitler, Ericksen noted that Trump has more dangerous weapons in his arsenal—weapons Christian nationalists such as Robert Jeffress has proclaimed God gave him the authority to use.
“In the end, Trump could be more dangerous than Hitler, because Trump has the nuclear option,” he said.

The "othering" of Israeli-Arabs continues

Two articles detailing how Israeli-Arabs face racism in the Israeli society and how many officials of Israeli state encourages this racism. A recent statement by the Israeli Defense Minister demonstrates how Israeli-Arab are not considered part of the Israeli nation and how Isreali politicians, working at the highest level, have no moral or political compunctions in helping propagate and promote the 'othering' of around 20% of Israeli citizens (Israeli-Arabs) and brazenly working for an exclusive Jewish nationalism.

Akiva Eldar's article Israeli defense minister's comments highlight 'plague of racism' gives a general overview of racism and bigotry in the Israeli society and state's promotion of it:

In a Dec. 12 interview with my colleague Mazal Mualem, Liberman proudly held up a poll indicating that 93% of Israelis who had emigrated from the former Soviet Union in recent decades (one of his party’s main constituent groups) support his call to boycott businesses in Wadi Ara. 

If this poll is really accurate, the migrants are not alone. According to a comprehensive study conducted last year by the Pew Research Center, the cancer of racism has spread to Israelis of all stripes. The poll found that almost half the Jews in Israel, 48%, think Israel should expel its Arab citizens, who constitute some 20% of the country’s population. Eight out of ten Arab Israelis (79%) said there was widespread discrimination of Muslims by Israeli society. 

A study presented in July to Knesset members indicates that academia, one of the institutions expected to uphold democratic values, is not immune to racism, either. About half the Arab students said they encounter manifestations of racism and discrimination in colleges and universities they attend, and 40% reported expressions of racism by faculty members. One-third of the students reported that the institutions in which they were enrolled did not give them any leeway to help their integration — not even taking into consideration Muslim holidays and fasts, and 30% said they could not apply for scholarships they wanted because they had not served in the military (unlike Israeli Jews who are required to perform military service). 

In a September 2016 report, State Comptroller Josef Shapira wrote, “We have been experiencing the harsh phenomena of hatred, racism, violence, factionalism and intolerance.” The chief government watchdog went on to cite the disastrous results of historic racism against the Jewish people. “Human society, wherever and whenever it is, has no guarantee that the underbrush of racism will not turn into a dense forest,” he warned. Shapira upbraided the Education Ministry — the state arm tasked with eradicating racism, xenophobia and factionalism — for failing to turn education into a bridge between the various segments of Israeli society. The ministry only addresses these issues sporadically, on a case-by-case basis, and then only following extreme displays of racism, Shapira wrote. 

President Reuven Rivlin said in response that the report reflects the extent to which racism had become an acute and strategic issue for Israeli society. He complained that “the state is not doing enough to uproot severe phenomena of racism and hatred among youth.” Several months prior to the report, Education Minister Naftali Bennett derailed a program for the development of a “racism index” initiated by the ministry’s chief scientist, professor Ami Volansky, after the July 2014 murder by Jews of Palestinian teen Mohammed Abu Khdeir. The index was designed to allow schools to assess the level of racism among its students and to seek appropriate remedies. 

Bennett subsequently ordered his office to sever ties with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which runs programs for the prevention of racism, among its other activities. This week, his ministry ordered a high school in the northern town of Nesher to cancel a planned annual event with members of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families, the Parents Circle Family Forum. The ministry forced the mayor, himself a bereaved father, and the school’s frightened teachers to prevent the students from meeting with six Jews and Palestinians who devote their lives to the struggle for peace and against racism. 

A Knesset committee is currently deliberating an article that would officially allow segregation, part of a proposed law that would define Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. It authorizes the state to “permit a community, including the members of a single religion or the members of a single nationality, to establish separate localities.” In an editorial titled “Israel’s Attempts to Preserve a Racist Heritage," the liberal Haaretz newspaper wrote: “It would be interesting to see Israel’s response if some other country passed a constitutional amendment letting communities that exclude Jews be established.… ‘Judaism’ isn’t a synonym for racism and elitism.”

Source: Liberman: 'Joint Arab List is a fifth column'

Mazal Mualem's article Liberman intensifies campaign against Israeli Arabs focuses on Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman. He is determined to become the next Prime Minister of Israel and is willing to throw Israeli-Arabs and Israel's peace and stability under the bus to fulfil his dream. 

At the request of Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, his associates prepared for him several lists concerning Israeli Arab Knesset members. These lists, containing details of past comments made by those members condemning Israel and also data on terrorist attacks perpetrated by Israeli Arabs, appeared on his desk in the Knesset on Dec. 11. He used this information in a speech to the Knesset attacking the Joint Arab List, even calling them "war criminals.” 

Among the people featured in Liberman's lists was former Knesset member Azmi Bishara. Appearing beside his name was the charge against him: "Accused of high espionage: making contact with a Hezbollah agent." There was Knesset member Jamal Zahalka who "while in the 12th grade was arrested and sent to prison for two years for membership in an illegal PLO group.'' Then there was former Knesset member Basel Ghattas, "a cousin of Bishara, who smuggled 12 cell phones to prisoners." Chairman of the Joint Arab List and Knesset member Ayman Odeh was listed as having "refused to attend the funeral of President Shimon Peres, calling Peres 'the murderer from Kafr Kanna.'" There were also quotes such as "within us, we Arabs refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state," which was attributed to a speech delivered by Knesset member Zahalka in December 2007 and later quoted by the website Checkpoint. 

Liberman's assertive speech came just a day after he used interviews with Army Radio and Reshet Bet radio to call for a consumer boycott of Arab businesses in the northern Israeli-Arab Wadi Ara region. Actually, this was a new stage in his longstanding campaign against the Israeli Arab community over the past few election cycles. This time, his attack was triggered by the violent demonstrations in Wadi Ara, which broke out in response to US President Donald Trump's Jerusalem proclamation on Dec. 6. During the course of these protests, Arab youths hurled rocks at police cars, private vehicles and buses throughout the Sabbath on Dec. 9. 

"Simply impose a consumers' boycott and don't go in there. Don't enter their restaurants or their businesses. Don't get your cars fixed there. The residents of Wadi Ara must understand that they're unwanted and that they're not part of us. They’re working from within to harm the State of Israel," said Liberman, adding fuel to the flames in an already tense atmosphere. 

All at once, Liberman removed the mantle of formality that he had donned upon entering the office of the minister of defense in May 2016. He went back to being chairman of a right-wing nationalist party Yisrael Beitenu who would rather exacerbate tensions instead of restoring calm. Politicians on both the left and right expressed their reservations about his remarks, including co-leader of the Zionist Camp Tzipi Livni, Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan of Likud and Education Minister Naftali Bennett. It was exactly what Liberman expected. It was what he had hoped to achieve.

From Jerusalem of Gold to Gold-plated Jerusalem?

A Jewish professor highlights the flaws in the religious arguments proclaiming Jerusalem the capital of the Jewish people or the eternal capital of Israel. Two excerpts from the essay are reproduced below:

From the halls of the Israeli Parliament to the fresh cut lawns of American Jewish summer camps, one hears the refrain that Jerusalem is the capital of “the Jewish people.” This is an interesting assertion. First, as my colleague Liora Halperin noted in a Facebook post, the Jewish people do not have a capital because the Jewish people are not a nation-state. Israel is not the state of the Jewish People, even if you maintain it is a Jewish state, largely because about half of the world’s Jews choose not to live there. Like every nation-state, Israel is state of its citizens. Second, Jerusalem is certainly the holiest site of the Jewish people, the center of its homeland, and the place of its longing. But as Hannah Arendt noted in her 1947 essay “To Save the Jewish Homeland,” a homeland is not a state and, in fact, a state may undermine a homeland. Homelands too are aspirational, states by definition often destroy aspirations. As Franz Rosenzweig suggested, homelands, or holy lands, are places of longing. In states longing too often is buried in the messiness of injustice and inequality. Finally, Jerusalem in the Jewish imagination was not limited to a place, much less a state, but also traditionally functioned as a marker of robust Jewish life in the Diaspora. Thus Vilna was called “The Jerusalem of Lithuania,” and Lublin “The Jerusalem of Poland,” etc. If you look at the “real” Jerusalem, the city behind the theology, which is, as Israeli poet Yehudah Amichai so pointedly put in his poem, “Tourists,” the place where “A man buys fruits and vegetables for his family,” Jerusalem is a divided city where a significant portion of its inhabitants (not of all whom are even citizens) do not even recognize the sovereignty which that capital represents. What drives the rhetoric of “Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel” is the erasure of a divide separating aspirational theology and Realpolitik...

The tragedy in President Trump’s Jerusalem decision is that its ostensible obviousness belies its destructive potential, and not only in regards to violent protest or political fallout. Rather, it undermines the sacrality of Jerusalem for three religions, essentially relegating it only to one. As Isaiah saw it, that exclusivity undermines Jerusalem’s sacredness. As a lover of gold, Trump has inadvertently undermined Shemer’s song and given us a cheaper version: a gold-plated Jerusalem. Shemer saw a vision of the future even though it was still an illusion; Trump abandoned any spiritual vision for the cheaper shininess of the now.

I affirm all Judaism’s religious claims to Jerusalem. And I affirm all Islam’s religious claims to Jerusalem. And Christian claims. And I reject all of them as leverage to the modern secular nation-state called Israel. I can live with my prayer and my hope as having two separate objects. Jerusalem, a city divided, and the Jerusalem that aspires one day to be unified. But I can only tolerate the “unification” of my prayer and my hope if such unification maintains the object of my prayer as an integral part of the object of my hope. The U.N. Partition Plan made “internationalization” an exercise in pragmatism. They likely did not have Isaiah 56 in mind. But I do. And it is my prayer and my hope that moving forward, Isaiah’s words will once again be heard from the City of Peace, not as a triumphalist claim of sovereignty but as a true call for “unification.” Only then can the holy city of Jerusalem truly be a capital of anything.

Source: Tripadvisor

Rest of the article Gold-Plated Jerusalem can be read at Contending Modernities.

Robes, hoods and burning crosses of KKK: Artifacts of white supremacy and religious nationalism

Was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) inspired by religious nationalism? A study of the KKK artifacts certainly seems to answer 'yes' to this question.

An artifact (or artefact in British English) is an artificial/manmade product as opposed to a natural product. According to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Aristotle first made this distinction. Since artefacts are made, they have a maker and a purpose. Researchers learn about a society by analyzing its cultural artifacts as they reveal not only the intentions of their makers but also provide information about the specific functions they used to perform in that society.

Kelly J. Baker in her amazing article The Artifacts of White Supremacy enlightens the readers about the purpose/meaning of the things associated with the extremist, white supremacist American organization KKK. Religion or more specifically Protestant religion formed a very significant part of the how the KKK understood itself and the purpose of burning crosses, robes and hoods was directly linked with their understanding of God, nation and the Protestant religion. For instance, Ms Baker informs that the revival of the KKK in 1915 started because of a vision that was thought to be divinely-inspired:

The second Ku Klux Klan (1915-1930) began with a dream. William J. Simmons, an ex-Methodist minister, fraternal organizer, and founder and eventual Imperial Wizard of the Klan’s Invisible Empire, claimed that his recreation of the Klan began with a vision on a summer night in Alabama. As he looked out a window, Simmons saw “something mysterious and strange in the sky”: horses “galloping across the horizon” with riders dressed in white robes. Then, “a rough outline of the United States appeared as the background.” Simmons watched as each “big problem” in “American life” shifted across the celestial map, and he “fell to his knees and offered a prayer to God.” He prayed to “solve the mystery of the apparitions he had seen in the sky” and vowed to build “a great patriotic fraternal order” as “a memorial to the heroes of our nation.”

These heroes were the members of the first Klan that flourished between 1865 and 1870. Simmons believed the earlier Klansmen fought for the vanquished (white, Protestant) nation, helped restore the divinely-ordained racial order and saved the nation from the iniquitous and malicious Reconstruction forced on the South by the North. 

His religious visions and adoration of those first Klansmen, as well as the theatrical release and popularity of Birth of a Nation (1915), led Simmons to create the second Klan, a fraternity dedicated not only to white supremacy and social order but also nationalism and religious faith. On November 25, 1915, Simmons and 16 men climbed atop Stone Mountain, Georgia and lit a large wooden cross on fire. At midnight on that Thanksgiving night, these men pledged allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, American ideals, and “the tenets of the Christian religion.”.....

It’s noteworthy that Simmons’ vision included figures in robes and that the order started with a fiery cross. These are the most recognizable objects of the Klan past and present. His retelling of that vision and recreation of the order points toward an often-overlooked part of the history of the 1920s Klan: the reliance on artifacts in the order’s daily operations, meetings, naturalizations, marches, picnics, and other public events. These artifacts communicated the order’s ideals—Christianity, white supremacy, and patriotism—as well as their vision of America as a nation created and maintained solely for white Protestants.

Artifacts of the KKK

The artifacts of the KKK, like artifacts of other historical organizations, have remained the same but their meaning has changed over the years. Furthermore, the meaning of the artifacts for the KKK was  quite different than what was perceived by others:

Yet, the meaning of an object is never settled, and often the story the Klan wanted objects to tell was not the one that everyone else heard. Robes, fiery crosses, and the American flag ended up telling competing narratives about the Klan’s idealized vision of white Protestant America and their promotion of intolerance and racism. The Klan couldn’t control how other people interpreted their actions or their objects, but that didn’t stop them from trying.

In the following section, excerpts from the article are reproduced to highlight the meaning of the different KKK artifacts. It is clear that the meaning of all these different artefacts was/is religiously-inspired.

White Robes

The infamous white uniforms were, and continue to be, the most distinctive feature of the Klan. The Reconstruction Klan created the distinctive outfit: long, white robes decorated with various occult symbols and tall hoods with aprons, or masks.7 The uniforms evoked the ghosts of the Confederate dead, and Klansmen employed them to terrify African Americans and sympathetic white people. The 1920s Klan adopted the uniform from the Reconstruction Klan, but also changed it to mimic the Klansmen in Birth of a Nation.  

Imperial Wizard Simmons admitted that his initial purpose in adopting robes “was to keep in grateful remembrance the intrepid men who preserved Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the South during . . . Reconstruction.” However, the uniform’s importance grew and its meaning changed....No longer a ghoulish disguise, the robes became a sacred object....

According to an Exalted Cyclops (a Klan leader) from Texas, Klansmen wore “this white robe to signify the desire to put on that white robe which is the righteousness of Christ, in that Empire Invisible, that lies out beyond the vale of death.” Putting on their uniforms, then, commemorated the life and death of Jesus. 

But more than that, to wear the robes was to wear Christ’s example on one’s body, to embody it. Each robed Klansman wasn’t supposed to appear terrifying, frightening, or dangerous, but Christ-like. The theology of the robes tried to counter the violent legacy of the robes’ use in the Reconstruction Klan’s terrorism. Klansmen imagined themselves as Christian Knights, who supposedly were beyond the violent legacy of the artifact.

Hoods

The mask concealed the members’ faces, wiped away the last traces of the individual, and allowed each Klansman to become part of the larger Klan community. While the mask protected the identities of members, the Klan also claimed that it symbolized the Klan’s dedication to selflessness. In the minds of the order’s leadership, each individual Klansman sacrificed a sense of self to become an active and valued member of the order.

The motto of the Klan—“not for self, but others”—was realized in the indistinguishable multitude. The Klan claimed that if the uniform terrified, it was only because the robes and mask conjured images of Christianity, Americanism, and white supremacy. The enemies of nation, particularly the Klan’s vision of the nation, would have rightly felt terror upon glimpsing the hooded Klansmen because of what they stood for. The uniforms did represent exclusion, after all. Unsurprisingly, the order favored its own interpretation of the Klansman’s uniform as an artifact of Christian brotherhood and selfless service rather than outsiders’ claims about terror and intimidation.

Source: White supremacist says KKK group recruiting around Ohio

American Flag

In the Klan’s story, the flag became a powerful artifact created by a people’s love of their nation. The American flag, particularly, was an emblem of not only patriotic devotion but also the freedom and liberty of Americans granted by the founders. It was the physical symbol of the peculiar history and destiny of Americans, particularly white Americans....
For the Reverend W.C. Wright, a Klan minister, the flag was “purchased by the blood and suffering of American heroes,” which was the “price paid for American liberties.”...

The Kourier, a Klan national newspaper, demonstrated how faith was also a key component of the flag. The red stripes manifested patriotic devotion, even if this required “the shedding of blood.” The monthly noted, “We love Jesus because He shed his blood for us, and we love the Flag because it represents the blood shed for our freedom.” The stars in the field of blue came to represent “Him [God] Who is back of the stars in Heaven above.” The Kourier continued, “We may not all understand God alike, but we do believe there is a God, and we must admit that the bases of America’s Laws are the great moral laws of God. When any man turns his back on God [,] he turns his back on the Flag.”

For the Klan, belief in God was essential to citizenship. Yet, the Kourier wasn’t promoting a universal God that would be inclusive of citizens of all faiths, but rather understood Christianity as essential to Americanism. The monthly continued, “Pure Americanism can only be secured by confidence in the fact that the Cross of Jesus Christ is the wisest and strongest force in existence.” For the editorial staff of the Kourier, American nationalism couldn’t exist without Christianity. Under the Star-Spangled Banner, Americans might claim unity, but the Klan’s unity was narrowly limited to those people they thought qualified as truly American—only white Protestants.

KKK in Washington DC in 1925

Source: A Turbulent Decade The Twenties

The Cross (on flag and robes)

A deep red patch on the chest interrupts its [robes'] whiteness. Inside the patch resides a cross with a teardrop shape in its center. The cross symbolized the order’s commitment to Christianity while the teardrop symbolized the blood Jesus shed to redeem humanity... 

The cross, which also appeared on Klan uniforms, echoed the order’s Protestantism and the magnitude of Jesus’s redemptive sacrifice. Interestingly, most Protestants viewed the cross as a potent symbol of “Romanism” until the middle of the nineteenth century, and Protestant churches avoided the object as a symbol of their faith.21 Despite the cross’s ambivalent history, the Klan claimed it was “the symbol of heaven’s richest gift and earth’s greatest tragedy.”....

The wooden artifact became a memorial of Christ’s debt, clearly attached to the Klansman’s version of Jesus. An Iowa Klansman wrote a poem about the fiery cross, claiming its light revealed that God controlled the universe. Its flames guaranteed that God would “redeem and regenerate the world.” For this particular Klansman, the cross promised that a “good” Klan would triumph over any “evil”: immigration, alcohol, threats to the public school, attacks on Protestantism, Catholicism, Bolshevism, and Judaism to name several. The Klan emerged as a force of good that would triumph in an increasingly unsafe world.

The Fiery (Burning) Cross

Imperial Wizard Simmons added the fiery cross to 1920s Klan’s rituals, but it was Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (1905) that introduced the idea of the burning crosses as a part of Reconstruction Klan’s mythology. In the novel, the burning cross was a tool for Klansmen to communicate with each other, an attempt to connect the order to the Scottish clans of lore and larger history of Anglo-Saxons. The 1920s Klan adopted the artifact for ritual and as a warning....

For the Klan, the fire signified that Christ was “the light of the world” that vanquished darkness and evil. It was a beacon of truth given for Klansmen alone. An Exalted Cyclops [a Klan leader from Texas] reflected:  ‘Who can look upon this sublime symbol, or sit in its sacred, holy light without being inspired with a holy desire and determination to be better man? By this sign we conquer.’ The Klan leader believed the fiery cross helped Klansmen become better men and confirmed that they were Knights ready to conquer forces that opposed their nation.

To conquer, or re-conquer, the nation for Protestantism, white supremacy, and “100% Americanism” was a clear aim of the Klan. Perhaps Christ’s light did emanate from the burning cross, but lifting up the fiery cross as a central symbol of the Klan was also an attempt to “rally the forces of Christianity” to take back the nation. Conquering required purging the “hordes of the anti-Christ” and the “enemies” of Americanism from America.26 The cross served as beacon and warning. For Klansmen, its glow provided comfort, but for those “enemies,” the fire terrified.

Source: The Artifacts of White Supremacy 

Role of Hindi journalism in fanning religious hatred during and after Babri Mosque destruction

Krishna Pratap Singh, who is from Faizabad district where Babri Mosque was located, tells the reader how responsible, factual and courageous journalism was thrown out and fake, malicious and communal karsevak journalism was embraced by many reporters and editors in the Hindi belt in the late 1980s. The Babri Mosque affair was especially affected by this fake print and later electronic journalism. Covering the VHP’s rath yatra from Sitamarhi to Ayodhya in December 1992 was Krishna's first assignment and he witnessed not only the destruction of the three domes of the Babri Mosque but also of his positive views about his profession. Following is an excerpt from his article on the role of journalism in fanning hatreds:

Maybe one should put it down to naïveté for thinking that that the job of a journalist, even in such dire times, was to be a ‘watchdog of the people’: to be an advocate of understanding an issue as it really is and presenting it as such; to cultivate a distance from the lure of gains and trickery; and with a habit of upholding moral and progressive values in life. It was painful to think that journalists, instead of giving a factual account of situations and events, could go to the extent of concocting them in the interest of an insular, communal group and be willing to work as their instrument.

To journalists like me, the very attraction of the world of journalism lay in the fact that one could constructively question the distortions abounding in the world – what makes the world such a heartless place; why, despite ceaseless efforts, is it not improving and, moreover, who are the people whose machinations are preventing it from straightening itself. 

One witnessed journalists afflicted by communal and professional vested interests immersing themselves in the manoeuvres of the VHP and BJP, hawking their point of view as a ‘truth’ that was far more dangerous and toxic than any falsehood. Since I had no right over them to subject them to my questions, I would ask myself those very questions: in a pluralistic society such as in India, when some people gather belligerent crowds in the name of religion, use the very provisions of democracy to raze it, give it a bad name; spare neither the constitution nor its values; and are intent on dressing up animosity as consciousness and intolerance as a fundamental principle of life, what is the duty of journalists in such a situation? Should they break all professional limits to be tolerant towards such people, egg them on? If so, wouldn’t they themselves become participants in furthering the cynical game of intolerance?

Source: The Time When Hindi Journalism Turned Into ‘Hindu’ Journalism 

Krishna acknowledges that there were journalists that did not report as karsevaks or to increase circulation but they were few:

It was not as if there were no voices of resistance against the prevailing state of affairs; just that they were confined to being voices in the wilderness.

I vividly recall one incident in 1990 when Vishwanath Pratap Singh was the prime minister and Mulayam Singh the UP chief minister. During a commotion masquerading as ‘kar seva’ on November 2, when as per the reports of Hindu journalism ‘Ayodhya was bathed in blood’, I was working in the editorial section of the daily Janmorcha, published from Faizabad. Several news agencies had set up temporary bureaus in the Janmorcha office located in the heart of the city.

Immediately after the police firing on the kar sevaks, one news agency started putting out inflated figures of casualties. When a correspondent of a rival news agency received a call from a flustered head office anxious not to be ‘left behind in the race’, he sarcastically replied, “I have given you the accurate figure of kar sevaks killed in police firing. As for the rest of the so-called casualties, you also know when and how the news agency in question killed them. But if you insist, I will try to find out once again. Although, if you wish to raise the number of casualties please send some guns. I myself will kill some to arrive at a figure that surpasses the rival news agency. But if an incident results in five casualties, don’t expect me to inflate the number to 15.” The phone conversation swiftly terminated on the other end.

The floodgates of self-control could not be maintained for long. In their rivalry to outdo the competition, the things journalists and newspapers did to sensationalise news by inflating the figure of kar sevaks killed in the firing is well-known. The conventional belief among ordinary people was that journalistic publications always underreported casualty figures, saying five had been killed when in fact the actual number would be 15. The police firing on the kar sevaks put paid to this innocent belief. Journalists busied themselves in cooking up ever more deaths adhering to the motto ‘if not real, fake will do’.

The article The Time When Hindi Journalism Turned Into ‘Hindu’ Journalism was published on the 25th anniversary of Babri Mosque destruction.

Is Rahul Gandhi a Hindu? And is this important?

There is currently a debate going on India about whether Rahul Gandhi, the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and the soon-to-be President of the Congress Party, is a Hindu or not. The debate started during the campaign for the Gujarat state elections. It was reported that Rahul signed the register for non-Hindus while visiting the Somnath Temple. The BJP is now accusing Rahul of not being a Hindu and falsely posing as a Hindu while the Congress is trying to prove that Rahul is a Hindu. 

Robin David, the resident editor of The Times of India's Chandigarh edition, has written an enlightening article on what this debate about Rahul's Hinduness means for Indians who are not Hindus.

An excerpt of the article is reproduced below. Rest can be read Disturbing debate on Rahul Gandhi’s Hindu-ness: India’s top national parties are reducing the importance of being Indian:

The loud and coarse debate over which register Rahul Gandhi signed when he visited Somnath temple has led to politicians of both Congress and BJP using an awkward hyphenation – the ‘non-Hindu’. With campaigning peaking in Gujarat, no one has bothered about how this ‘Hindu vs non-Hindu’ debate has marginalised those who are not Hindus. It has erased the many unique distinctions among different groups and reduced them to one broad, generalised category – the non-Hindu.

You are not a Christian or a Parsi or a Muslim or a Jew. You are a non-Hindu. Sit on the sidelines and watch us fight over who the real Hindu is, is the message BJP and Congress have driven home.

Given the manner in which both parties are fighting over the issue, it seems that the ‘Hindu’ is an exclusive club for the privileged. To become a member, you have to meet the stiff criteria set by the club management and be ready for a rejection.

By questioning Rahul’s Hindu identity, the BJP has challenged his membership to the club and asked him to establish his credentials. Although BJP leaders haven’t said it in as many words, the implicit message is that Rahul does not deserve to ask for the votes of Hindus in Gujarat because his Hindu credentials are questionable. BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra even demanded that Rahul “must say who he actually is”.

Rahul Gandhi in the Somnath Temple

Source: Disturbing debate on Rahul Gandhi’s Hindu-ness: India’s top national parties are reducing the importance of being Indian

The Indian Express has noted the same phenomenon but has ignored its implications for the minorities and the future of secularism in India. In their article, Gujarat assembly elections 2017: Rahul Gandhi’s devotion to temple politics catches BJP off guard, they point out that Rahul has visited 25 temples so far and it is the first time that party leadership of both major parties is trying to outdo each other in visiting temples. A excerpt from the article is reproduced below:

There is a new facet emerging in the Gujarat Assembly elections, the first phase of voting for which ended on Friday. Never before have temples played such a major role in politics of the state, since it was formed in 1960. The individual Hindu candidates used to launch their campaigning and election exercises by paying obeisance at their local temples or to their family deities, but the party top brass leading the campaign have never bothered to visit practically all important temples in their areas or on the route of their campaign.
This time, both the major political parties — the Congress and the BJP — have made it a point that their star campaigners visit important local temples wherever they go to address public meetings. While it was quite obvious for Prime Minister Narendra Modi or BJP national president Amit Shah to do so because of their religious background and RSS connections, it is quite new for Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi to visit temples.
If it is a matter of prestige for the BJP and particularly, Modi, to ensure that his party retains the political power in the state as this election is being viewed as a precursor to the outcome in 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress is doing everything available at its disposal to ensure that it wrests Gujarat from BJP after 22 years, to improve its prospects in 2019 general elections and come back to power at the Centre.

Gau rakshaks' (cow protectors) rise under Modi/BJP: Is there a more sinister agenda?

In November 2017, Reuters published an investigative report Cash Cows: Emboldened by Modi's ascent, India's cow vigilantes deny Muslims their livelihood by Zeba Siddiqui, Krishna N. Das, Tommy Wilkes and Tom Lasseter. This report explains that, along with the physical threat, cow protection movement is also an economic threat to the Muslim minority. Due to the Hindus' aversion to the killing of cattle, the slaughtering, animal transport and hides businesses had been primarily in the hands of Muslims. These businesses are now all under threat. The slaughterhouses are being closed. The cow vigilantes not only beat and kill Muslims but also take away the cattle and these cattle are later sold to Hindus. So, assets are transferred from the poor indigent Muslim minority to Hundi majority, making Muslims more destitute.

Some excerpts of the report are reproduced below (full report can be accessed here):

The beating that ended Pehlu Khan’s life was televised nationwide. Cell phone video captured a group of men punching and slinging Khan around the middle of a road in north India, stomping on him and then slamming the 55-year-old farmer down on concrete as he begged for mercy. 

Khan had been stopped by the lynch mob of right-wing Hindus as he rode home from a market in April with two cows and two calves in the back of a truck. The crowd was furious at the sight of a Muslim transporting animals held sacred by Hindus, according to the accounts of his sons and two fellow villagers who were also attacked. Before the men beat Khan so badly that he later died, breaking his ribs in multiple places, they screamed that he was planning to slaughter the cattle for beef. 

Outside the frame of the video, something else was happening: Pehlu Khan’s cows were seized. They were hauled off to a nearby Hindu-run shelter that takes in cattle snatched from Muslims and sells them. 

Assaults meted out in broad daylight against India’s Muslim population, some 14 percent of the country’s 1.3 billion people, have sparked concern about the direction the country is taking under Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi. There has been another, less noted dimension to the violence: The theft from Muslims and redistribution to Hindus of cows that provide crucial income in the Indian countryside. 

Such scenes clash with India’s image as an investor darling in Asia and the pro-business message Modi broadcasts to foreign investors. But three and a half years after his electoral victory, the cow seizures illustrate how the nation’s right-wing Hindu factions that propelled Modi to power are now shaping India and stirring religious upheaval. 

Having stoked Hindu nationalist passions in his bid for the highest office, it’s unclear to what extent Modi can now control them. The bands of right-wing Hindus who seize the cows are operating essentially as private militias. They are undeterred by the prime minister’s public calls on them to end the violence. States governed by Modi’s party have seen a marked increase in cow theft from Muslims as well as funding for cow shelters that in many cases take in the stolen cattle. 

Interviews with nationalist Hindu leaders and militia members across the country reveal an impatience for Muslims to demonstrate obeisance to the Hindu majority. 

There are no official statistics for how many cows have been stolen from Muslims in incidents involving such groups since Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to national power in 2014. Reuters’ reporting across India, though, puts actual numbers on the extent of the cow theft. It also provides the first in-depth look at how the actions of cow vigilantes are leading to further economic marginalization of the country’s Muslim minority. 

In northern India, the leadership of just two of the main organizations of “gau rakshaks” – right-wing Hindu cow vigilantes, or literally “cow protectors” – said they have taken about 190,000 cows since the year of Modi’s election, some in the presence of police and almost every single one of them from Muslims, the reporting shows. 

Separately, Reuters surveyed 110 cow shelters or farms, known as “gaushalas,” across six Indian states that were led by BJP chief ministers from before or just after Modi’s 2014 election win. The survey found an increase of 50 percent in their cattle holdings - from about 84,000 head before Modi came to power in 2014 to more than 126,000 today.
The survey, conducted by phone and in person, covered a fraction of the thousands of cow sheds nationwide.It was not possible to determine how much of the 50 percent increase was due to cow vigilantes, because record-keeping in many cases is non-existent. But of the 110 cattle facilities surveyed, all but 14 said they receive cows from the Hindu vigilante groups. About a third said they sell or give cows away, nearly all to Hindu farmers and households.

In a separate survey, Reuters found that only three of 24 cow facilities in four states not ruled by a BJP chief minister said they sold or gave away cattle - mainly to Hindus - after receiving them. While cattle stock has risen about 40 percent in these gaushalas since Modi took office, only a small part of the increase was due to vigilantes. In many of the cases, cows were donated to the shelters for religious reasons or purchased from cattle markets for fear they would be slaughtered.... 

Cow slaughter is illegal in most of India, while committing cruelty to cattle by transporting them crammed into small spaces is outlawed across the country. Slaughtering buffalo, an animal not considered holy, is allowed, fueling a multi-billion dollar meat export industry that is dominated by Muslims. Penalties for killing a cow differ from state to state, with most ranging from six months to five years in prison....
People involved in snatching cattle from Muslims speak with a triumphant sense that their moment in history has arrived. “Everyone in this world is born Hindu. They are turned into Muslims when they are circumcised and Christians when they are baptized,” said Dinesh Patil, a district head of the Bajrang Dal group in the southwestern state of Maharashtra.

The Bajrang Dal organization is closely linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the nation’s umbrella right-wing Hindu organization. The RSS argues the purity of India was soiled by the foreign intervention of Muslims and then Christians beginning in the 8th century. The RSS helped create Modi’s political party, and the prime minister himself first attended the group’s meetings as a child.

At the complex he manages, Patil said that almost every one of the 1,700 cows grazing outside was “rescued by the Bajrang Dal” from “these Muslim slaughterers.” Patil described how a degree of law enforcement sanction is conferred on the cattle seizures: His group takes the cows and hands them over to the police, who then deliver the cattle to his facility. “The entire investigation and catching of the culprits is done by us,” Patil said.
The police, he added, “have to listen to us because the BJP is in power.” 

Told of Patil’s comments, Bipin Bihari, second-in-command of police for Maharashtra, said: “In a way their work supports the police. It eases our work. If they have some information on some illegal activities, they can share it with us, and we act on it. But they are not allowed to take the law into their hands.”.... 

Reuters found no evidence of a formal plan by the BJP to use cow vigilante groups to engineer the seizure and transfer of cows from Muslims to Hindus.

But in states where the BJP has taken power, cow seizures have ramped up. In the absence of official data on the number of cows taken, Reuters reporting and a review of past incidents show that the largest vigilante groups and the cattle seizures are concentrated in BJP-led states.

One organization of cow vigilantes in the northern state of Haryana has a golden cow with crossed swords and two AK-47s beneath it as its logo. The leaders of the Gau Raksha Dal, or cow protection group, say they have captured up to 120,000 across the country since beginning their campaign in 2013. Most of that activity was carried out after Modi’s victory in 2014, which was followed by a BJP chief minister taking office in Haryana later in the year.





Source: Cash Cows: Emboldened by Modi's ascent, India's cow vigilantes deny Muslims their livelihood

Dinesh Arya, state head of the Gau Raksha Dal, acknowledged his group is breaking the law. Arya produced a list of 27 criminal complaints lodged by cattle traders against his members that he said were still pending. “Seizing cattle is not legal and we know that well. We are not authorized to do this, it’s the police department’s work,” Arya said.

But he claims a higher calling: “Our religion has given us the right to stop our mother being butchered,” he said, referring to “gau mata,” or mother cow. “We have forcefully taken that right.” 

Outside his office, a truck converted into a “mobile cow ambulance” used to transport seized cattle bore a bullet hole – the aftermath of a recent gun battle with Muslim “cattle smugglers,” Arya said. 

Modi has at least twice publicly criticized cow vigilantism. “Do we get the right to kill a human being in the name of cow? Is this ‘gau bhakti’? Is this ‘gau raksha’?” he declared in a speech in June, using the Hindi phrases for cow devotion and cow protection. “Violence is not the solution to any problem,” he added. 

The Supreme Court has also addressed the issue. In September, the court ruled that central and state governments must deploy police officers to prevent cow vigilante violence.

On the ground, some Hindu activists aren’t heeding Modi’s calls. The leader of a group of cow vigilantes, which claims 10,000 members concentrated mostly in western and northern Indian states, said they were unmoved by the prime minister’s condemnation of what he called the vigilantes’ “anti-social activities.” 

“The cow protection movement totally belonged to the BJP before 2014,” said the group’s leader, Pawan Pandit, a part-time software engineer. “Now groups like ours have the momentum.” 

Pandit said networks of vigilantes operating under his Bhartiya Gau Raksha Dal – or Indian cow protection group – captured as many as 60,000 cows in the three years before Modi came to office. Since 2014, Pandit said, the group has grabbed more than 100,000 cows, often working with police.....

This lawlessness extends beyond the 18 states Modi’s BJP now controls directly or with coalition partners. In the southern state of Telangana, one of 11 states where the BJP is not in power, a man named Purushottam Gupta was arrested shortly after Modi gave a speech in August last year condemning cow vigilantes. Gupta had refused a court order to hand back 20 cattle seized by cow vigilantes and kept them with some 5,000 other cows at a facility next to the ashram where he is the de facto deputy head. Gupta said he was released the same day he was arrested and that the cows have yet to be returned to their Muslim owners.

India’s laws against cow slaughter predate Modi’s administration, and cow vigilantes were operating in India before Modi came to power. At the federal level, the BJP’s predecessor, the relatively liberal Congress party, funded the cow sheds via a federal animal welfare association at higher levels than Modi. Spending from the association’s four main gaushala grants, the primary source of federal funding for the facilities, was about 150 million rupees for the 2010-11 fiscal year, compared with some 58 million for 2015-16, the most recent period available. 

But at the state level, BJP politicians have in many cases sharply increased funding for the cattle shed facilities through government bodies. In Haryana, the state where Pehlu Khan lived, the Gau Seva Aayog, or cow protection commission, went from allotting 18.5 million rupees to cow sheds in the 2014-15 fiscal year, when a BJP chief minister took over, to more than 37 million for 2016-17. In Rajasthan, the state where Khan was killed, funding doubled from about one billion rupees in 2013-14, as the BJP captured the state, to more than 2.3 billion rupees in 2016-17, according to a state official... 

For Hindus, the cow has long been holy. In ancient scriptures, it is celebrated for its ability to nurture humanity and is compared to deities.  

During Modi’s Hindu nationalist administration, the cow has taken on additional political significance. In his campaign for office, Modi referred to the danger of a “pink revolution” under the relatively liberal Congress party, the domain of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. 

It was a play on Congress’ “green revolution,” under which agricultural output increased, suggesting the party had allowed the production and export of meat including beef to surge. 

Those in hardline Hindu groups supporting Modi frequently complain that Congress and its allies looked the other way when it came to illegal cow slaughter operations run by Muslims to gain favor with that community at the polls. Two spokespeople for Congress did not respond to questions from Reuters.

In May, Modi’s government banned the trade of cattle for slaughter. The measure mostly affected the buffalo industry, as killing cows for meat was already forbidden in most states. But the move was seen by many Muslims as a ploy to further squeeze them out of the multibillion dollar beef and leather industry, which employs millions in India. India’s Supreme Court in July suspended the government measure, effectively lifting the ban on the trade of buffalo for slaughter.

The list of cow rakshak attacks from September 2015 to June 2017 that caught media attention can be read in the article Una, Alwar and Delhi cow vigilantism: A list of 'gau rakshak' attacks since 2015 Dadri lynching.