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Showing posts with the label “religious nationalism”

Israel in the Grip of Hardline Religious Nationalism

The main ideas in the rest of the article : Hazony founded the Edmund Burke Foundation in Washington to strengthen ‘the principles of national conservatism in Western and other democratic countries’. Hazony, writing just after [Meir] Kahane’s assassination in 1990, made clear that he never subscribed to his violent political views, but he did adopt Kahane’s neo-messianic brand of theology. Hazony helped edit Netanyahu’s  A Place Among the Nations,  the book which set out the future prime minister’s programme. Netanyahu asserts (in the Hebrew edition) that ‘the Israeli left may be suffering from a chronic disease that has affected the Jewish people for a century: the Marxism that impregnated the Jewish leftist, far-left and communist movements in Eastern Europe.’  An affliction that might explain why, after the June 1967 war, some leftwing Israelis wanted to give back the conquered territories. Hazony takes Asa Kasher, a philosopher at Tel Aviv University to task: ‘Kasher ...

The Battle Between Myth and History in India

“ All dissent has been criminalized in India. Until recently, dissenters were called anti-national. Now we are openly labelled intellectual terrorists. We are currently in that dangerous place where there is no set of facts or histories that we can agree upon, or even argue wi th.  The narratives do not overlap or even intersect with each other. It’s myth versus history. We’re on our own. No help will come. It didn’t come to Yemen, to Sri Lanka, to Rwanda. Why should we hope otherwise in India? In international politics, only profit, power, race, class, and geopolitics determine morality. Everything else is merely a posture, a shadow dance.” Arundhati Roy on religious nationalism and dissent