What is a Spaniard?: Forcibly Crossing the Cross, the Crescent, and the Star

"The conversions came at the end of one of the most successful Jewish periods in human history... Their success led them to call their land Sepharad, a name from the book of Obadiah that implied that Spanish Jews were the successors to the Jews of Israel. This world ended in 1391."

"At the appointed time, those children who were not presented voluntarily were seized by the officials and forced to the font.... In many cases, parents smothered their offspring in their farewell embrace. In others, they threw them into wells in order to save them from the disgrace of apostasy, and then killed themselves. Sometimes, even old men were dragged to the churches and forcibly baptized by over-zealous fanatics,... In all other cases, the unwilling neophytes, some mere babies, were distributed throughout the country, as far as possible from home, to be brought up in Christian surroundings."

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posted by orthogonality on Dec 18, 2008 - 28 comments

Baghdad nights: evaluating the US military ‘surge’ using nighttime light signatures (PDF). A team of UCLA geographers using satellite imagery to track the amount of light emitted in Baghdad at night found that electricity use in Sunni neighborhoods fell prior to the surge and never returned, indicating that ethnic cleansing by Shiite militias drove the Sunnis away before the surge began and was largely responsible for the subsequent decrease in violence. [Via Passport]
posted by homunculus on Sep 23, 2008 - 33 comments

Reading the news, the violence in Kenya can feel distant. For Mission in Action/Nakuru Baby Orphanage, located in the heart of the Rift Valley, the violence is all to near, and extremely troubling. (the last link contains images that may be very disturbing) [more inside]
posted by [expletive deleted] on Jan 30, 2008 - 15 comments

What they didn't teach me about Israel's 1948 war in religious school.
posted by Tlogmer on Jan 13, 2004 - 95 comments

Ethnic Cleansing - The Video Game? I don't know what can be said about this. It pushes several hot buttons - violence in video games, "hate speech" and (in the US) the First Amendment, and race relations in a post 9-11 world. Yes, it's reprehensible - but can you play Voltaire and defend the author's right to create it? (Warning: Pro-Aryan website; link contains explicit depictions of race-based violence.) Discuss.
posted by tpoh.org on Feb 16, 2002 - 39 comments