Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Violência religiosa" in Portuguese language version.
However, the violence has not only been from the religious side. In the last 100 years, the major religions have been more heavily persecuted than at any other time in history. And most of this has not been religion persecuting religion. It has been ideologies persecuting religion. This ranges from the Mexican socialist revolution in 1924 attacking the power, land holdings and ultimately the clergy and buildings of the Catholic Church, through the attacks on all faiths in the Soviet Union, the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis, the massive onslaught of the Chinese Cultural Revolution against all faiths in the 1960s and the assaults on the Baha'is in Iran from the 1970s onwards.
Frequently Jewish fundamentalists refer to the Palestinians as the 'Amalekites' ... of today.... According to the Old Testament, the Amalek ... were regarded as the Israelites' inveterate foe, whose 'annihilation' became a sacred duty and against whom war should be waged until their 'memory be blotted out' forever (Ex 17:16; Deut 25:17–19).... Some of the [modern] political messianics insist on giving the biblical commandment to 'blot out the memory of the Amalek' an actual contemporary relevance in the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. In February 1980, Rabbi Israel Hess ... published an article [titled] 'The Genocide Commandment in the Torah' ... which ends with the following: 'The day is not far when we shall all be called to this holy war, this commandment of the annihilation of the Amalek'. Hess quotes the biblical commandment ... 'Do not spare him, but kill man and woman, baby and suckling, ox and sheep, camel, and donkey'.... In his book On the Lord's Side Danny Rubinstein has shown that this notion permeates the Gush Emunim movement's bulletins [one of which] carried an article ... which reads 'In every generation there is an Amalek.... The Amalekism of our generation finds expression in the deep Arab hatred towards our national revival ...'... Professor Uriel Tal ... conducted his study in the early 1980s ... and pointed out that the totalitarian political messianic stream refers to the Palestinian Arabs in three stages or degrees: ... [stage] (3) the implementation of the commandment of Amalek, as expressed in Rabbi Hess's article 'The Commandment of Genocide in the Torah', in other words 'annihilating' the Palestinian Arabs'
I am using broad definitions of the terms "violence" and "nonviolence". "Violence" means harm or damage, which obviously includes the direct violence of killing -- in war, capital punishment, murder --but it also covers the range of forms of systemic violence such as poverty, racism, and sexism. "Nonviolence" also covers a spectrum of attitudes and actions, from the classic Mennonite idea of passive nonresistance through active nonviolence and nonviolent resistance that would include various kinds of social action, confrontations and the posing of alternatives that do not cause bodily harm or injury.
