The Far-Right Embrace of the Knights Templar isn’t Just About Faith, Tradition or History — It’s About Hate
In 1302, the island of Arwad, off the coast of Syria, fell to Mamluk forces….
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The Myth of the ‘Lone Wolf’ Terrorist Continues with New Zealand Attack
It makes no difference whether or not Tarrant or Breivik were card-carrying members of racist organizations. They imagined themselves as triumphant warriors in a great social struggle.
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What Makes a Human Bomb Tick?
Western experts, looking for a comprehensible narrative, mistake consistency for fact. The misconceptions are further compounded by how difficult it is to identify a potential suicide—even mental health professionals can get it wrong—and how easy it is to conflate suicide terrorists with regular terrorists, the vast majority of whom don’t strap on bombs, preferring to stay alive and fight.
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Masculinity and Mass Violence: When Will We Acknowledge the Smoking Gendered Pronoun Hiding in Plain Sight?
The recent spate of mass killers all sought to solve their problems with a certain expression of gun violence that maps easily onto the masculinist roots of Christianity and other religious traditions—particularly in more conservative expressions.
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When Religion Kills: The Narco-Traffickers of the Borderlands
When Anders Breivik slaughtered over 70 people in Norway last month, he did so in the name of the Knights Templar. Known for their extreme violence, this was the Roman Catholic crusading fraternity dedicated to the protection of Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. Medieval military orders do not commonly hit the headlines, but oddly—as was noted in the Christian Science Monitor in late July—the Knights Templar were also implicated in another context, in another country, the same week that Breivik’s Manifesto began to circulate.
Read MoreBreivik’s Demographic Warfare and the American Right’s Demographic Winter
Kathryn Joyce’s reporting shows a shared reference to the 1683 Battle of Vienna.
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