“From the October 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to the April 2022 bombing of the Sufi Khalifa Sahib mosque in Kabul, Afghanistan, religious minority sacred spaces are a conspicuous target of societal violence.” So opens “Diversionary desecration? Regime instability and societal violence against minority sacred spaces,” a new paper by Ariel Zellman and Andrea Malji, published in Politics, Religion, & Ideology. The authors undertook quantitative analysis to explore the link between severe violence carried out against minority sacred spaces and increased regime instability, especially in democratic states, where religious freedoms are traditionally supported (the authors also note that societies don’t actually need to be “particularly fractionalized or experiencing war” for religious minorities to be targeted). “Our findings,” they write, “suggest that the most violent outcomes tend to be diversionary, redirecting public anger toward internal ‘enemy’ others, rather than reactionary or retaliatory behavior toward already persecuted or genuinely threatening out-groups.”

In order to carry out this study, the authors used “data regarding the governmental and societal treatment of 701 individually measured religious minority groups across 162 states from 1991 to 2014 drawn from the Religion and State project’s Minorities module (RASM).” And statistical analysis by and large bore out what they had hypothesized: “the increasing extent to which higher levels of violence against minority sacred sites reflect diversion of societal unrest amid regime instability, rather than reactionary attitudes toward oppressed minorities or perhaps even retaliation for minority incitement.” Crucially, higher levels of violence tended to be associated with democratic states where the dominant religion was strongly supported. The authors also stress the difference between violence against religious sites of minority populations and violence against the minority populations themselves.

Drawing on the pre-existing literature, the authors devised a theory as to the difference between minor and major violence and when violence is reactionary, retaliatory, and diversionary: Minor vandalism of minority sacred sites tended to be reactionary, and major vandalism and minor violence was often retaliatory. However, “major violence targeting minority sacred sites, however, is most often diversionary, occurring especially in more religious states against the backdrop of rising regime instability, wherein societal actors employ such violence opportunistically as a tool of religious outbidding to claim power and legitimacy.”  And this was what they turned to the data from RASM to test, using multinomial logistic regressions. While much of what they found matched conventional wisdom, “Less conventional are our nuanced findings regarding major violence targeting minority sacred sites. Herein our results show that such violence is very frequently driven by diversionary rather than mere retaliatory dynamics.”

The authors believe that this work has important policy implications (beyond the “obvious suggestion” that states respect the rights of all populations: “The ability to protect and preserve cultural heritage sites is directly tied to state discrimination, that is, states willing to discriminate against their religious minorities are also unlikely to protect their heritage sites.”

Jon Lewis and Luke Baumgartner broke down the threat posed by antisemitic “white replacement” conspiracy theories. They note that, even though nearly a dozen terrorist attacks have already taken inspiration from conspiracies like Great Replacement theory, such conspiracies are still being pushed by right-wing media figures and politicians alike into the mainstream. The basic contours of such theories are that Jewish elites are flooding non-white migrants into countries to remake their demographics. These ideas have found devout adherents in the United States and Europe. “As these influencers and media personalities continue to use social media platforms to spread antisemitic conspiracies, more ‘normies’ are likely to become radicalized and embrace increasingly dangerous and violent ideologies,” the authors warn.

Daniel Ofman reported on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to the Baltic states, where he traveled to shore up support for Ukraine, which will mark two years since Russia’s all-out invasion next month. Ofman described the trip as a “whirlwind,” with Ukraine’s president heading from Vilnius to Tallinn to Riga, where “Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs said that there needs to be a ‘change in emphasis’ when talking about Ukraine. He said the message from many countries is that they’ll support Ukraine ‘for as long as needed.’ But Rinkēvičs declared, ‘We will support Ukraine until its full victory over Russian imperialism.’”

Dina Temple-Raston wrote about how Chinese hackers “can hide the code they use to infiltrate systems worldwide.” Temple-Raston explained that China “passed a law in 2021 that requires any business operating in China to report any coding flaws to a government agency before patching the vulnerability or revealing its existence publicly.” State-sponsored hackers then use the information. This is all detailed in a new report by the Atlantic Council, a Washington, DC-based think tank, and Dakota Cary, one of the report’s authors, spoke with the “Click Here” podcast (a transcript is also available at the link).

Double, double, toil and trouble.

No, you really shouldn’t have!

Doppelganger’s doppelganger.

Dinner and a Showtime.

What does this hyrax know?

Choose your fighter.