Dehumanizing rhetoric legitimizes persecution across cultures and eras

Evidence

Dehumanization has a long bloody history. In the holy terror of the Crusades, Pope Urban II portrayed Muslims as “despicable, degenerate, and enslaved by demons.” In his contemporary jihad, Osama bin Laden portrayed the American “decadent infidels” as “the most ravenous of animals.” The Holocaust, genocides, mass killings, and military atrocities are fueled by institutionally orchestrated campaigns of dehumanization. Once entire classes of people are rendered less than human, their stigmatization, persecution, and exclusion from the most basic human rights becomes personally and socially acceptable. If the justifications are crafted skillfully, the degrading treatment can be made morally acceptable as well. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 613

Categorization

• XREF: Bin Laden’s framing the US as ‘decadent infidels’ echoes the vault’s Islamophobia/rationalization claims — here shown as a two-way street. — connects to: The ancient blood libel remains actively cited into the twenty-first century — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 275
• SEED: Could feed an essay angle on symmetrical enemy-making — how Pope Urban II and bin Laden deploy interchangeable dehumanizing tropes.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 613