Ritual-abuse accusations function to justify violence against target groups

Evidence

In all such accounts, the nocturnal ritual fantasy is used as justification for violence against the suspected group, Cohn and Barbezat write, a way of quantifying its wickedness in terms that justify any means to stop it. Writer and activist Chip Berlet calls the fantasy “coded rhetoric” meant to incite “scripted violence.” Accordingly, accusations of ritually killing Christian and Muslim children have been used to justify mass executions of Jews across Europe and the Middle East. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 274

Categorization

• XREF: Core support for the reader’s thesis: conspiracy accusations of ritual evil are causal engines licensing violence — same mechanism that vault claims link to authoritarianism and prejudice psychology. — connects to: Blaming the victim rationalizes anti-Muslim violence as deserved consequence — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 515; Perceived out-group threat amplifies ritual-driven sacralization of values. — Hammad Sheikh and Jeremy Ginges and Alin Coman and Scott Atran, Religion, group threat and sacred values, 45; Violent hatred need not spring from the victim’s power and abuse — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 66 (+5 more)
• SEED: Angle: tracing how ‘wickedness quantification’ rhetoric does legal and moral work in a new conspiracy (QAnon, child-trafficking panics) — what ‘any means to stop it’ has licensed.

Broader Connections

• Blaming the victim rationalizes anti-Muslim violence as deserved consequence #exemplifies (0.94) — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 515
• Perceived out-group threat amplifies ritual-driven sacralization of values. #expands (0.85) — Hammad Sheikh and Jeremy Ginges and Alin Coman and Scott Atran, Religion, group threat and sacred values, 45
• Violent hatred need not spring from the victim’s power and abuse #complicates (0.82) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 66
• Ritual participation plus perceived threat converts disputed preferences into sacred values. #expands (0.80) — Hammad Sheikh and Jeremy Ginges and Alin Coman and Scott Atran, Religion, group threat and sacred values, 58
• Group violence requires the victim to be abstracted into a category #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 383
• Anti-Morisco violence was framed in racial rather than religious terms #exemplifies (0.72)