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Religious Intolerance: Israel and Ireland
international |
rights, freedoms and repression |
opinion/analysis
Wednesday June 15, 2011 16:51 by Peter Mulholland
No democracy would admit to being intolerant of minority faiths or opposed to religious liberty. But... On May 23, 2011, the Israeli Special Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs Task Force on minority religious groups presented a 48-page report to the Minister of Welfare. The Report has been described as being "a blueprint for systematic, government-fuelled intolerance directed at minority religious communities throughout Israel". The Report categorised around 80 belief systems as being ‘cults’ or ‘sects’ and recommend defining a cult as being a group that converges around one person or idea and adopts thought-control methods, encourages emotional dependency, loyalty, obedience and subordination to the leader. ‘Thought-control’ or ‘mind-control’ are the terms that anti-cult activists now use in place of the widely discredited ‘brainwashing’ thesis and they predominate in the Report with opposing views being only briefly presented before being dismissed on the grounds that “therapists dealing in the subject in Israel claim... that mind control techniques are used in recruiting cult members” (page 22). Only two ‘therapists’ are named in the Report and Israeli academics specialising in the study of religions have identified both as being anti-cult activists. |
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