Presents the inside story of Kurdish guerrilla movement. This book combines reportage and scholarship to give an account of PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party.

This in-depth study of the Kurdistan Workers' Party combines reportage and scholarship for “a scholarly, gripping account” (The Economist). The Kurds, who number some twenty-eight million people in the Middle East, have no country to call their own. Yet today, they are highly visible actors on the world's political stage. To understand modern-day Kurds—and their continuing demands for an independent state—we must understand the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). A guerilla force founded in 1978, the PKK radicalized the Kurdish national movement in Turkey, becoming a tightly organized, well-armed fighting force of some 15,000, with a 50,000-member civilian militia in Turkey and tens of thousands of active backers in Europe. Aliza Marcus, one of the first Western reporters to meet with PKK rebels, wrote about their war for many years before being put on trial in Turkey for her reporting. Based on her interviews with PKK rebels and their supporters and opponents throughout the world—including the Palestinians who trained them, the intelligence services that tracked them, and the dissidents who tried to break them up—Marcus provides an in-depth account of this influential radical group. Blood and Belief combines reportage and scholarship to give the first in-depth account of the PKK. Aliza Marcus, one of the first Western reporters to meet with PKK rebels, wrote about their war for many years for a variety of prominent publications before being put on trial in Turkey for her reporting. Based on her interviews with PKK rebels and their supporters and opponents throughout the world—including the Palestinians who trained them, the intelligence services that tracked them, and the dissidents who tried to break them up—Marcus provides an in-depth account of this influential radical group.

"A wonderful, rich, and fascinating book, and a great read. Biale explores the meanings of blood within Jewish and Christian cultures from the blood of the sacrifices of the book of Leviticus to the blood of the Eucharist to the blood of medieval blood libels and the place of blood in Nazi ideology. Biale shows that blood symbolism stands at the center of the divide between Judaism and Christianity. This book will be the point of departure for all future studies of the subject."—Shaye J.D. Cohen, Harvard University "I know of no other work that, through numerous insights and useful distinctions, so alerts us to and comprehensively documents the ongoing constitutive role of Christian and anti-Semitic perceptions of Jewish existence and the interactions between them. Whereas much contemporary historiography has become so specialized that historians have surrendered the larger picture, David Biale's panoramic perspective reveals the great value and interest of this work."—Steven E. Aschheim, author of Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad

Blood contains extraordinary symbolic power in both Judaism and Christianity—as the blood of sacrifice, of Jesus, of the Jewish martyrs, of menstruation, and more. Yet, though they share the same literary, cultural, and religious origins, on the question of blood the two religions have followed quite different trajectories. For instance, while Judaism rejects the eating or drinking of blood, Christianity mandates its symbolic consumption as a central sacrament. How did these two traditions, both originating in the Hebrew Bible's cult of blood sacrifices, veer off in such different directions? With his characteristic wit and erudition, David Biale traces the continuing, changing, and often clashing roles of blood as both symbol and substance through the entire sweep of Jewish and Christian history from Biblical times to the present.

The culmination of years of fieldwork in southern Malawi, River of Blood reconstructs the beginnings of the Mbona martyr cult, follows its history to the present day, and reveals the fascinating intersections of an indigenous belief system with European Christianity. In the cult of Mbona, the central African mythology of the snake that is beheaded to make the rains come has been combined with a more spiritual interpretation: the snake has been transformed into a human martyr and redeemer. According to the cult, the rainmaker Mbona was tracked down by his enemies; they cut off his head, and his blood formed the River of Blood. Mbona returned as a storm wind and asked that a shrine be dedicated in his name. J. Matthew Schoffeleers recounts how the Portuguese presence in Zambezia in the period 1590-1622 led to more than three decades of internecine warfare and caused the people of southern Malawi tremendous suffering. In response to this political oppression and social upheaval, Schoffeleers shows, the people looked to Mbona, their "black Jesus," for redemption. Beyond reconstructing the cult's genesis, Schoffeleers traces its recent history, particularly in political context. He provides texts of seven cult myths from different historical periods in both Chimang'anja and English. His analysis presents the Mbona myth as a continuous social construction and deconstruction. Emphasizing the impact of political and spiritual oppression on the cult, he distinguishes between the differing versions of the myth preserved by the aristocracy and by the commonalty and demonstrates how these disparate views unite to preserve historical information. In so doing, he shows that cults serve as valuable repositories for historical information.

What does Israel hope to achieve with its recent withdrawal from Gaza and the building of a 700km wall around the West Bank? Jonathan Cook, who has reported on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the Second Intifada, presents a lucid account of the Jewish state's motives. The heart of the issue, he argues, is demography. Israel fears the moment when the region’s Palestinians – Israel's own Palestinian citizens and those in the Occupied Territories – become a majority. Inevitable comparisons with apartheid in South Africa will be drawn. The book charts Israel’s increasingly desperate responses to its predicament: -- military repression of Palestinian dissent on both sides of the Green Line -- accusations that Israel's Palestinian citizens and the Palestinian Authority are secretly conspiring to subvert the Jewish state from within -- a ban on marriages between Israel’s Palestinian population and Palestinians living under occupation to prevent a right of return ‘through the back door’ -- the redrawing of the Green Line to create an expanded, fortress state where only Jewish blood and Jewish religion count Ultimately, concludes the author, these abuses will lead to a third, far deadlier intifada.

Blood, in Gil AnidjarÕs argument, maps the singular history of Christianity. A category for historical analysis, blood can be seen through its literal and metaphorical uses as determining, sometimes even defining, Western culture, politics, and social practices and their wide-ranging incarnations in nationalism, capitalism, and law. Engaging with a variety of sources, Anidjar explores the presence and the absence, the making and unmaking of blood in philosophy and medicine, law and literature, and economic and political thought, from ancient Greece to medieval Spain, from the Bible to Shakespeare and Melville. The prevalence of blood in the social, juridical, and political organization of the modern West signals that we do not live in a secular age into which religion could return. Flowing across multiple boundaries, infusing them with violent precepts that we must address, blood undoes the presumed oppositions between religion and politics, economy and theology, and kinship and race. It demonstrates that what we think of as modern is in fact imbued with Christianity. Christianity, Blood fiercely argues, must be reconsidered beyond the boundaries of religion alone.

In the decades following the Revolution, the supernatural exploded across the American landscape—fabulous reports of healings, exorcisms, magic, and angels crossed the nation. Under First Amendment protections, new sects based on such miracles proliferated. At the same time, Enlightenment philosophers and American founders explicitly denied the possibility of supernatural events, dismissing them as deliberate falsehoods—and, therefore, efforts to suborn the state. Many feared that belief in the supernatural itself was a danger to democracy. In this way, miracles became a political problem and prompted violent responses in the religious communities of Prophetstown, Turtle Creek, and Nauvoo. In Blood from the Sky, Adam Jortner argues that the astonishing breadth and extent of American miracles and supernaturalism following independence derived from Enlightenment ideas about proof and sensory evidence, offering a chance at certain belief in an uncertain religious climate. Jortner breaks new ground in explaining the rise of radical religion in antebellum America, revisiting questions of disenchantment, modernity, and religious belief in a history of astounding events that—as early Americans would have said—needed to be seen to be believed.

Blood Sacrifices contributors: - Dawn Perlmutter, Ph.D. - Robert J. Bunker, Ph.D. - Marc W.D. Tyrrell, Ph.D. - Paul Rexton Kan, Ph.D. - Lt.Col. Lisa J. Campbell, B.A., SME Beheadings - Tony M. Kail, B.A., SME Esoteric Religions - Pamela Ligouri Bunker, M.Litt., M.A. - Charles Cameron, B.A., SME Religious Violence - SA Andrew Bringuel, II, M.A., SME Criminal Extremism - Jo?se de Arimate?ia da Cruz, Ph.D. - Mark Safranski, M.A., M.Ed. - Alma Keshavarz, M.P.P., Ph.D. Student - Pauletta Otis, Ph.D. The acknowledgment that blood sacrifice, particularly human sacrifice, actively occurs in the 21st century is a pivotal triumph in scholarly research. Twenty years ago, this book could not have been published. In most universities, think tanks, and government research facilities, characterizing any type of murder as sacrificial was viewed at best as a secondary motive and at worst as junk science. - Dr. Dawn Perlmutter

A landmark history of the antisemitic blood libel myth—how it took root in Europe, spread with the invention of the printing press, and persists today. Accusations that Jews ritually killed Christian children emerged in the mid-twelfth century, following the death of twelve-year-old William of Norwich, England, in 1144. Later, continental Europeans added a destructive twist: Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. While charges that Jews poisoned wells and desecrated the communion host waned over the years, the blood libel survived. Initially blood libel stories were confined to monastic chronicles and local lore. But the development of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century expanded the audience and crystallized the vocabulary, images, and “facts” of the blood libel, providing a lasting template for hate. Tales of Jews killing Christians—notably Simon of Trent, a toddler whose body was found under a Jewish house in 1475—were widely disseminated using the new technology. Following the paper trail across Europe, from England to Italy to Poland, Magda Teter shows how the blood libel was internalized and how Jews and Christians dealt with the repercussions. The pattern established in early modern Europe still plays out today. In 2014 the Anti-Defamation League appealed to Facebook to take down a page titled “Jewish Ritual Murder.” The following year white supremacists gathered in England to honor Little Hugh of Lincoln as a sacrificial victim of the Jews. Based on sources in eight countries and ten languages, Blood Libel captures the long shadow of a pernicious myth.