{"id":1616,"date":"2008-12-09T10:39:01","date_gmt":"2008-12-09T15:39:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=1616"},"modified":"2008-12-09T10:39:34","modified_gmt":"2008-12-09T15:39:34","slug":"army-of-the-pure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=1616","title":{"rendered":"Army of the Pure"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It has seemed to me that the quest for purity often leads to exceptional evil. The Nazis wanted a pure Aryan race. Religious extremists of all sorts focus on various types of purity. In a sense, the belief that one can attain purity is to reject that most human of all statements: &#8220;Nothing human is alien to me.&#8221; Instead, purity by definition is about exclusion in contrast to messy humanity.<\/p>\n<p>I was reminded of this when seeing the <em>New York Times<\/em> translate the name of the terrorist group that is believed to have been behind the Mumbai massacre: Lashkar-e-Taiba, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Lashkar-e-Toiba\">army of the pure<\/a>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In the name of purity, there was another massacre. It will not be the last.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It has seemed to me that the quest for purity often leads to exceptional evil. The Nazis wanted a pure Aryan race. Religious extremists of all sorts focus on various types of purity. In a sense, the belief that one can attain purity is to reject that most human of all statements: &#8220;Nothing human is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8,367,9],"tags":[1085,1083,1084],"class_list":["post-1616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-morality","category-national-security","category-the-war-on-terrorism","tag-army-of-the-pure","tag-lashkar-e-taiba","tag-purity"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8qcx-q4","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1616"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1629,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1616\/revisions\/1629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}