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lthough the west's appetite for witch-hunting has long been sated, the urge to persecute has not, which explains why the idea remains so useful. Politicians and celebrities and journalists use the term "witch-hunt" all the time. In March this year the blogger Craig Charles Haley described "social media witch-hunts" as " witch-hunts on steroids". Accusations go viral, globally, within hours, and "instead of having dozens of angry voices baying for your blood", writes Haley, "you have tens of thousands". Typically the accusers are cowardly, ignorant, offensive and openly misogynistic. When the historian Mary Beard appeared on BBC's Question Time, she received torrents of abuse from internet trolls, less about what she had said than about how she looks.

In the victimisation of public figures like Beard, we instantly recognise the witch-hunting paradigm: a mob pointing at an older woman, exposed in public and outspoken. But what, historically, are we referring to? Haley assumes we know. A witch-hunt was "the search for those people - usually solitary women - suspected of witchcraft, guided by panic, misinformation and misunderstanding". Without pretence to a fair hearing, "communities would execute their suspects" on the thinnest proof.

Yet much of what we know, from folklore and fiction, is wrong. Robert Eggers' horror movie, The Witch, set in New England in 1630, examines a family in the wilderness, afraid of what lurks in the woods. Eggers gives us a real witch, fleetingly glimpsed yet malevolently near. However, most real suspected witches were not isolated figures hounded by their communities. They were integrated and proximate, and all the more scary for that. Accusations involved personal relationships and intense emotions rather than random scapegoating.

There were some savage purges in the 17th century. Between 1616 and 1630, the German cities of Bamberg and Würzburg burned more than 2,000 witches. Matthew Hopkins, the infamous "Witchfinder General" - who is the subject of a new immersive experience at the London Dungeon - orchestrated an English witch-hunt in the 1640s that claimed 100 lives, and Scotland saw similar outbursts. On the whole, though, crazes that sucked in scores of innocents were the exception which proved the rule, namely that the toxic brew of a witchcraft prosecution followed a specific recipe of religious belief, legal opportunity and uncomfortable social intimacy.

In one three-week period, the words 'slut' and 'whore' had been directed at 6,500 unique Twitter users in 10,000 tweets

It's a myth that millions of innocent women were persecuted by male lawyers and clerics as a means of social control. We know of about 110,000 witch trials between 1450 and 1750, six of which have recently been commemorated with temporary "dark plaques" in London. This may seem like a lot, but over 300 years and millions of women, it is not so great a total. Nor were accusations tantamount to death sentences: half of the trials ended in acquittal because courts were wary of executing blameless people on dubious evidence. This is why there were fewer trials than many suppose. If witch-hunting was a way of getting rid of people, or explaining misfortune, it wasn't a very good one.

So is "witch-hunting" an appropriate label for what Jon Ronson has called "the great renaissance in public shaming"? Let's turn to gender. Pre-modern societies were patriarchal, and most suspected witches female, their accusers male. Yet one in five convicted witches was male. Men could be witches in exactly the same way as women - there were just fewer. Even more interesting is the proportion of witnesses against witches who were women - women who believed themselves, or often their children, to be bewitched. Our female ancestors were keen students of each another's reputations, and competed ruthlessly to protect themselves and their households, and to denounce others.

And how do things look today? Misogyny thrives. A recently published study by the thinktank Demos revealed that in one three-week period in the UK, the words "slut" and "whore" had been directed at 6,500 unique Twitter users in 10,000 tweets. It's striking that half these cyber-bullies were women. This is alarming, but we shouldn't confuse new media with old messages. Most lawsuits for defamation, hidden in the archives, involve sexual slander using words like "whore" and "witch", and often both plaintiff and defendant were female. The big difference is that these enemies knew each other.

Perhaps we shouldn't linger too long on the perpetrators. What about the victims? In some witch-hunts every suspect was a woman, and overall the proportion was 80%. The Bible taught that women were "the weaker vessel", and therefore more vulnerable to diabolic temptation. Physicians saw female bodies as leaky, corrupt, rebellious.

And just as then so, too, are most victims of cyber-bullying female. Perhaps, as with so many prejudices we think we've abandoned, some of this is hardwired into us. According to Alex Krasodomski-Jones, a researcher at Demos, the digital age creates "new battlegrounds of the worst aspects of human behaviour". But it's this human essence that should worry us, as much as the means by which it's manifested.

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Social media witch-hunts are no different to the old kind - just bigger | Malcolm Gaskill

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lthough the west's appetite for witch-hunting has long been sated, the urge to persecute has not, which explains why the idea remains so useful. Politicians and celebrities and journalists use the term "witch-hunt" all the time. In March this year the blogger Craig Charles Haley described "social media witch-hunts" as " witch-hunts on steroids".

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FRAMINGHAM, Mass. (AP) - A yearslong effort to restore the ramshackle Massachusetts homestead where a woman accused of witchcraft during the 1692 Salem witch trials resettled after escaping the hangman's noose is nearing an end.

A $1.5 million renovation project at the Peter and Sarah Clayes House in Framingham is expected to be completed in the spring.

"This is an amazing piece of national history, and it was just falling apart," said Annie Murphy, executive director of the Framingham History Center and a member of the Sarah Clayes House Trust, formed several years ago to save the structure. In addition to its connection to the witch trials, the house is thought to have been a stop on the Underground Railroad and once housed Secret Service agents assigned to protect President Franklin D. Roosevelt's son when he lived nearby.

The home on Salem End Road was privately owned until it was essentially abandoned after a foreclosure around 2000.

It fell into disrepair. Vandals smashed the windows and defaced the interior. The paint peeled, the woodwork rotted and waist-high weeds grew in the yard. Local kids who used the building as a party spot called it the "witch house."

Sarah Clayes, whose last name is sometimes spelled Cloyce, was jailed during the witch trials, which claimed the lives of 20 people, including her sisters Rebecca Nurse and Mary Easty. She was freed in 1693 when the government realized the lunacy of killing innocents over unsubstantiated accusations.

Sarah and Peter Clayes, as well as about 50 members of their extended family, got out of town.

"They wanted to get away from Salem, clearly, as a lot of people did," said Emerson Baker, a Salem State University history professor and witch trials expert who's not involved with the effort to preserve the house.

One of the judges during the trials was Thomas Danforth, a former deputy governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony who owned land about 35 miles (55 kilometers) southwest of Salem.

"We assume Danforth took pity on Peter and Sarah and offered them the land," Baker said. Many of the Salem refugees became pillars of the town that in 1700 was incorporated as Framingham.

Probably the only thing remaining - if anything - of the original 1693 house is the rough-hewn stone foundation, Murphy said. But 17th century maps of the area clearly show the Clayes house at the exact location. The house that still stands dates to 1776.

One of the trust's first tasks was to figure out who held the mortgage, which during the financial crisis was sold so many times that nobody could figure out who held it.

Attorney and trust member Stephen Meltzer helped trace it to Goldman Sachs Mortgage Co. Goldman Sachs bought the house at auction in 2015 and donated it to the nonprofit Land Conservation and Advocacy Trust, founded to provide legal assistance to help preserve historic places.

The renovations are being financed by several members of the Sarah Clayes House Trust and supervised by Ned Murphy of E.J. Murphy & Co., who has decades of experience restoring historic homes.

The project has been one of the most challenging of his career. So much of the woodwork has rotted that the house sagged and one of his first jobs was to hoist it several inches. The house was expanded several times over the centuries using different construction methods and materials.

"Part of the challenge is just the strangeness of the construction," said Murphy, Annie Murphy's husband.

When the renovations are complete, the home will be sold to a private buyer, who under preservation laws won't be allowed to make substantial changes and will also have to open the house for tours one day a year.

Despite the preservation restrictions, Annie Murphy doesn't anticipate any problems finding a buyer.

"Anybody who buys this house is going to have to love history and they're not going to want to change anything," she said.

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House tied to 1692 Salem witch trials rises from near ruin

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FRAMINGHAM, Mass. (AP) - A yearslong effort to restore the ramshackle Massachusetts homestead where a woman accused of witchcraft during the 1692 Salem witch trials resettled after escaping the hangman's noose is nearing an end. A $1.5 million renovation project at the Peter and Sarah Clayes House in Framingham is expected to be completed in the spring.

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The Crucible Handout - SET OF HANDOUTS.docx

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Analysis of a Witch Hunt - Graphic Organizer.docx - Google Docs

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Analysis of a Witch Hunt - Graphic Organizer.docx - Google Docs

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Sudanese woman sentenced to death for being a Christian: Is this a modern day witch hunt? - Telegraph

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Sudanese woman sentenced to death for being a Christian: Is this a modern day witch hunt? - Telegraph

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A denunciation of blasphemy or apostasy, then, has become the go-to, sure-fire means of taking out someone who offends you, whom you might fear, envy or hate for a myriad of different reasons. In essence, it has become the modern-day version of accusing someone of witchcraft.

Witch hunting 2.0

It wasn't so long ago that witch hunting was in full, vengeful force in Britain: the town that I grew up in still has a ducking stool in the local river - thankfully maintained purely for tourist titillation these days.

It is practiced, still, in many countries around the world - Thomas Muthee, a Kenyan preacher who gained international attention for his association with Sarah Palin during her 2008 vice-presidential campaign, based his credentials on his successful exile of a local "witch" named Mama Jane.

The hunting of witches is often fuelled - and enabled - by dogmatic religious ideologies, be them Christian, Muslim or another. While the victims, in the patriarchal societies where it usually takes place, are often women - but not always. "The witch" has taken many guises over the years - think the Communist, in the McCarthy era, or conversely the anti-Communist under Stalin. Many political dissenters, or those espousing alternative lifestyles, have been similarly branded in the past. It is no coincidence that in Britain the last successful blasphemy prosecution was the 1977 verdict against Denis Lemon, the editor of Gay News, for publishing the controversial James Kirkup poem, The Love that Dares to Speak Its Name.

In short, anyone considered to deviate from the established norm can incur the wrath of the mob. The witches are the outliers, and in the social and familial environment which Meriam inhabits, (who just gave birth whilst wearing leg shackles) she certainly fits the profile.

Daniel Wani, Meriam's husband, with their newborn baby daughter Maya

The family politics

According to Sudanese politicians, she was denounced by her own half brother, who complained that she had gone missing for a number of years and the family was then shocked to discover she had married a Christian man. Meriam had always trodden her own path: her father having left when she was six, she was raised not according to his Muslim faith but the Christianity of her mother. She went on to become a successful, educated and independent woman - a doctor who also owned a profitable general store in a Khartoum shopping mall, who married a man - a US national also outside her father's religion - of her own choosing.

If that wasn't offensive enough - to a certain narrow patriarchal thinking - her case, like so many others, appears to have the added impetus of personal grievance. According to her US legal team, her relatives - from whom she was long estranged - brought the complaint out of pure greed: Justice Centre Sudan, an NGO which is paying for her defence, said her family appeared to have set their sights on her business. "They've been doing really well and the business was growing ... her half brother and half sister must have heard about this and worked out she was a relative of theirs because of her name," a spokesperson said according to the Daily Mail. "The first thing Meriam knew about them was when her half brother and half sister filed the lawsuit."

To the Sudanese government too, the role of actual religious adherence is questionable. Clearly at least somewhat moved by the international backlash, it has made the unusual move of putting out a statement on the case, making clear Meriam's sentence is subject to appeal and not final. Mohammed Ghilan, an expert in Islamic jurisprudence, told Al Jazeera he believed the embattled government of Omar al-Bashir - an Islamist, who in 2008 became the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity - was using the case as a ploy to appear as "defenders of Islam" and divert attention from internal conflicts and perceived corruption.

"The punishment has little to do with religion and serves as a political distraction," Mr Ghilan said, adding that it was "an attempt to give the regime legitimacy with the more conservative crowd".

So neither for those who provoked the sentence or for those overseeing it, does religious morality appear to be the overriding concern. It is for that reason that in general, apostasy and blasphemy laws (which linger on the statute books in far many countries than you might imagine - Britain dropped its own blasphemy law in 2008) only get rare outings. They are there to be trotted out periodically as tools of individual punishment, vengeance or political expedience. That is to say, when someone, usually a woman, needs burning at the stake.

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Sudanese woman sentenced to death for being a Christian: Is this a modern day witch hunt?

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A denunciation of blasphemy or apostasy, then, has become the go-to, sure-fire means of taking out someone who offends you, whom you might fear, envy or hate for a myriad of different reasons. In essence, it has become the modern-day version of accusing someone of witchcraft.

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A CDC team races to Uganda just days after an outbreak of the killer virus to try to pinpoint exactly how it is transmitted to humans

Smithsonian Magazine |

Shortly after dawn on a cool morning in late August, a three-member team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, along with two colleagues, set out in a four-wheel-drive Toyota from a hotel in central Uganda. After a 15-minute drive, they parked on a dirt road in front of an abandoned brick house. Mist shrouded the lush, hilly landscape, and fields glistened with dew. "We checked this place yesterday," said Megan Vodzak, a Bucknell University graduate student in biology who had been invited to join the CDC mission. "We were walking around and they flew out, and we're hoping they will have moved back in." A cluster of schoolchildren watched, rapt, from a banana grove across the road. The team put on blue surgical gowns, caps, black leather gloves and rubber boots. They covered their faces with respirators and plastic face shields. "Protection against bat poop," Vodzak told me. Jonathan Towner, the team leader, a lanky 46-year-old with tousled black hair and a no-nonsense manner, peeked through a cobweb-draped door frame into the dark interior. Then they got to work.

Towner-as well as Luke Nyakarahuka, an epidemiologist from the Ugandan Ministry of Health, and Brian Bird and Brian Amman, scientists with the CDC-unrolled a "mist net," a large hairnet-like apparatus fastened to two eight-foot-tall metal poles. They stretched it across the doorway, sealing off the entrance. Towner moved to the rear of the house. Then, with a cry of "Here we go," he hurled rocks onto the corrugated-tin roof and against metal shutters, sending a dozen panicked bats, some of them possibly infected with Ebola, toward the doorway and into the trap.

The team had arrived here from Atlanta on August 8, eleven days after confirmation of an outbreak of the Ebola virus. They brought with them 13 trunks with biohazard suits, surgical gowns, toe tags, nets, respirators and other equipment. Their mission: to discover exactly how Ebola is transmitted to human beings.

Towner had chosen as his team's base the Hotel Starlight in Karaguuza, in Kibaale district, a fertile and undeveloped pocket of Uganda, 120 miles west of the capital, Kampala. That's where I met them, two weeks after their arrival. For the past 13 days, they had been trapping hundreds of common Ethiopian epauletted fruit bats ( Epomophorus labiatus) in caves, trees and abandoned houses, and were reaching the end of their fieldwork. Towner suspected that the creatures harbored Ebola, and he was gathering as many specimens as he could. Based on his studies of Egyptian fruit bats, which carry another lethal pathogen, known as Marburg virus, Towner calculated that between 2 and 5 percent of the epauletted fruit bats were likely to be virus carriers. "We need to catch a fair number," he told me, "to be able to find those few bats that are actively infected."

Ebola was first identified in Zaire (now Congo) in 1976, near the Congo River tributary that gave the virus its name. It has been terrifying and mystifying the world ever since. Ebola is incurable, of unknown origin and highly infectious, and the symptoms are not pretty. When Ebola invades a human being, it incubates for a period of seven to ten days on average, then explodes with catastrophic force. Infected cells begin producing massive amounts of cytokine, tiny protein molecules that are extensively used in intercellular communication. This overproduction of cytokine wreaks havoc on the immune system and disrupts the normal behavior of the liver, kidneys, respiratory system, skin and blood. In extreme cases, small clots form everywhere, a process known as disseminated intravascular coagulation, followed by hemorrhaging. Blood fills the intestines, the digestive tract and the bladder, spilling out of the nose, eyes and mouth. Death occurs within a week. The virus spreads through infected blood and other bodily fluids; the corpse of an Ebola victim remains "hot" for days, and direct contact with a dead body is one of the main paths of transmission.

In 1976, in a remote corner of Zaire, 318 people were infected by Ebola and 280 died before health officials managed to contain it. Nineteen years later, in Kikwit, Zaire, 254 people out of 315 infected perished of the same highly lethal strain. Four outbreaks have occurred in Uganda during the past 12 years. The worst appeared in the northern town of Gulu in the fall of 2000. More than 400 inhabitants were infected and 224 died from a strain of the virus called Ebola Sudan, which kills about 50 percent of those it infects. Seven years later, a new strain, Ebola Bundibugyo, killed 42 Ugandans in the district of that name.

A person stricken with Ebola wages a lonely, often agonizing battle for survival. "It becomes an arms race," says the investigating team's Brian Bird, veterinary medical officer and an expert in pathogens at the CDC. "The virus wants to make new copies of itself, and the human body wants to stop it from doing so. Most of the time, the virus wins." The most lethal strain, Ebola Zaire, attacks every organ, including the skin, and kills between eight and nine of every ten people it infects. The virus strain, the amount of pathogen that enters the body, the resilience of the immune system-and pure luck-all determine whether a patient will live or die.

The virus arrived this time, as it usually does, by stealth. In mid-June 2012, a young woman named Winnie Mbabazi staggered into a health clinic in Nyanswiga, a farming village in Kibaale district. She complained of chills, a severe headache and a high fever. Nurses gave her antimalarial tablets and sent her home to rest. But her symptoms worsened, and two days later she returned to the clinic. Mbabazi died there overnight on June 21.

Two days after Mbabazi's death, a dozen family members from a three-house compound in Nyanswiga attended her funeral. Many wept and caressed the corpse, following Ugandan custom, before it was lowered into the ground. Soon, most of them began to fall ill too. "Everybody was saying, 'I have a fever,'" said one surviving family member. Five people from the compound died between July 1 and July 5, and four more during the next two weeks. One victim died at home, two expired at a local health clinic, two brothers died at the home of a local faith healer, and four died at the government hospital, in the nearby market town of Kagadi. The survivors "could not imagine what was killing their family members," said Jose Tusuubira, a nurse at the facility. "They said, 'It is witchcraft.'"

Health workers at Kagadi Hospital didn't suspect anything unusual. "Malaria is the first thing you think of in Africa when people get sick," says Jackson Amone, an epidemiologist and physician at the Ugandan health ministry in Kampala. "If you're not responding to treatment, the [health workers] might be thinking that the problem is counterfeit medicine." Then, on July 20, one of their own succumbed to high fever: Claire Muhumuza, 42, a nurse at Kagadi Hospital who had tended several members of the doomed family. Only then did the health ministry decide to take a closer look.

About Joshua Hammer

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Smithsonian Magazine | Shortly after dawn on a cool morning in late August, a three-member team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, along with two colleagues, set out in a four-wheel-drive Toyota from a hotel in central Uganda.

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Modern Day Witches
and The Crucible
Political
Christine O'Donnell
Terrorism
Immigration Law
Jews
Muslims
Christians
Catholic Church
Definition
Examples:
Modern Day Witch Hunts
Witch Hunts
According to Wikipedia: A witch-hunt is a search for witches or evidence of witchcraft, often involving moral panic, mass hysteria and lynching, but in historical instances also legally sanctioned and involving official witchcraft trials
According to dictionary.com: An intensive effort to discover and expose disloyalty, subversion, dishonesty, or the like, usually based on slight, doubtful, or irrelevant evidence.
Some have called the Catholic Church's efforts to weed out homosexual priests a modern day witch hunt.
Another potential example of a modern day witch hunt is the Department of Homeland Security trying to catch fugitives across the US. Muslims are often targeted in these searches.
In the 20th century, Christians have been persecuted by Muslim groups, and by atheistic states such as the USSR and North Korea.
As of 2012, as estimated by the Christian missionary organization Open Doors UK, an estimated 100 million Christians face persecution, particularly in Muslim dominated countries like, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Christians in Pakistan are reportedly being subjected to a genocide by Pakistani Taliban. They also face persecution in atheistic states like North Korea in which there is no religious freedom.
A recent study, cited by the Vatican, reported that 75 out of every 100 people killed due to religious hatred were Christian.
The Jewish people have been one of the most persecuted groups in history. Persecution of Jews reached its most destructive form in Nazi Germany, which made the destruction of the Jews a priority, culminating in the killing of approximately 6,000,000 Jews during the Holocaust from 1941 to 1945.

In 2010, O'Donnell ran for a Delaware Senate seat. She was targeted politically for her very conservative views and for a statement she made years earlier, saying she'd "dabbled in witchcraft."
Is the US Government's Terrorist Watch List just a modern day Witch Hunt?
Alabama 2011 - (from msnbc): "Illegal is illegal." With that rallying cry, Alabama passed HB 56 in 2011, the harshest state immigration law in the country.

The lead sponsor of the bill boasted to state representatives that the law "attacks every aspect of an illegal alien's life." Among its key provisions: landlords were banned from renting homes to undocumented immigrants, schools had to check students' legal status, and police were required to arrest suspected immigration violators. Even giving unauthorized immigrants a ride became a crime.
Religious

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Modern Day Witches and The Crucible PoliticalChristine O'DonnellTerrorismImmigration LawJewsMuslimsChristiansCatholic ChurchDefinitionExamples:Modern Day Witch HuntsWitch HuntsAccording to Wikipedia: A witch-hunt is a search for witches or evidence of witchcraft, often involving moral panic, mass hysteria and lynching, but in historical instances also legally sanctioned and involving official witchcraft trialsAccording to dictionary.com: An

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Arthur Miller, "Are You Now Or Were You Ever?"

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Arthur Miller, "Are You Now Or Were You Ever?"