[quote=@mdk]
 Religion + Politics is a bad combo 
[/quote]

Well amen to that (if you will excuse the pun). Islamic Terrorism too mixes religion and politics. ISIS is, as you say, a political entity of sorts.

[quote=@mdk]
it's hardly fair to [i]literally eradicate religion[/i] over that. 
[/quote]

No, and I'm not advocating that we should start eradicating the religious. I'm just contending that we might be much better off as a species if we could wave a secular wand and get rid of the whole sorry mess. It might be a bit easier for people to make rational decisions if they hadn't been brainwashed as children to think that God, or Allah or whomever wanted them to act a certain way.

As a historical note, although there were certainly pogroms against Jews associated with the Crusades*, they continued in a relatively unbroken stream from before the declaration of the First Crusade up into the early Renaissance. Particularly during times of trouble, like during the Black Death, Jews were likely to be massacred. Documented cases exist of hundreds or thousands of Jews being massacred or burned alive.

These people weren't that different from you and I. They just got it into their head that this is what God wanted. Not that unlike idiots today who get it into there head that what Allah really wants is to blow up a train-station.

Barbara Tuchman's masterwork A Distant Mirror contains some truly grotesque examples in France and in what is today Germany. Some of the stuff about Blood Libel is really terrifying. I'm less familiar with Iberia but I think its fair to say that given the later preoccupation with crypto-jews and such that you can expect more of the same.


[i]*I'm using the term crusades to apply to the earlier Crusades here, as crusading as a tradition continued for a very long time, with decreasingly zeal. There were for example annual Crusades conducted by the Teutonic order more or less for fun, and intra-Christian crusades which fit less well into what we generally consider the Crusades. [/i]