Editing Religious persecution (section)

===Religious cleansing===
{{Distinguish|Ritual cleansing}}
"Religious cleansing" is sometimes used in reference to the removal of a population from a certain territory based on its religion.<ref name=booth>{{cite book
 |       title = The Kosovo Tragedy: The Human Rights Dimensions
 |      editor = Ken I. Booth
 |     section = The History and Politics of Ethnic Cleansing
 |      author = Carrie Booth Walling
 | section-url = https://books.google.com/books?id=e4MsBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA47
 |       pages = [https://books.google.com/books?id=e4MsBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA49 pp.49-51]
 |   publisher = Routledge
 |        year = 2012
 |        isbn = 9781136334764
 |         url = https://books.google.com/books?id=e4MsBgAAQBAJ
 }}
</ref>  More recently, “religious cleansing” has been used in reference to the elimination of all religious structures or all individuals who adhere to a particular religion and live within a larger community which is composed of people who are members of the same ethnicity.<ref>url=https://fiacona.org/a-new-model-of-religious-cleansing-pioneered-in-manipur-india/</ref>

Throughout [[Classical antiquity|antiquity]], [[population cleansing]] was largely motivated by economic and political factors, but occasionally, ethnic factors also played a role.<ref name=booth/> During the [[Middle Ages]], population cleansing took on a largely religious character.<ref name=booth/> The religious motivation for population cleansing lost much of its salience early in the modern era, but until the 18th century, ethnic enmity in Europe continued to be couched in religious terms.<ref name=booth/> [[Richard Dawkins]] has argued that references to ''[[ethnic cleansing]]'' in the former [[Yugoslavia]] and [[Iraq]] are [[euphemism]]s for what should more accurately be called religious cleansing.<ref name=koopman>{{cite encyclopedia|url=http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199656431.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199656431-e-8|page=256|encyclopedia=The Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming|author=Adrian Koopman|editor=Crole Hough|title=Ethnonyms|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2016|doi=10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199656431.013.8|isbn=978-0-19-965643-1|url-access=subscription }}</ref> According to Adrian Koopman, the widespread use of the term ''ethnic cleansing'' in such cases suggests that in many situations, there is confusion between ethnicity and religion.<ref name=koopman/>