My (earnest, irate) thoughts

If you are American and you speak English, it is doubtless that you, even without being totally aware of it, harbor a vague sense that Islam is a religion of few gods (One, to be precise) and much violence.

Ever wonder if A World Without Islam would be a rather benign, peaceful sort of place? Turns out, not really. Reading this article by professor Graham Fuller will make you feel like you just read an unusually succinct and sharp world history text that covered the last thousand years. An excerpt:

In the face of these tensions between East and West, Islam unquestionably adds yet one more emotive element, one more layer of complications to finding solutions. Islam is not the cause of such problems. It may seem sophisticated to seek out passages in the Koran that seem to explain “why they hate us.” But that blindly misses the nature of the phenomenon. How comfortable to identify Islam as the source of “the problem”; it’s certainly much easier than exploring the impact of the massive global footprint of the world’s sole superpower.

Since you now know quite a bit about world history, let’s have a real dialogue about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. First off, is anyone who disagrees with zionism an anti-Semite? Not necessarily. Read what a former Israeli citizen thinks at A Change Needs to Come. An excerpt:

This idea that Israel is the only safe place for Jews is critical to understanding the roots of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and Israel’s policies and perspective in the present. The majority of Jewish people do not trust non-Jews as life-long compatriots. Experience and cultural narrative have been telling them that since antiquity, rulers and governments as well as populations have become hostile to Jews without warning. This means that no matter how long Jews have lived anywhere, no matter how unobtrusive and well integrated they have been, or how much they contributed to their society, things could turn against them overnight.

What an amazing feeling to read articles by non-Muslims that don’t paint Muslims with the same ugly broad brush — articles that actually point to political and historical ’seeds’ for the branches of evil that cover us today! Praise be to the infinitely Compassionate, indescribably Merciful.