Hate all Muslims or all Christians? Your thinking is evil and warped

By David McElroy · June 10, 2013

I didn’t grow up knowing much about Muslims. If you grew up in the United States (or most places in the West), odds are very strong that you didn’t know much about Muslims, either. I’ve discovered that most Muslims know just as little about us as we know about them. That doesn’t stop many people on both sides from hating each other with a passion, though.

For many people who become active in terror groups today, a radical version of the Islamic faith is a motivating factor. Some of those people come to hate those of any other faith. They’re willing to kill other people in the name of destroying anyone who doesn’t bow before their version of God.

As a result, some people in the West — some who claim to be faithful Christians and others who are just nominally or culturally Christian — have decided that all Muslims are evil. This makes no more sense than being robbed by a red-haired man and deciding that all red-haired men must be evil.

On Facebook Saturday night, one of my “friends” posted the following:

Muslims can all go to hell. They are evil bastards. There are no good Muslims, just good dead Muslims. I am a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant woman, and I have never flown a plane into a building or bombed anyone in my life.

If you agree with this statement, someone has warped your thinking and filled your mind with hate. If you call yourself a Christian and believe this, you don’t understand the essence of your alleged faith. If you believe this, your thinking is evil and very warped.

I’m a Christian. I grew up in a culture largely infused with Christian ideas and I have a long history with churches that are theologically conservative. I have disagreements with Muslims that are theological and cultural. On the most basic of issues, Muslims and I disagree with one another, both about theological truth and about the role of any particular religion in influencing government.

But I have friends who are Muslim. Other than their theological beliefs, the Muslims I know aren’t much different than the people who live around me. They happen to come from a part of the world where people’s skin is a bit darker than mine. They happen to speak different languages. They happen to have grown up with different customs.

But the Muslims I know are simply decent human beings with the same sort of hopes, dreams, fears and loves that I have. They’re not monsters. The only people who could possibly believe that they’re “evil bastards” are those who have accepted dishonest generalizations and lies. Period.

There’s currently a minority part of the Muslim world that hates anyone who isn’t a Muslim. Those people hate the West in general and the United States in particular. Some among that group have done evil things to hurt and kill non-Muslims. But to pretend that they represent all Muslims is ignorant and backwards. If you believe this, you’re telling me that you have listened to idiots and come to irrational conclusions.

As far as Muslims are concerned, they haven’t grown up around Christians or westerners any more than we have grown up around people like them. They don’t know us. For most of them, we are a caricature of evil because of what the U.S. government has done in very concrete ways where they live.

To them, Christians and Americans are people who come to the Middle East with machines of war and kill people very much like them. To them, we are people whose government has manipulated politics in their region to prop up dictatorships — when it was convenient to us — that oppressed them and then invaded their countries and killed their friends and neighbors when it became convenient to us.

You might say that you didn’t go their countries and kill their friends and relatives, so you’re not responsible. You might say that you never had anything to do with stationing troops in their countries. You might say that you never had anything to do with a dictatorships in Iran or Egypt, for instance, that came to power or stayed in power because of U.S. government money and assistance.

But your words of protest are the generally same as an average Muslim would make when they deny responsibility for the militants who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. The Muslims I know had nothing to do with those attacks or any others — just as you and I have had nothing to do with the things the U.S. government has done to affect them.

I disagree with Muslims about theology and (with some of them) about what cultural and legal norms should be. But that doesn’t mean I’m evil and want to kill them. It also doesn’t mean that the vast majority of them are evil and want to kill me.

We can disagree with people about theology and about what legal and cultural norms should be without hating each other. The more we know other people in groups we consider to be “the other side,” the more we find out that they’re much more like us than we realize.

Just as there’s no one person or one group who speaks for all Christians (or even for most Christians), there’s also nobody who speaks for most Muslims. Just as we’re individuals with our own beliefs and prejudices, they’re the same way.

If you claim to believe in individual freedom or the Christian faith, one of the best things you can do is to get to know individual Muslims as individual human beings. Show them who you are. Show them that you have good will for anyone who has good will for you. Show them that the stereotype of us is no more accurate than the stereotype that many of us have of them.

We need to find a way to put aside the hate and treat each other as individuals. The more we get to know each other and break down the dishonest stereotypes, the more we can quit hating each other and find peaceful ways of living on the same planet.

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

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