Posts Tagged ‘Muslims’

Americans need to speak up against anti-Muslim language and actions.

April 9, 2010

Hatred of the “other” in America is on the down slope. We still have some way to go, but we’ve come a long way since “No Irish need apply” for employment, gays and lesbians barred from teaching,lily-white major league baseball, and deed restrictions against selling houses to Jews. Heck, we even elected an African-American President.

It seems like the only minority it’s ok to hate is the Muslims. Ann Coulter’s many fans laughed when she said that Muslims should not be allowed to fly on airplanes and should take “flying carpets” instead. When a Canadian Muslim student protested that she did not, in fact, own a flying carpet and asked how she should travel, Coulter’s rejoinder was “Take a camel.” Haha.

More serious hate-Muslim screeds are viral on the internet. And worse than the crude screeds are the seemingly analytical pieces laying out the danger we face from a growing Muslim population, (more…)

Memo to Congress: Leave the Turks and Armenians alone to bury old enmities

March 4, 2010

Old hatreds die hard. Many Serbs still burn with hate for Muslims over the lost battle of Blackbird’s Field in Kosovo on June 15, 1389. In Great Britain there remains mutual hatred between Catholics and Protestants dating from atrocities of the 17th century. And many Armenian Americans still burn over the massacres and other deaths of 1,500,000 Armenians by the forces of the collapsing Ottoman Empire—the predecessor to modern Turkey in 1915. Turks dispute the number, claiming that 300,000 Armenians were killed and at least as many Turks as the empire descended into chaos and war.

It seems that civilization depends on our ability to put such horrors aside, to consign them to the ash heap of history. That ability is (more…)