Pay attention on this one, because there will be a short quiz at the end….
“How to wink at a ______” It really works with anything! Just insert the group you want to intimidate, alienate, and discriminate against….
A short time ago, a County Commissioner right here in middle Tennessee posted a picture on his Facebook page that said, “How to wink at a Muslim” over a picture of a man looking down the sight of a shotgun. Now really, this sort of ignorance and idiocy is not that surprising to me. It should be, but it’s not–There are always going to be scared and spiteful and stupid people who do scared and spiteful and stupid things…. What IS surprising is what happened at a public meeting in Manchester, TN (of Bonnaroo fame, about 70 miles from Nashville) that was being held to address discrimination against Muslims in the area, as well as indirectly addressing the offensive post.
It’s not ALL bad–At least they left them the emergency telephone number to call….
A local U.S. Attorney named Bill Killian organized the meeting, and what was meant to be a conversation turned into a spectacle of misplaced emotion by a largely anti-Muslim audience. When he told the crowd that speech calling for violence against people was not protected by the First Amendment, he was met with people yelling “Serpent,” “Traitor,” and “Go home!” There have been quite a few incidents of violence and hatred against Muslims in Middle Tennessee–Burned Mosques, vandalism, pickets and protests and whatnot–and when a Muslim advocate named Sabina Mohyuddin mentioned the Mosque that was burned down in nearby Columbia, TN, many in the crowd cheered. It was shameful. Or it should have been. They SHOULD have been ashamed of themselves. You can hear some of the disturbing highlights from the meeting HERE by listening to the NPR story. While you’re there, read the comments below the article, and notice which comments have gotten the most “likes.” It’s just so disappointing….And the most disappointing part (for me, anyway) is that the people who hating the loudest are all Christians.
Horrific. And the work of demented people trying to inspire fear and hatred and war. Don’t let ’em.
I understand that when we see pictures like this one on the news a person might be inclined to think that all Muslims are waiting to chop up infidels with meat cleavers. It can be pretty scary! Pastors preaching hate, people passing along eMail stories of Christians being murdered by Muslims…. It might even seem like Muslims are the ENEMIES of Christians. It can leave a person feeling unsure of what to do! Well, luckily we have been given very clear instructions on how to respond to our enemies. Here it is (this is Jesus talking): “Love your enemies”. I know this can be confusing, so I have provided a short list of things that are NOT examples of “loving your enemies”–Posting pictures suggesting that we kill them, Protesting their arrival in the community or their attempt to build a place to worship, Spray Painting their stuff, Burning down their place of worship, or Cheering when someone mentions the burning of their place of worship (this list is not exhaustive).
And then they read the words, saw the crosses, and decided to convert to Christianity .
The people who do these horrific acts in the name of Islam are no more representative of Islam than the Westboro Baptist people are representative of Baptists, or the “Christians” screaming at that meeting are representative of Christianity. Ironically, one of the things that Christians are most critical of when generalizing Muslims is that they accuse Islam of being “a religion of violence” and that they’re taught to hate people who aren’t Muslims. Is it that hard to see the hypocrisy in this criticism??? You are hating them because you believe they hate, and you are advocating violence because you believe them to be violent! That is, unless all the people making this criticism are really living out Jesus’ call to non-violence and love as a response to hate…. Which I highly doubt. But I’ve been wrong before.
That’s funny–I thought we were home….
So here’s this: If you are a Christian who hates Muslims, your “Christianity” isn’t worth a shit. Not one shit. I’m sorry, it’s not. I’d seriously rather you call yourself anything else–A Satanist, whatever you’d call someone who worships Paris Hilton as a deity (A Hiltonian I guess?), an Atheist…. ANYTHING, just don’t go around hating people in the name of Jesus. You know what? Don’t call yourself an Atheist either. If you are the sort of jack ass who would cheer when a Muslim woman mentions a Mosque that was burned down in an act of hatred, you’d be giving a bad name to Atheists…. So there you have it.
Alright, here’s the quiz. It’s just one little multiple choice question for you:
They will know we are Christians by our….
A) Hatred of Muslims
B) Patriotic bumper stickers
C) Judgmentalism
D) Heterosexuality
E) Love
If you answered E, congratulations. You passed! Feel free to share this post….
If you answered A, B, C, or D (or, if you were hoping for some sort of “F) All of the above”), you got it wrong. As a punishment, you have to share this liberal blog post as penance. It’s not my rule–It says so in the Bible. But don’t give up! You can take this quiz a many times as it takes until you get it right….
And if you call yourself a follower of Jesus, it’s not your responsibility to stand against Islam. I believe it is a far more important responsibility for Christians to stand up against this sort of hatred in the name of Jesus, and let the world know that the people doing this hating under the guise of “Christianity” are NOT representative of what it means to follow Jesus–Just like the man with the bloody cleaver is not representative of what is means to be a Muslim. If Jesus is the truth, then it will be evident by the way we love each other–even our enemies (ESPECIALLY our enemies–even people who know nothing about Jesus are good to the people who are good to them, right?). No one ever got hated into following Jesus.
Now, please don’t fill my comment section up with “reasons” and “examples” of why Muslims should be feared and hated. You’ll just be proving my point. And you’ll probably also be providing a Muslim somewhere with yet another “reason” and “example” of why Christians should be feared and hated. And on and on it goes….
Also, if you’d like to give to Sojourners and help them raise money to put up billboards that say “Love Your Muslim Neighbor” in places around the country where Christians are giving Jesus a bad name by committing acts of hate in his name, you can do that HERE. I did. It’s a simple act, but it is an act of reconciliation. And that’s something.
The Boeskool 
Don’t Read The Comments
I can’t seem to do either of these things….
That’s what everyone says, at least. If I ever mention something awful someone wrote in the Comments section of an online story, people are always like, “NO! Don’t read the comments!” But I still do. I can’t help it. Something in me cares about what is being said there. I think it’s that I’m hopeful. Hopeful that this story might be the one where people say things that are intelligent and kind, instead of things that are belligerent and hateful. Or, at the very least, maybe there will be a few people spewing hate and prejudice and lies, but THIS will be the one where the number of people opposing and standing up to the hate and prejudice and lies will dwarf the number of people giving those comments thumbs ups and likes and whatnots. I haven’t found it yet…. Maybe someday.
Paula Cooper–28 years after a fifteen year old girl was sent to death row.
I read this amazing story the other day about a man named Bill Pelke who worked most of his adult life to free a woman from jail. That woman’s name was Paula Cooper, and when she was 15 years old, she murdered Bill’s grandmother Ruth Pelke (a crime for which she was sentenced to death, because at that time in Indiana, you could be as young as ten years old and receive the death penalty). Cooper was physically abused as a child, she was forced to watch her mother get raped, and she was a chronic runaway. Even though Bill Pelke initially supported the death penalty (her sentence was later reduced to Life in Prison after they changed the death penalty age to 16), he became convinced that his Grandma would not want this woman rotting away for the rest of her life in prison. Bill Pelke “begged God to give him love and compassion for Paula Cooper and her family,” he forgave the woman who stabbed his Bible teacher Grandmother 33 times, and after 27 years in jail, Paula Cooper was recently released (You can watch an interview with Bill Pelke HERE). I was inspired. The people who left comments were not impressed.
If you have ever read internet comments before, you can imagine the kind of garbage that was written at the bottom of that story. Everything from racist diatribes, to laments about Paula Cooper breathing the same air as us, to promises by people to “kill her myself if I ever see her.” And then, to top it all of, the places where you can vote comments up or down were about 4 to 1 in favor of the hateful comments…. It was discouraging, to say the least.
“I’ve had it up to here with internet comments.”
The comments section on the internet is the cesspool of humanity. A few weeks ago when Cheerios decided to have a biracial girl on their commercial and showed a white mother and black father, they had to disable the comments because of all the hateful and racist crap people were writing. Something has got to change. These things that people are writing are not without consequence–They affect us, and they make the world more and more cynical–but there seem to be no consequences for the people writing the comments. It’s terrorism of the soul. People file this sort of thing under “Freedom of Speech” or “Right to Privacy,” but I don’t think it’s that simple. We have the right to privacy and we have the right to free speech, but we do not necessarily have the right to private speech. This stuff is speech without accountability, and it can be as harmful as any false “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Free speech is not designed to protect some anonymous semantic sadist, spraying words like rounds from a machine gun, attempting to hit as many people as possible. Its the same reason a man in a pointy, white hood feels emboldened to say things he would never say if his identity were exposed. At least if you say something racist in person you have the risk of getting punched in the face…. These hate-filled comments are the linguistic equivalent of dropping bombs from a remotely piloted drone.
His name is Sebastien De La Cruz, he is 11 years old, and he seriously rocked the National Anthem.
I’m not saying that I’m against free speech. I’m not. Individuals have the right to speech that the listener deems offensive and even hateful–I’m saying that there should be accountability. There has to be some way to register people for internet comments and insure the things people write can be traced back to a real person. So if you decide to write something so offensive and hateful that it makes the rest of us question whether there is any good in the world, maybe that comment is going to get back to your boss. Or your employees. Or your board of directors. This is a bit of what the Public Shaming Tumblr attempts to do–manufacture accountability for people’s words (Here is a list of offensive tweets about the Mexican-American boy who sang the National Anthem during the NBA Playoffs). The whole “Sticks & Stones” saying is full of crap–Words can hurt just like stones, and if you are going to be throwing those sorts of stones on the internet, you don’t have the right to do it from behind an anonymous white hood.
Still my favorite book ever.
On the way home from a recent trip, we stopped at a gas station in the middle of nowhere to take my kids to the bathroom. In the bathroom, written in very large letters on the door, were words that no kid (or adult, for that matter) should ever have to stumble upon. I thought of The Catcher In The Rye‘s Holden Caulfield trying to erase all the “Fuck you’s” in the world, but knowing there were just too many of them. I know we can’t get rid of all of them, but part of the reason we are part of a community is to keep each other accountable. I don’t have the skills it takes to create some sort of internet registration that verifies people’s identities before allowing them to comment, but someone does. If somebody could come up with a way to do this, that would be great. The conversations and discussions that can happen online can be good things, but lack of accountability aids those who only want injure HOPE. And that is a dangerous thing. If we are all going to be using the same bathroom, we might as well work together to keep it clean. And if not clean, we can at least try to point out who is putting all the crap on the walls….