at the core, there is:

the inability to accept that people do not share the same beliefs;
the inability to feel, understand, and believe that those differences are fine

and so, we kill, through the flaws of humanity.

please, please, please let our generation, and the ones to come after us, help make this better. please let us refuse to inherit the hatred and mistakes of the generations that have come before us.

please.

found a bit later today, from the many faces of american muslims by laura miller, on salon.com. i've bolded a sentence in the quote, as i think it relates directly to what i'm talking about earlier in this post. i don't think of the sentence in relation to just radical muslims, i think of it in relation to people who are radical with their religion, no matter what kind it is:

The story of how Saied rejected this ideology is one of the most significant in Barrett's book. At a conference for a Muslim youth group in Chicago, he and a buddy got into a debate with an older, more moderate Muslim man. This man greeted Saied's knee-jerk tirade by arguing that "the basic foundations of American values are very Islamic -- freedom of religion, freedom of speech, toleration." Others joined in, all of them able to quote passages from the Quran that support pluralism. They did not back down, and finally Saied and a friend who came with him had exhausted their Islamist ammo. They both realized that this -- the free exchange of sometimes conflicting ideas -- was a part of the life they had abandoned when they were radicalized. It was as if a spell had been broken; Saied's friend likens the conversation, which lasted for hours, to deprogramming.

Labels: hatred, humanity, love, peace, war