Hate e-mails against Muslims in America

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Other

Kansas.com - The Wichite Eagle:
E-mailers' deep hatred is truly shocking
by: Mark McCormick
The Wichita Eagle

I'm not sure which group scares me more: foreign terrorists or some
of the domestic wackos crawling out from under rocks in response to
the terrorists.

Take this latest batch of e-mail sent to Eagle religion writer Joe
Rodriguez after he wrote about the completion of a new mosque ("With
mosque, dream is reality," July 14).

I'd ordinarily ignore such e-mail, but it traveled so far beyond civil
discourse into hate speech that I felt compelled to sound a critical
social alarm.

I apologize to anyone of the Islamic faith who is offended by what
follows. I use it only because people need to know that such disgusting
attitudes exist here in our community of faith.

"We don't need this blood thirsty Religion in America," read one e-mail,
signed "Semper Fi. USMC Vietnam Combat Veteran."

Another seemed to advocate internment camps for Muslim Americans.

"All jihadists are Muslims, but not all Muslims are jihadists. But how are
we supposed to distinguish between the ones who are plotting attacks
and the ones who are just selling pitas and fatoush?" the writer said.

"Whether or not Muslims actually want to blow us up is irrelevant
simply because the average citizen can't tell the good from the bad,
therefore all are suspect."

Wow. What about all the people resembling Eric Rudolph and Tim
McVeigh? Should we start locking them up too?

Muslims, says another writer, have "infiltrated our lands, multiplied
their numbers, slowly used our own constitution against us, the same
constitution that they will love to do away with so that we all can
'submit' to a Muslim theocracy...."

In response to a photo of Gov. Kathleen Sebelius in the new mosque
with her head covered, another person wrote, "It was really nice to see
Sebelius wearing the mark of a 7th century slave."

Under the heading of "dream of mosque opening" still another wrote,
"More like a... nightmare. I say to our military, bomb the mosques."

Another writer wanted to go beyond bombing mosques.

"I don't give a tinker's damn about their mosques, their warlord's
religion or their phony god. If I were President there would no longer
be an Arab world. These people understand nothing but death."

There was much more, but you get the point.

Sometimes crazy e-mails such as these waft in from the fringe. This
time, though, there are so many of them, and fringe folk ordinarily
don't leave a name and address. These folks did. That's what's so
scary.

The people who wrote these screeds didn't appear to feel any shame
about the racist sentiments in the e-mails. In fact, they seemed imbued
with some sort of twisted patriotism.

It's not patriotism. It's sick.

We need to loudly distance ourselves from these fanatics and their
rhetoric.

These writers, like the terrorists they're reacting to, use fear to divide
and intimidate. And they demonstrate the cultural superiority that long
has fueled anti-American hatred in pockets of the Islamic world.

If the simple threat of terrorism can cause so many people around us
to emotionally and psychologically regress this way, the terrorists won't
really have to do anything.

We'll finish the job ourselves.

Reach Mark McCormick at 268-6549 or
mmccormick@wichitaeagle.com.

Photo:
The scarf Gov. Kathleen Sebelius wore at a mosque's grand opening
attracted bitter criticism in an e-mail, one of several expressing anti-Muslim
sentiment to an Eagle writer.