Earlier this week I got an email from an old friend of mine. It was one of those disgusting, ignorant things people forward whenever their fear chain gets pulled. This one purported to prove that all Muslims are under orders from Allah to kill the rest of us. Lock up the women and children! Fear the brown people! Be afraid, be very, very afraid!

The offending email even claimed to have been vetted through snopes.com, so I checked snopes myself and they call this piece of fundamentalist propaganda as a “mixture” of truth and lies.

Most senders of this type of trash don’t take the time to READ the snopes articles they reference. If they did, they might think twice before adding to the giant snowball of hate and ignorance these things become.

The piece of offensive propaganda in question was based on an editorial a guy named Rick Mathes wrote sometime back called “Allah or Jesus?” It describes an interfaith training session among prison ministers, aimed at achieving greater religious tolerance and sensitivity among the group. Mathes refuses to comment on the incident out of “fear of retribution” because he has a ministry to protect. What a faithless display of spinelessness – man up Rick, tell us what really happened!

The gist of the whole thing is that an imam in attendance was asked about the supposed global Jihad against all infidels (non-believers). The imam in question, probably the equivalent of a lay preacher, could not adequately answer the question since one individual cannot speak for all members of a global faith.

The whole thing got blown way out of proportion, misquoted, and for many years now has been spread far and wide in online conservative and evangelical circles. This kind of ignorant behavior does nothing to move us toward peace and greater understanding. If anything, it only fuels the fires of the already misguided minorities on both sides of the divide.

Think about it this with me for a second. Islam, like Christianity, is not a monolithic religion. That means that one imam or cleric can no more speak for all muslims than a Baptist preacher in any small town or a parish priest anywhere can speak for all Christians. Just as there are many different denominations of Christianity in the world there also are many different sects of Islam and even more Islamic movements not recognized by the majority of Muslims.

Imagine how you, as a Christian – for the sake of argument let’s say you’re a Quaker – would feel if somebody took the opinions of a twenty year old Mormon missionary in Belize, or the Pope, or an illiterate lay-preacher in the backwoods of Appalachia, and judged every Christian in the world based upon that one person’s views. I would think you’d be pretty pissed off, and rightfully so.

Muslims who practice terrorism are as far removed from mainstream Islam as those so-called Christians in America who support the actions of people like Eric Rudolph, Tim McVeigh, or Scott Roeder are anti-Christian. Terrorism is terrorism, no matter who’s side you’re on or what the motives might be. It really gets under my skin when people start displaying their ignorance and spreading it around where it can infect others with their counterproductive ideas.

I find violence as reprehensible as the next sane individual on the street, but I do not buy the propaganda our government and the mainstream media would have us believe.

A small bit of research makes it very clear that most terrorists don’t “hate us because of our freedom.” They hate us because of our government’s hypocrisy. Read up on the establishment of the modern state of Israel and the sorry treatment the Palestinian people have received over the last half century or so. Who got screwed in that deal? And don’t you dare try to hand me back any of that crap about the Jewish homeland. So. Freaking. What.

The whole thing was carried out in a heavy-handed fashion by the British and American governments and the rights and desires of the people who were already living in Palestine got next to no consideration. Put your self in the shoes of the average Palestinian. Your homeland has been invaded by a bunch of people who don’t give a flying cat about your culture, history, or property rights, and they have the backing of the most powerful military nations in the world.

Just as the American colonists, faced with superior firepower and resources resorted to guerilla warfare during our own revolution, the folks in Palestine have fought back any way they could, and I really can’t say I blame them for doing so, and it’s long past time for the Israeli government to man up and start behaving in a more humane and civilized manner.

The same goes for the people of Iran. Do a bit of research on Prime Minister Mosaddegh and the coup our CIA helped the British government pull off in the early 1950’s. All in the name of the British and American oil industries – democracy be damned!

We screwed those people out of several generations of progress and planted the seeds that grew into the Islamic Revolution of 1979. By screwing them we ended up screwing ourselves a generation later. Today the Iranian people are surrounded by nuclear or nuclear backed states, live atop one of the largest remaining oil reserves on the planet, and we wonder why they might feel the need not only for nuclear weapons.

If I owned something as valuable as the Iranian oil reserves and lived in a place where all my neighbors had machine guns, I don’t think I’d feel safe with only a baseball bat for protection either.

Stories like this are everywhere one cares to look. We made Saddam Hussein the dictator he was and our government funded and supported Osama bin Laden during the Soviet – Afghan war. South and Central America overflow with horror stories of the American government orchestrating and facilitating horrible crimes in the name of corporate greed and unwarranted fears of communism throughout the last century.

Throwing bombs and bullets at the terrorists will never lead to a sustainable solution. One cannot win a war of ideology with military power.

Yes, crimes were committed on 9/11/01, and the perpetrators should have long ago been brought to justice, and they would have been had we not taken our little jaunt through Babylon to enrich the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and company.

No, we should not negotiate with terrorists after they have committed heinous crimes against all of humanity, but we should sit at the table of diplomacy, find out what their problem is, and work toward greater understanding and negotiate a path to peace.

Equitable solutions can be found, but only if our government stops propping up capitalist malcontents who see fit to roam the global landscape destroying all that falls into their path and dragging the military might of the American empire wherever they go to enforce their twisted definitions of freedom and democracy.

If you’re an American and you call yourself a patriot, you owe it to your country to demand nothing less. If you call yourself a Christian, you have an obligation to ask yourself what Jesus would do, and act accordingly.