Hate Mail

I got an email tonight from a college-educated young woman whose work with children I truly respect. Imagine my surprise when I opened her email and found myself confronted with that stupid diatribe about Obama being a Muslim that has been circulating through cyberspace for months. Same old crap. It used his middle name over and over, capitalizing it in case one might have overlooked the significance, and it stated as accepted fact that he was a Muslim and therefore a danger to America. I wrote back and told her that I still loved her, but that her email was pure horse shit. I pointed out that not only is Obama a Christian, he chose to be a Christian - unlike many of us who were born into the religion and exercised little or no choice beyond family dictates.

Do you realize that Hussein is one of the most common names in the world? It ranks right up there with John and Juan. Maybe we should fear the Arabian name Aladin as well!

Do you realize that being a Muslim is not an evil thing, in and of itself? When Europe was going through a thousand years of the Dark Ages - 500 A.D. to 1500 A.D., it was the Muslim world that was perfecting mathematics concepts like Algebra and Geometry, creating literature, developing an understanding of science, and pushing the boundaries of knowledge and the arts.

America has undergone two major acts of terrorism in the past fifteen years. When a squad of Saudis knocked down the World Trade Center and hit the Pentagon, President Bush quickly got all of bin Laden's Saudi relatives out of the US and then declared war on a country that had nothing to do with the attacks. It has become, in effect, a holy war that stirs crap emails like the one I received today. If a person is a Muslim, then he or she must be our enemy. The other act of serious terrorism was Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols bombing the federal building in Oklahoma City. Did a holy war follow that blatant attack against the government of the United States of America? Did President Clinton send in the military to clean up the scuzzball militias who hide behind the Constitution to spew their Nazi racist venom. No, but those terrorists were caught - unlike Osama who still roams freely thumbing his nose at Bush and Company. Some good police work would have done more to bring the guilty bastard to justice than this crazy war has done. And, it would have been a hell of a lot cheaper!

The war in the Middle East is costing our government $12 billion a month, damaging our troops and their families in ways that cannot be calculated, and destroying our credibility and standing in the world. January 20th, 2009, cannot come quickly enough!