Gosh. I have Baptist friends, Methodist, Catholic, and Lutheran friends. Because I have been blessed with a multicultural and multinational career and life over the last half century, I have other friends and acquaintances who are Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim.
All of my friends are wonderful people who espouse love and peace. Sometimes, however, they let politics influence their judgement.
It is with real discomfort that I see some U.S. Friends and family having no respect nor compassion for Muslim refugees in Europe from Syria, Iraq, Libya, and other Northern African countries. These people are NOT terrorists, not for the most part opportunists; they are hungry, poor, and frightened people running for their lives.
My non-Christian friends and acquaintances believe in their world view. The Muslims are, for the most part, truer to their faith than all but Baptists. While they are intolerant sometimes, most are not pushing Sharia law and peacefully co-exist in our country.
I am not saying that we should accept any of the refugees threatening Europe, Europe's own past imperialist policies require them to address this human flood; I am only saying that the overly righteous language pushed by a few of my friends and family is wrong. Are we here not about peace and love? How is condemning a million plus starving Muslims as terrorists consistent with that view.
Granted, if the majority of these refugees are left in relocation camps with no jobs, no assimilation, and no sympathy, Europe will have a problem. They need to assimilate the majority.
Let's be optimistic and recognize that the vast majority of the refugees are hungry, desperate, and scared. Let us encourage our European cousins to do the right thing. We know, based on the holocaust of the last century (no, not just Germany) that doing the right thing is hard for them.
Let us not be cheering Nazis on the sidelines demanding the final solution for people whose only sin is that they are unlike us.
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