Hatred Over Cartoon

Please help me to understand why after attending their Friday day of prayers, Muslims seem to always come out bitter and angry about something. What do their religious leaders teach them? It seems that their religion is one based on hatred and violence. Is that what the Prophet Muhammad taught when he was alive? I know that MAD is part of the spelling of Muhammad, but I’d venture to say, knowing very little about the Muslim religion, that’s not what he, neither preached nor stood for.

So why is it that after attending their Friday services they come out like raging animals? Recent publications of slanderous cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad have ignited a series of destructive attacks on Danish and Norwegian embassies in Syria and Lebanon. They not only destroyed buildings in their homelands but also put thousands of their police and security people at risk. When I attend my weekly religious service, I leave with the message that says love your fellow man and turn the other cheek. I don't come out ready to kill and destroy my so called enemy.

Many Catholics get offended whenever someone makes a mockery out of Jesus and his teachings, but rarely do they become barbaric. There are various means and ways to protest peacefully and get a point across. Violence and rage never resolves anything other than create additional violence and rage. Just this weekend in Turkey an Italian priest Father Andrea Santoro was shot ad killed while praying in his church by a teenager. Here was a religious man who had been in Turkey for five years and had built up a great dialogue between Muslims and Catholics shot in cold blood. How should Westerners respond to the murder of an innocent person?

If Muslims have such a built in and pent up hatred for westerners and act this way over some political cartoons how can we trust a Muslim country such as Iran to continue their process into developing nuclear weapons? They haven’t demonstrated any responsibility at showing any restrains. They haven’t demonstrated that they are a people who will sit down at table and negotiate differences. Many of their religious leaders, especially the younger ones, seem to bask in the limelight of violence.

The radical Islamists have become a grave danger to the world. It’s excruciating to see innocent lives shed by our men and women in hopes of freeing the innocent victims of repression in Iraq. At times I wish that President Bush had never committed our men and women to the senseless war on terror, but I now see that it’s not the right time to leave.

The solution to the problem cannot be solved solely from outside sources – it needs the resolve of the people within. If they are not willing to stand up and fight for what they want, they will always be trampled on by the radicals.

These radicals have the potential for the next and last war. It was written somewhere that civilization started in the Middle East and will end there also. Are we living this prophecy?