Killer Doves

Strange reality that the less exposed people are to other cultures – real life experiences living and traveling among people who have different beliefs and core values – the less people are truly educated, the more folks are isolated and insulated from experiences different from their own, the easier it is to dehumanize people with strongly different belief systems. It’s really hard to be religiously and culturally intolerant when you grow up and go to school with real human beings, who naturally become your friends or at least acquaintances, who may go to a Hindu, Buddhist or Jewish temple or a Muslim mosque while you might go to church. You actually find yourself thinking of your friends for who they are… not which category they might fit into.

And when economic issues press misery into our lives, it sure seems as if these same insulated individuals are the first to seize on “people who are very different from me” as scapegoats for their malaise. Hitler ignited Germany in a wild, xenophobic frenzy – after the victorious allies sucked reparations out of the German people for the misstep they call World War II – and he toasted 13 million human beings, almost half of whom were Jews. And it is so with a truly ignorant fool, the “Reverend” (I truly challenge that title!) Terry Jones who, after making sure the Muslim world was fully aware of his tiny (20-30 followers left) and inconsequential sect of Gainesville, Florida-based ultra-extreme pseudo-Christians burning of copies of the Qur’an (televised on Truth TV), shrugged off the deaths U.N. workers, fleeing for their live s as their bunker fell under attack by furious – and equally primitive, intolerant and insulated – Afghanis hell bent on revenge for the sacrilege of their faith. Counting protestors and UN workers, at least 21 people were killed and 81 injured in just the first two days of violence in several Afghan cities, with angry protests continuing for days more. The burning of the holy book gave the local Taliban exactly the kind of anti-American recruiting materials they needed.

While Jones was “saddened” at the deaths and injuries, he made it clear that even knowing these results, he would have done it anyway: “‘Did our action provoke them?’ the pastor asked. ‘Of course. Is it a provocation that can be justified? Is it a provocation that should lead to death? When lawyers provoke me, when banks provoke me, when reporters provoke me, I can’t kill them. That would not fly.’ [But he was fully aware of the real risks of extreme violence?] ‘We knew it was possible. We knew they might act with violence.’” Quote in the New York Times, April 2^nd. Odd the misnomer of his headquarters: The Dove World Outreach Center.

It’s easy to castigate such outrageous extremes – Jones’ “not-quite-Christian” sect and the Taliban horrific interpretation of God’s will – but when we have the degree of polarization that exists within this country today, I think we should all look for the attempts to justify intolerance. Right vs. left. Left vs. right. Religious attacks. Racial exclusion and bias. Gender discrimination, and the list rolls on. Our immigration policy, for example, has made it even difficult for non-white émigrés with advanced degrees in medicine, science, engineering and math to enter the United States, even though those are professions are desperately needed to grow our economy and create jobs… we just don’t produce enough such graduates within our own colleges and universities. That “throw the baby out with the bathwater ” mentality on immigration policy, coupled with the fact that so many lower level jobs aren’t being filled by American-born citizens at any price, suggest that too many people favor very restrictive immigration policies – not for the very legitimate reason of securing our borders and creating a rational basis to fill job needs – but because so many of those “qualified” potential émigrés are “people of color,” Asians for the most part. Whenever a policy comes to an “us against them” wall, we need to take a very careful at “why”… “why really”? Equality and tolerance are what America was built for.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we really should be aware of what the underlying motivations for any proposed harsh policies really are… and deal with those honestly.