September 23, 2004
Thursday

I am somewhat religious myself; attend services on holidays, weddings and occasionally with family but I have always had a very positive impression of all religions and of all highly religious people particularly. Passionately religious people are the ones feeding poor people on skid row, visiting the sick in hospitals, working to reform people in prison and are usually the only people who adopt troubled orphans without a profit incentive. Muslim extremists are changing my mind about religion, changing my mind about their religion certainly.

When I got home from school Wednesday I saw pictures of that poor, decent man beheaded in Iraq, not by Iraqis either but by religious fanatics whose non-Iraqi leader has sworn to make Iraq into an "Islamist Republic" like Iran. Muslim extremists killed two young female Italian aid workers today...AID WORKERS! Then there was the pitiful eighteen year old girl who blew herself to bits in Israel trying to murder a bus full of innocent people. Was she really that angry that "infidels" are living on holy Muslim ground or some such nonsense?

These murderers and terrorists are often the product of strictly religious schools in places like Saudi Arabia which sounds like a lovely place to live especially for women. Terrorist leaders have religious titles like "Mullah", "Imam" and "Ayatollah", often preaching their virulent hate right there in the Masques. As they cut throats and bomb airliners, the terrorists even chant religious verses. We have heard them on the last radio calls from our doomed planes, Don't they realize that they are turning the entire world against their beloved religion or is their logic so alien that we cannot even understand what could possibly make them tick?

I have read that teen aged boys, child homicide bomber terrorists, are talked into blowing themselves up with promises of quick trips to Paradise where they will be given thirty-seven virgins each. I wish I knew a Muslim who could explain what could be in that bargain for the women or are we just so much chattel that it does not matter? And how about the young girl who died murdering people in Israel today? Does she win thirty-seven young virgin boys or does she automatically become one of the virgins donated to the next killer?

Israelis who were born in Israel to Holocaust survivors are not going to throw themselves into the sea. They will always fight for their homes, the only homes they have known. Most people in nations like Iraq do not want to go back to a dark-age lifestyle, women in veils and all of that and they will fight back. The Catholic nations of Spain and the Philippines are going to fight to not be converted by force to Islam. The world's only superpower, America is far too powerful for them to take us on as an enemy. Don't they know what our parents and grandparents did to the Japanese Imperialists and to the Nazis who threatened our existence? Is that what they want?

I am sure that these extremist Muslims complain that we in the West do not understand them. Perhaps, if there are any readers who could help explain some of these questions we could begin to try to understand a little.

Emily Katz
Seattle Washington

 

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