I would like to raise consciousness among educators at all levels to address the need for teaching students how to question in ways that might lead them to consider critiquing everything they see that pretends to be true — in particular, everything that is clearly trying to persuade. A bigger danger than being taken over by jihadist Muslims (or any other distinctly identified group) is being misguided into stupidity and self-destruction.
Every one of this woman's messages fails to include context — as in the reasons for executive orders issuing from the presidential office in Obama's administration — assumes all adherents of Mohammed are violent, cruel, vicious, bent on terrorizing the world in the name of their evil and indefensible religion, and so on and on.
I want so much to tell her about one summer evening when I was driving our children back from a lake where we'd been having a before-supper cooling swim and came upon a hitchhiker. We were less than two miles from home. The children immediately begged me to stop and pick him up. I pointed out that we couldn't take him far enough to do him any good, so he'd do better with someone who might be going where he was headed. They made such a to-do, I stopped to ask him where he was going.
He said he'd been left at the bus station in Danbury, Connecticut and was on his way to Salisbury, about 30 miles north. It turned out that he was on his way to an international peace conference at a facility way up in the northwest corner of the state. It also turned out that he was from Baghdad.
We took him home and he had supper with us, and I called the place he was headed for, thinking someone would come to get him. We ended by agreeing that I would pack the kids back in the truck — my husband was, as usual, overseas on business — and I took him to a town near to his destination, where he was met.
Our conversation was hampered somewhat by his lack of fluency in English, but he was certainly equipped to carry on amusing, intelligent conversation, joke with the kids if they didn’t get too colloquial and we had a really fun and somewhat educational time with him.
Before he had left to return to Iraq, we received a box of delicious dates and a tent bag with his thank you note. A tent bag is hand-knotted of wool like an Oriental rug, has a braided woolen hanger intended to use for storage in a tent. It's about 10 by 18 inches with a figured right side and a plain brown back. I put filler inside and use it for a cushion in a rocking chair in my study .
The point of this lengthy anecdote is to suggest that if everyone could be exposed to the American Friends Service organization that sponsors foreign high school students in the US, to other groups formed to promote world peace like the one our Iraqi friend was attending, and we could be encouraged always to consider acceptance of those whose actions indicate benign curiosity and/or clear friendliness, we might accept that there's at least a possibility that not every Muslim is a terrifying zealot. A mosque is not automatically a training spot for those bent on killing all non-Muslims and wiping out Judeo-Christians, Buddhists, and all other persuasions world-wide.
Even Arab A is not Arab B!
©2015 Joan L. Cannon for SeniorWomen.com
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