The main criminal in the Mideast uprising over the last couple weeks is undoubtedly ignorance. I can make that assessment as a born-and-raised American who is also a Muslim Imam (clergy) who studied in the Middle East for five years. I have a dear relationship with America, Islam and Muslims, so naturally I know each of them very well. I know that not every American holds to American values just as I know that many Muslims don’t live up to Islamic values. I also know that people from both sides can take advantage or interpret those values for malicious purposes.
The percentage of people protesting violently is very small, so let’s not demonize 1.5 billion people as belligerent maniacs. Everyone has the right to protest peacefully, even if their protest is based on ignorance. The protesters’ problem is rooted in their deep-seated pain caused by our foreign policy, which has unjustly afflicted millions of lives in the Muslim world for decades, particularly in the last 10 years.
Non-U.S. Muslims are ignorant and unjust in assuming our government had anything to do with the production or distribution of the recent anti-Islam film. The reason they make such an assumption is because most Muslim countries are micromanaged by a dictatorship that oversees every form of public speech.
The man who produced this film is taking advantage of the ignorance of Muslims as well as that of non-Muslims who know nothing about Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. He has twisted events in the most slanderous, crooked manner simply to spread hate and cause outrage in the world. He knew that the media would cover it as though all Muslims were a part of it.
We wish that everyone would adopt or at least respect our values, but the reality is they will not and it would be presumptuous, unfair and un-American to force our values on someone else, judging them as wrong when they don’t accept”