Learning a language is learning a culture. When I stepped into an Arabic class my freshman year, I had no idea what kind of world I was about to immerse myself in.
Despite the sometimes tedious and timely work, I can say it was the best on-the-whim decision I have ever made.
So Monday morning when my Arabic teacher informed my class of a reckless individual burning the mosque in Corvallis, I found myself overwhelmed with emotion.
How could someone destroy something so holy to a large percentage of the world?
Apparently, many people in Corvallis felt the same way. Later in the week, I read an article about hundreds of local residents attending a remembrance ceremony in honor of the mosque.
My teacher told us Monday morning to send our thoughts and prayers out to the Arab community. As a journalist my mind told me to write a column about it. But as I sat down to put my jumbled thoughts into words, I flashed back to this summer.
I remember sitting in front of the television, flipping through the channels when I found a station talking about the mosque near Ground Zero.
As I listened to the correspondents’ banter, one claimed, “building a mosque at Ground Zero is like building a memorial to Hitler at Auschwitz.” When I went to reaffirm this quote on Google, I found thousands of sites displaying those exact words.
I felt the same rage boiling within me like the day I had heard it on the television. Nazism is political ideology. To compare Islam to an ideology that murdered millions of innocent people is complete arrogance.
9/11 was an attack on Americans. We can be proud of the mass amount of support and unity that sprouted from these events. But along with punishing the ones responsible for the attack, we ostracized an entire religion.
There is no denying there are corrupt people in every religion, but religion doesn’t kill people. People kill people.
Islam is a misunderstood religion. When I sit in my Arabic class, I view a world full of tradition and respect. I view a world full of bright colors and joyous music. I view a world formed from the same deep, religious roots as Christianity and Judaism.
Yet when I turn on the television, I don’t see anything like that. I see hatred. I see misunderstanding and I see pain. Although I do not conform to a set belief, faith or ideology; tolerance is simply my religion.
Instead of preaching superiority and self-righteousness, I wish we could sit down and identify everyone for what we innately are — humans.
It is an undeniable commonality.
If we humans could just open our minds and our hearts to every religion, culture, stereotype and race maybe we could begin to understand one another and begin to rid ourselves of the ignorance we have created.
There are a lot of people who believe humanity is better than burning down mosques, invading other countries and killing innocent people.
Would Martin Luther King, Jr., be satisfied with the world we have created? He wasn’t just speaking of tolerance between whites and blacks. Although Americans have made tremendous leaps in racial equality, do we substitute that tolerance with discrimination against another group that we may not understand? It’s a vicious cycle that has yet to be broken.
My heart goes out to those affected by the sabotaged mosque in Corvallis this week. My thoughts go out to those who have ever been discriminated against because of their religion. My warmest regards goes to those who stood against these acts of violence.
I hope that one day my children will experience a world with no cultural tensions, with no wars of religion or resources. I hope my children will live in a world that isn’t divided on something ambiguous such as religion, but brought together by celebrating one another’s differences. I hope they learn to welcome cultural identities with open arms instead of clenched fists. I hope they will choose understanding over arrogance. Most importantly, I hope my children will live in a better world than the one we have created.
But then again, I know better.
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O’Brien: No place for cultural, societal ignorance
Daily Emerald
December 5, 2010
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