Greetings andSalutations;

I hope, during this Christmas season, that I can post some positive moments from America, to remind all of us that the bigoted, hateful, racist  bastards we appear to be are just a small subset of the population. However, so far, it has been a challenge to find anything. Maybe soon, though.

That having been said. Yesterday evening a particularly annoying bit of news came up. HERE is a link to one of the reports In short, a young girl was attacked and beaten up by bullies on the playground simply because she is Muslim and was wearing the traditional head scarf -the Hijab. They tore the garment from her, and called her ISIS(Daesh). To add to the the shame, the police were called, but,refused to take a report, basicially blowing it off as kids being bad on the playground, rather than a hate-based attack. The school alleges that they are doing an internal investigation and will mete out any required punishment. Frankly, since it appears that the kids that attacked the young girl were white, and male, I suspect that nothing will come of it.

It is my opinion that actions like this are generated by what the kids learn at home, so, I would be inclined to hold the parents responsible for their kid’s actions. Granted kids at that age do not have the social barriers that ensure they will not randomly attack people, but, neither do they act so violently towards another kid. Making fun and teasing, yes, sure. That is NOTHING compared with what happened to this young girl. For all you folks out there supporing the flaming rhetoric of The Donald and other Right-Winger candidates…this is the world you are building. DO you really think that is the world you want to live in?  Why is it that all of a sudden,  it is OK for us to blame ALL Muslims for the acts of a fanatical few?   Should we treat all Christians as psychotics filled with hate because of the actions of the killers who shoot doctors as Woman’s Care clinics?   Or by the actions of the Westboro Baptist Church?   I think most Americans would say “no”…because it is THEIR ox being gored,  not some one elses.

In reading this report, I was reminded of an interview I heard quite some years ago, with an administrator in the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation. He had, in his youth, grown up in a racist household and was a die-hard Skin-Head, and white supremacist. One day,though, when he was in his early 20s, he was at a White Supremecist rally being ranted at about white purity, and how all the Blacks should be sent back to Africa and how racial impurity was destroying America…all the typical nonsense. In between the speeches, though, he was talking to one of his friends, and he asked a very important question – “What would we do if we got our wish? That all the people of color WERE rounded up and deported? Who would we hate THEN?” His friend looked at him and said “Don’t worry man, we will find SOMETHING”. The young man was bright enough to think about this, and he came to the realization that these folks were not fighting to preserve something GOOD.  Rather,  they were fighting because they HATED people that were different. He also realized that the next group could be blue-eyed people, or left-handed people, or any other group that did not match their definition of “normal”. This flash of insight caused him to change his life path, leaving the Supremacist movement and their hate-filled views, and moving over to join in the hunt for Nazis. It was a most interesting article.

Pleasant Dreams

Bee Man Dave