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Editorial:
We must support
and protect those Muslims who are fighting back the extremists.
There are many good
Muslim people who were horrified with September 11, 2001 and who want to see
these extremists stopped.¹ They believe their religion has been hijacked.
Yet, before visiting their websites and learning about who they are, you should
know that they do hold in common some of the perceptions of their extremists
when it comes to the historical analysis of Judaism and Christianity.
We've got to push
ourselves and our government to empower a bold, deep, and meaningful "human
values" campaign that shows the real heart of America and not the values
promulgated by those Hollywood-types who exploit on film and television any
value and every emotion to earn a buck.
These
pages are all in process; work will continue on these four articles even after
September 11, 2006.
Footnotes:
¹Along with the
Free Muslim Coalition, get to know the work of groups like
Islam for Today and also our long-standing
private-sector institutions like
Freedom House
with their Center on Religious Freedom. We
all must be bold and brave.
²Also, get to know the work of groups like
Islam Online and
Ijtihad yet also our long-standing,
quasi-government groups like
the U.S. Institute of Peace. tEach needs to
suggest programs and actions private citizens can take.
³Our
first principles page |
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Those Muslim people
who know the real heart of the USA are not so resolute and unbending in
engaging in a real dialogue with Jews and Christians and they do not insist on
the Islamic domination of the world.²
In 1995 I proposed
a series to PBS called, Why religion? Which religion?. The show was to
look at the best parts of each confession of faith and attempt to grasp the
first prin¿iples by which that faith statement came to be.
Of course, that
show needs to be done more today than anytime in the past. If PBS had been
truly doing her job back in the 1970s, such a show would have surely been
started even before the Ayatollah Khomeini began the grand opening of his reign
of terror in 1979 when his minions seized the US embassy.
There are only six
billion people on this little planet. We need to know the names of all those
people who are open to discussing their sacred scriptures and re-reviewing the
histories through which each religion evolved.
That openness is
the antithesis of elitism.
The challenge for
all humanity – all religions, sciences, businesses and governments –
is to use our human will to impart order and continuities wherever we can, and
to build relations with symmetries however we can, so in those rare moments,
our God can break through the natural chaos and create dynamic moments filled
with harmony.³
Thank you.
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