Friday, February 17, 2006

It continues

The protest, I mean.

The thing about Islam is that we, or at least I, don't know which people are the fundamentalists. In America, if we hear a televangelist say something, we can oftentimes dismiss it. However, with Presidents W Bush and Clinton repeatedly saying that Islam is a religion of peace and it's just the super conservative sects that are violent without helping us to understand who the super conservatives are, we are put at a disadvantage to truly understand which people to dismiss.

I suppose you could assume that the ones calling for deaths to the infidels are the fundamentalists, and therefore dismiss them. But, it seems like there's just a huge number of people calling for deaths of the infidels. Whole countries like Iran seem to advocate murder.

Perhaps the stories are just exaggerated in the media. A couple of years ago, I had the good fortune to visit Israel for a week and a half (my brother is currently spending a semester over there). If memory serves, while I was there, there was, from what I learned from the news, a fairly substantial riot not too far from where our group was, and we didn't see or hear anything. It is possible that our guides knew about the incident and kept us away from it, but we didn't hear any gunshots or screams, which led me to believe that the uprising was not as substantial as the news led me to believe.

I don't know though. A million and twenty-five thousand dollars and a car to kill somebody...it's almost like it's game show. It's almost cartoony. It's definitely surreal.

Does anybody else think it's odd that there are still protests going on about this?

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