Also, the lack of adequate mental health care in the military is now acknowledged by General Peter Chiarelli, as the number of suicides in the army continues to rise at a record pace.

That’s what grates on me, is the bizarre double standard. If a Muslim kills someone, the media treats it as if they were obviously driven to it by their faith, as if there’s no other possible justification. When a Christian does it, not only does it hardly even qualify as news, but nobody would even speculate that they were driven to murder by verses in the Bible that command it.

The article by Cal Thomas was carried by the editorial page of my local paper also. It grated on me so much, I penned a letter to the editors laying out the absurdity of his arguments and asking that they refrain from carrying such intolerant and bigoted articles masquerading as simple op-eds. I just got word from one of the managing editors and they will be publishing my piece as a counterpoint. I think it’s important to confront these types of issues locally as well, to the extent we’re able to.

Once upon a time, in America, reporters reported, they tried not to editorialize. Now they editorialize and try very hard not to report. Tabloid journalism at it’s finest. Back when the TV program “All in the Family” aired, people could easily see that Archie was ignorant because his prejudices kept him from seeing people as individuals. Now, the conservatives, who stress the desires of the individual over the needs of society, are actually worse than Archie, but no one is laughing.

Now I don’t want to look naive about this. There probably are significant numbers of Muslims residing in America who would relish the opportunity to damage America in a dramatic violent way. How many are there? We don’t know. There might be 2 of them, or 200. We don’t know. How many Muslims are there residing in the U.S.? It’s more than one million. It might be as many as 7 million. The statistics are now solid. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_the_United_States

What if there were 1,000 U.S. Muslims who wanted to harm the U.S.? That would mean that 999 out of 1,000 U.S. Muslims was innocent, and that any sort of profiling law that presumptively profiled or punished people for being Muslim would be terribly unfair to most American Muslims.

I wish that the xenophobic Americans would take deep breaths and settle down, but I don’t think that will happen. Nor will they be inclined to admit that more than 3,000 American soldiers were needlessly killed in Iraq, based on lies by non-Muslims.

We need perspective at times like these, but that might be asking for way too much, especially when the news media thrives on senseless conflict.