"Days after the televangelist Pat Robertson said on his Christian Broadcasting Network that 'what the Muslims want to do to the Jews is worse than the Holocaust', Mr. Powell told a gathering in Washington: 'This kind of hatred must be rejected.'
"The escalation in anti-Muslim comments from conservative Christians includes a recent claim by Jerry Falwell, the country's leading right-wing Baptist, that the prophet Mohammed was 'a terrorist'.
"Veteran evangelist Jimmy Swaggart followed that this week by calling Mohammed a 'sex deviant' and a pervert and demanding that Muslim students in the US be expelled. 'We ought to tell every other Muslim living in this nation that if you say one word, you're gone,' he said." -end Guardian quote.
An anti-Islamic theme has been promoted from the White House, as most fair minded observers would admit. It is a theme repeated everywhere by the media, which has galvanized the ECR to the point that they believe their aberrant theology is not only “American” but moral. Bush himself has said words to the effect that we are not at war with Muslims, who are "nice people", but that the war is with "radical Islam." To my knowledge the President has not offered a definition of "radical", though we can infer that it is any branch of Islam that is opposed to Mr. Bush's foreign policy. He has repeatedly stated that those who are not with his policies are against America---a statement that is itself un-American, in a country that prides itself on its freedom of speech and open exchange of differing views. It is reasonable to conclude that most of the millions of Muslims in America would oppose a policy of bombing people in the Mideast, but this does not make them less American.
"The escalation in anti-Muslim comments from conservative Christians includes a recent claim by Jerry Falwell, the country's leading right-wing Baptist, that the prophet Mohammed was 'a terrorist'.
"Veteran evangelist Jimmy Swaggart followed that this week by calling Mohammed a 'sex deviant' and a pervert and demanding that Muslim students in the US be expelled. 'We ought to tell every other Muslim living in this nation that if you say one word, you're gone,' he said." -end Guardian quote.
An anti-Islamic theme has been promoted from the White House, as most fair minded observers would admit. It is a theme repeated everywhere by the media, which has galvanized the ECR to the point that they believe their aberrant theology is not only “American” but moral. Bush himself has said words to the effect that we are not at war with Muslims, who are "nice people", but that the war is with "radical Islam." To my knowledge the President has not offered a definition of "radical", though we can infer that it is any branch of Islam that is opposed to Mr. Bush's foreign policy. He has repeatedly stated that those who are not with his policies are against America---a statement that is itself un-American, in a country that prides itself on its freedom of speech and open exchange of differing views. It is reasonable to conclude that most of the millions of Muslims in America would oppose a policy of bombing people in the Mideast, but this does not make them less American.