No Happy Endings

Before I begin, I want you to look at this picture.

Victims, left to right: Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, his wife, Yusor Mohammad, 21, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19.

Remember these faces.  Imagine the successful, vibrant, endearing qualities of these three young college students.  They are not murderers.  They are not our enemy.  They are our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends, and family.  They are the people that make a difference, for the better, in America.

Oh, yes, and they’re Muslims.  Well, they were, before they were coldly murdered by Craig Stephen Hicks, in Chapel Hill, NC, yesterday.  The jury is still out regarding his true motivation to kill the trio (an interaction supposedly deriving from a parking dispute), but his background and his known bias all point to one thing: a deep-seated hatred, and fear, of the followers of Islam – a hatred that has been perpetuated by the hands of the United States government, mass media, and social networking.  Sorry to say, he’s far from the only one.

Years of the United States’ “war on terror” have eroded the public view of Islam.  Numerous terroristic acts all over the globe have been carried out by Muslim extremists, which in part led to this “war”.  As such, we’ve sent our soldiers to fight in regions of the world where Islam is the religion of the majority.  Fuzzy logic and a clash of cultures turned Islam into the face of our enemies, and the two are no longer differentiated.  Citizens cling to this, and blame these atrocities, and the subsequent loss of lives, not on the mad men who perpetrate them, but on the claimed religious core of their disjointed, bastardized beliefs.

Further exacerbating the situation are tactics used by governmental agencies to supposedly root out terrorism, such as the passage and abuse of the Patriot act, TSA discriminatory search practices, hundreds of cases of entrapment perpetuated by the FBI against Muslims, and even the mapping and tracking of Muslim communities by the NYPD.  All these avenues, and many more, have been used to normalize the practice of Islamophobia.

The disease spreads like wildfire on social media, where tensions run high on a text-filled, soulless platform; trolls flourish, fear and misinformation prevail, bigotry knows no bounds, and sheep blindly follow the wolf.  Sensational headlines, pushed by fear-mongering news anchors and publications, invoke irrational thoughts in their subscribers by emphasizing buzzwords.  Muslim.  Islam.  Extremist.  Jihad.  The religion is gutted, and twisted.  Its followers are demonized.  Neilson ratings rise.

And so evolves the cycle of bigotry, and an escalation to the breaking point.  Death threats and ill-wishes for Muslims in general abound.  Incidents arise such as in Europe, where dozens of mosques have become the target of vandals using firebombs, guns, and even pig heads.  Three innocent Muslim college students are murdered, seemingly for discriminatory reasons.  Tensions run high.  The media ignores the signs, underreports the facts, and perpetuates the propaganda.  Government officials stand idly by, and say nothing.  Thousands of innocent Muslims are oppressed by both government forces and non-Muslim citizens, all across the globe.

It’s a pattern of escalation we’ve seen once before in recent history that’s hard to ignore – the implications of which are frightening, to say the least.  Much like anti-Semitism spread far and wide in the 1930’s, anti-Muslim sentiment has taken a stronghold in the 21^st century.  Sadly, it’s just a matter of time before we reach the tipping point: Islam’s Kristallnacht.

I don’t foresee a happy ending to this story, either.

The New Crusades

Bigotry.

People like to throw that word around a lot lately. If you’re a bigot, you must be evil. You must go against all that is well and sacred, to intentionally negatively impact the livelihood of your fellow brethren. You must simply… have a differing viewpoint?

And for the small sum of $1,000.00, ladies and gentlemen, you, too, can have your professional career permanently ruined by a nefarious minority of venomous vermin! Step right up and get steamrolled!

OkCupid, a dating site you shouldn’t concern yourself with, recently announced their distaste in the hiring preference of Mozilla (the company that owns the browser Firefox) regarding their new CEO, Brendan Eich, because it’s easy to pick low hanging fruit. OkCupid voiced their concern by having a message launch within users Firefox browsers when visiting the site, which looks like this:

Douchebaggery at its finest.

For me to address the multitude of issues I have with their cute little message would be to simply post it in entirety again.

In 2008, Eich made a $1,000.00 personal donation to support Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that sought to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry within the state, for which a majority of Californians voted in favor. Mozilla was verbally attacked as an organization as retribution for his promotion to CEO – because if a person believes in “traditional” marriage and supports that viewpoint, then they obviously hate the gays. And that makes them a bigot. And if their company thinks that person is professionally qualified for a particular leadership role, regardless of his/her personal beliefs, then that makes them bigots, too.

Excellent fuzzy logic.

So this week, as the solution to the outrage built within the realm of the interwebz as well as his own company, Mozilla accepted Eich’s resignation from the position he had worked his entire life to earn. And that’s how the terrorists win.

Eich’s contribution to the development of Java is a large foundation of products we use every day. His work was revolutionary, and became an industry standard. The crowning achievement to his professional career was being selected as the CEO of an organization he helped create, while driving the company to success with his foresight and ingenuity. With no record of ever bringing his personal politics into the workplace, all of his hard work and dedication was eviscerated because of a single, outward, unrelated expression of personal values, to which he was legally entitled.

This is exactly why freedom in America is eroding. You’re either “right” or “correct”. But it’s not personal, it’s just business… as usual. Eh, and personal.

But who cares. Dialogue is for stupid-heads, anyway.

So let’s make individuals miserable for their constitutionally protected self-expressions. Let’s shame everyone into groupthink. Let’s frustrate the opposition by dragging them through the mud until they’re ready to play ball or go home.

This inane Crusade waged by the pro-gay agenda is not earning them any sympathies from me, because those who enforce misery, shame, and frustration are my enemies, and I wish them nothing but failure. They’re perpetrating the same persecution which they claim to be victims of. That’s called bigotry.

Intolerance is so intolerable.