Islam is a religion of peace, it is a peaceful religion. Muslims are very loving people and they have so much compassion. Their hospitality is something to note, no matter which parts of the world they come from their hospitality shines through. In the west, when people come across Muslims, they meet Muslims from various parts of the world.
In America, people are vey nice, but they were shown some of the worst examples and every kind of bad images of the Muslims over the past twenty years since 9/11 of 2001. So, they built an image in their minds about Muslims and being surrounded by the same types of news sources for years after years they are unable to escape that image that they have in their minds. This is happening to a vast part of the Americans, but definitely not to all. Somehow people are escaping the news sources that had been hypnotizing them for years. In America, the bubbles that we are in are strong, they do not break easily, but sooner or later, it is bound to happen, the bubbles are bound to break. When they do, people finally start to see something that is different, different than the images that they had in their minds. Their conscious minds are then alert. From time to time, I found myself being in various kinds bubbles about certain things or certain people. These bubbles were created based on some comments made by my close friends or family members. Finally, years later when I met that person, it turned out they like me and I like them. It was difficult to break out of that bubble, but it was very liberating.
Prejudice is another thing to escape. You will notice that all good people lack prejudice, they are able to love a diverse group of people. I thought each new generation overcome prejudice a little more than their parents, but sometimes when some young people demonstrate prejudice, I come very close to the brink of losing hope. I think it would be fair to say, we all have prejudice more or less, maybe even a tiny bit about something, we are not free from it, but we work on it, we try to be good and compassionate toward others. But we can do this because human minds are made incredibly compassionate. Once we learn about the people that we have any prejudice about we can become the most compassionate of people towards them. It is simple is that.
Complexion of our skins are probably the main drive for human prejudice. Most of the countries of the world normally just deal with one type of complexion with a slight variation of color. But in the western countries, such as, America, Canada, UK and Australia deal with a diverse population from all over the world. These economically prosperous countries are generous to attract and allow immigrants. They are also smart, probably smarter than many of the countries of the rest of the world to become economically successful. These smart countries allow others to integrate into their own country and with the immigration comes talent, that is why they are ahead of the rest of the world, they are not just smart they are also generous. Close mindedness does not make us the leaders.
There are millions of Muslims that demonstrate peace. In order to overcome our fear, we have to know about these good Muslims, why are they not violent, why do they also hate the extremist Muslims. And that is our common ground. We all hate the bad things and violence.
Thanks for reading.
Peace.
