Sadly misunderstood

With nothing better to do with my time, I was browsing through Facebook (if you don’t know what that is, then you’re missing a lot) when I came across a note that was posted by a friend. It was a collection of Bush quotes: you know, the stupid and absurdly funny things that came out of his mouth that would sometimes make people wonder if the person who said it is really mentally retarded. Amused, I read through the list. Some of the stuffs were hilarious.

And then, I came across these two.

I thought, hang on a minute, I don’t get it. What's so funny about that?

That’s when I realised. Oh. My. God.

See, the thing is, everybody knows Bush lies to people, so it comes as no surprise that you don’t automatically believe everything he said (though I sometimes wonder why on earth people would elect someone who blatantly lie to your face as president). However, this time he spoke the truth and sadly enough, a lot of people have associated Islam with terrorism that when somebody equates Islam with peace, they all laugh it out as a joke.

(I’m not including the friend in this group of people because I know him and this is probably a mistake in his part, maybe he didn’t realised it before posting… or something)

This is a depressing truth, but hardly surprising to some people I suppose. What’s with all the stuffs about bombings and terrorism going on on the media, some which give a really distorted version of what’s going on, which certainly doesn’t help. I read an article on Iran’s nuclear weapon on Digg the other day. As an aside, I stopped reading comments on Digg because I was always left with a sour mood in the end, what with all the comment bashings and people acting like they know everything whereas in fact, they simply don’t. For this article, I steeled myself and scrolled down to the comments section, knowing fully well what I would find. As expected, lots of heated… discussions, seem to be going on. And then, just as I predicted, someone made comments that sneakily changed the ‘Iran is a threat’ to ‘Islam is a threat’ and hardly anybody noticed. The frustrating thing is he presented ‘facts’ that were supposedly taken from the Qur’an showing how violent Muslims should be. To an average naïve person, he probably came across as convincing.

Now, I know that not everybody is like that, but still, the number of people who are like that is staggeringly large that it’s just disheartening. They are probably just average people that get all their information from mainstream news and TV, so in a way, they’re not all to blame. I would really like to strangle the person(s) who spread the disinformation about Islam in the first place, but that would just defeat the purpose. Oh well…

So, what to do? There is another piece of comment I found on the net. Albeit actually being posted on a different website and topic, the gist of it is really relevant. It goes something like this, “Whenever things like this happened, I try to remind myself that I have Muslim friends, none of whom are in the slightest bit like those portrayed on the media.” I guess, being a Muslim student studying overseas, that is the least (and probably one of the most effective) of things that I can do: show people that Muslims are normal people too, instead of some bloody violent savages they're all being lead to believe.

Yaz.