Ugh, DU. The anti-Muslim sentiment here is getting to me.

[renie408]

209. Now, I will say...they are just like us.

Middle Easterners are people, too. WE are people, THEY are people. I am by no means worldly, but I have known several Muslims and if I didn't know, they were indistinguishable from any other American. Some are first generation.

What makes the people of the Middle East different from us that ARE different is how they are raised to look at the world. Listen, this might sound 'bad' and I have never said it here because I have the feeling I am going to be skewered for doing so, but the Middle East has been dragged forward very rapidly into the 21st century. A 100 years ago they had a primarily nomadic society. These are people who cling to their history, not who rush forward toward the future like Americans do. Americans cannot understand why these people are still upset about something that happened in 1991 when some Middle Easterners are still pissed off about the Crusades. Which way is better? to NEVER look back or to rarely look forward? And why are WE the ones that get to decide? We are ALL OF US...me, you, the guy rioting right now somewhere over there...ALL OF US viewing the world through the filters we have put in place throughout our lives. OUR filter includes a deep respect for freedom of speech and the idea that the only way to go is FORWARD. His filter is a little different. And might be more different still in five or ten years.

In some of this there is no right or wrong...it just is. It is unquestionably wrong to do violence over this movie. Unquestionably. I would NEVER argue that any of these people have the 'right' to hurt another person. But I am not sure that from their point of view damaging our embassies is any more awful than the Occupy folks that stormed that the public building in California, destroyed public property and burned a flag on the steps. And most of us here, even if we thought they had gone too far, understood what drove them to do it and weren't THAT freaked out about it.

But let somebody ELSE, somebody who is OTHER than us, storm our public buildings and burn our flags and we go apeshit. I am not including the deaths of Stevens and the other three Americans in this because I believe those were targeted and planned and had little to do with the protest.