Find and Replace

Wondering why I find idiots going on and on about shortcomings in Islam to be particularly irritating. Let me demonstrate why:

It was just another weekend service for churchgoers in this Detroit suburb when, without warning, they began to be gunned down by one of their own.

Now victims' relatives are struggling to keep their faith and find answers.

"This is a totally senseless thing," said Ali Al-Modiri, whose 44-year-old brother, Sayeed, died shielding an elderly woman who survived. "He was a great guy. He didn't deserve to die."

Mohammad Fayid, a buttoned-down churchgoer known for sharing homegrown vegetables with his neighbors, walked into the room and police said he shot 22 bullets from a 9 mm handgun within a minute.

None of those who knew him expected Fayid to be violent. Neighbors said he was quiet and devout, that he liked to tinker about his house and garden. He would even release the chipmunks caught in traps he set in his yard.

But Saturday, at prayers at the Sunni Mosque, Fayid turned on worshippers.

"He wasn't a dark guy. He was average person," said Shane Colwell, a neighbor who knew Fayeed for about a decade. "It's not like he ever pushed his beliefs on anyone else."

The 44-year-old lived with his mother and sister in a modest home about two miles from the mosque where police say he opened fire during service.

Sunni's are a denomination that grew out of a schism in the Islamic church in the 9th Century.

This year, the group's leader, Iman Ali Mofuloshari, wrote that events prophesied in the Koran are "beginning to occur with increasing frequency."

Naturally this story will unleash a series of articles about how extreme muslims are, even in the United States and the pressure and discrimination will increase. Ann Coulter will say, "See I am right to want to convert them to Christianity." Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson will denounce Islam as a religion that breeds such thoughts.

FoxNews will engage in wall-to-wall coverage posing the question in bold graphics accompanied by the appropriate sound-effect "ARE ALL MUSLIMS CRAZY?". People like me, and other rational people would say it is inappropriate to condemn an entire faith based upon the actions of a random person, that religion is a tool that people use to justify such violent and repulsive acts and that religion is used as a sop. FoxNews, Coulter, et al will screech that we are enablers of these Islamo-Facists.

Well, all these things would occur should this incident actually involve muslims. But it didn't, it involved Evangelical Christians in the ultimate act of "Bobo's Worlds" dark underbelly.

Naturally, as this involves a Christian we will not judge harshly the institution as that simply cannot be done, it would be unfair.

Would be that we could apply this type of rationality to others.

But that would be asking us to actually THINK. We cannot have that.