Spread the word! Serious under-reporting of an attack on a Dayton, Ohio Mosque Last Friday

[dreams_of_wings]

This is from my friend lillibet. She got it from her elder sister, who got it from a student who has Muslim family members in Dayton. I am appalled and saddened by this, and particularly by the failure of the media to report on this, so I thought I'd spread the word and ask you all to do the same. Please, if you can, talk about this with your students,

Comments

don't let the bastards get you down

[daniel_t_miles]

I have to say that even though this is terrible news, I'm proud of us as a country that it took us this long for something like this to happen and that it's only happened once so far (probably a few more times than that but the numbers are still low). We're a hateful country and a hateful people; remember that the Klan has done a lot worse than this to a lot more churches than this. I think we're making some slow but undeniable progress.

If you're feeling defeated by this, I have a counter-story to buck you up. There is a cafe near where I used to live in Denver called the Jerusalem Cafe (very, *very* good, BTW if you get a chance to go there). They're run by an obviously Arab family, they serve Arab and Jewish food and they advertise themselves as "foreign" (like lots of foreign-food restaurants do). About a month after 9/11, I went to a "Muslims aren't so bad, really" talk where the son of the owner told this story:

In the days after 9/11, the family had a lot of debate about if they should open the restaurant or hide in the basement. About the third day, they decided to open but they were all scared as hell. Most people were nice enough but about mid-way through the day, a sleeveless-t-shirt "git-er-dun" red-neck strolled in with a baseball bat. The man talking at this even said he stayed at the counter and sent his sister in the back to get ready with the phone. The guy said that he knew the Arab family, they'd been in the community for years and he knew there was a difference between them and the terrorists. He offered to stick around the restaurant whenever he could with his baseball bat and make sure the family was safe.