To all Muslim haters and other zealots

Are a billion Muslims now fair game? How about Hindus? Sikhs? Mexicans? Jews? Where does it stop?

I am increasing disturbed that people in the barber shop (and the barber), colleagues, friends, some here in the South and others scattered across the country,  feel free to tell racist jokes about towel heads, camel jockeys, wetbacks, etc. They mock the Brahman bindi, and say they negotiate by "Jewing people down." (Anybody ever Baptist anyone down?)

Ninety-nine percent of people in the world just want to raise their kids and get on with their lives. Yet in one very racist town in California I was shunned by local and state law enforcement on a committee because I suggested part of the 911 celebration should be conciliatory.

Not for the SOBs who kill indiscriminately, but the other hundreds of millions who want their children to have decent education, a clean and safe place to live, enough to eat and hopes for a future. Is that so different from what the average American wants?

Are we to let 10,000 derange zealots--Muslim, Christian or other--determine how the other multiple billions of us relate to each other?

I am sick of Islamic zealotry and intolerance. But, I am just as sick of uber nationalism in this country and the intolerance of so many of the people I know personally.

In 1775, Samuel Johnson said, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." We have too many of these false patriots today who wrap themselves in the American flag and cry that any "non-American" is an apostate.

One of these uber patriots once told a newspaper reporter to go back and have the paper send an American to interview him. You see, she wore a Muslim headscarf. My secretary once opined that all those "foreigners" (read Muslims, the hated of the day) should go back where they came from. When I asked where they should go if they were born in the United States, she was at a loss for an answer.

As a world, we will never make progress until we unite all freedom loving people against the hatemongers irrespective of their national or religious beliefs.