OT, but I need to get this out of my system and you guys are the lucky winners. // If it gets tl;dr you can just skip to the last paragraph as that pretty much sums it up.

I don’t want to get drawn into a long discussion about this because it’s very emotional to me, but I do want to say this: Many if not most Muslims, both in the U.S. and around the world, are never going to believe that the murder of those three young people had nothing to do with them being Muslim.

Muslims overseas won’t believe it because of our drone strikes & wars in which hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been killed, and because of our support for dictators and our willingness to look the other way when they commit atrocities on their people because it’s in our best interests.

Muslims here in America will also find it difficult if not impossible to believe it had nothing to do with Islam. Why? Because we wake up every single day hearing the media, politicians, pundits and other public figures tell us how horrible Islam is—even if they don’t say it openly, how can one believe that any decent person would voluntarily choose to follow such a horrible religion?

You guys have NO IDEA what it’s like to be America’s bogeyman—you just don’t. This has been going on for decades now and it was made exponentially worse by 9/11.

This is what the murders look like from a Muslim perspective:

The mainstream (national) media went a full 12 hours (at least) before reporting on this. If the identities of the victims and perpetrator had been switched there would’ve been wall-to-wall national coverage starting almost immediately. That reinforced the idea that Muslim lives don’t matter, they’re cheap, even when the lives belonged to decent, productive young Americans that any parent would be proud to call their own.

As mentioned, we face a constant barrage of anti-Muslim sentiment—hell, there’s a whole well-financed industry dedicated to churning it out—yet we’re expected to believe this same constant barrage doesn’t affect non-Muslims, the actual target audience of all the negative framing? We’re supposed to believe that out of the many neighbors this murderous thug had confrontations with, he just “happened” to snap over parking that day? He just “happened” to go into the home of these young Muslims and shoot them in the head as if they were rabid dogs that needed to be put down?

Sorry, I don’t buy it. Does that come from an emotional rather than a logical place? Maybe, but I can assure you that if I feel that way, so do many other (if not most) Muslims because we all share the same daily experience of being America’s bogeyman.

Those three young people did everything right. They were exemplary citizens: educated, tolerant, law abiding Americans who went out of their way to help others, both non-Muslim and Muslim. And what did they get for thier efforts? A bullet in the head. THAT is how it looks from my side of the fence.