Peace

One of the salient and sad aspects of the McCain-Palin campaign focused on presenting Obama as Muslim. (Recall chants of "McCain not Hussein!" at rallies for instance.) Millions of people in the world are proud to be Muslim, but here in the US, certain factions consider calling a person "Muslim" a way of name-calling. The reason? There is a negative connotation associated with "Muslim", an association with terrorist activities, for example. I find this to be very strange, given the long history of war and even terrorist activity associated with almost all religions, notably Catholicism.

As was aptly put by a professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University in Washington:

“Certainly we cannot claim that violence is the monopoly of only one religion.”

Truly any large group of people, regardless of where they live in the world, their ethnicity, or who they call god, will harbor a small extreme faction prone to violence. We cannot judge any group solely by their fringe faction(s) or we will find that we will be forced to bring judgment on ourselves as well.