Penny Hero (dot) Net

I’m not sure if Nathanael Blake is guilty of hijacking a religion to hurt people, but he IS guilty of hijacking a pen (or an apple computer in Snell Hall) to instill anger and hate. Although the article I’m writing about is almost a month old, the Corvallist drew my attention to this and I’m not going to just sit still and say nothing.

Because I’m supposed to be studying, I’m mostly just doing link-plugging here, but there is no way that I can just say nothing. The Corvallist recently wrote about Nathanael Blake’s recent anti-islam piece that yesterday incited peaceful protest by Muslim students on campus. (Go read the Corvallist’s blog post. It’s much more informative and analytical than mine. quote: “Maybe Blake should start by picking up a history textbook. Maybe then he would learn that his statement “Christianity grew on the blood of its martyrs; Islam grew on the blood of its enemies,” is truly laughable. Maybe he hasn’t heard about the Crusades? Or maybe he is blinded by the rose-colored glasses of his own religion, which really makes him closer to the Muslim extremists than to peaceful folks in any religion.”)

I’ve read all of this and of course I’m pissed beyond belief. Nathanael Blake has a ginormous reputation for having the gall to take very non-peaceful and very anger-inciting positions on many issues. Occaisionally, his view is sound and keeps me from taking an extreme liberal side of things. I do sometimes (secretly) enjoy his articles because it reminds me that my viewpoint isn’t the only one on campus. However, most of the time he misinterprets or re-interprets facts and information apparently just to add to the sensationalism of his argument. I’m convinced he creates these columns with the sole purpose of pissing people off, and not with any redeeming motivation like solving any kind of problem or helping people to think more critically about world issues.

This article on islam is exactly the case. It does NOT help people see Islam in a fair light and it contributes to the already huge problem in this country of mistrusting people from the middle east. It looks like he maybe googled for Koran verses frequently cited as in support of violence against women and violence against others and went no further into the book. Instead of writing about how perhaps some of these terrorists are misinterpreting the core values of their religion with the lines he quotes, his article drops a bomb into a race-hate situation that has always been very unstable in the US since 9-11.

Not to suggest that Blake is ever going to be read extensively by many people outside of this little college community… but I’d say he represents what a lot of hate-filled ill-informed christians people really want to believe about their place in the world in relation to Islam.

I am angry at the barometer for being so irresponsible and letting one of their columnists be this racist and ignorant about the world’s largest religion. He’s a victim of his own ignorance if he thinks that Christianity is built on peace and martyrdom.

I am not calling for censorship, but I do wish that the barometer would have a higher standard of intelligence on their staff and when someone wants to post a column like this, that they do it responsibly and NOT attempt to encourage hate for a people who are already hated enough in this country.