Blog 4

Over the summer I was involved in an argument with a friend who is in the near future joining the army. After a few too many drinks his internal filter, which decides whether he should speak what is on his mind or not, was turned off. After the topic of the war in Iraq was brought up he quickly and energetically announced, "I cannot wait to get over there and kill every single Muslim person I see in the scope of my gun." (This quote is very censored and involved much more demeaning adjectives for the Iraqi people.) Immediately after this was said a dark cloud of irritated silence emerged. After a few seconds of processing what was just said me and all of my friends began grilling our friend who said the naive statement.
I will guiltily admit, my initial reaction was I want to punch his face in for saying something so naive and for over generalizing. However, after taking a few deep breaths and realizing that he had too many drinks to think clearly, I lead him away from the rest of the group that obviously wanted to punch sense into him rather than talk sense into him.
After leading him to the side of the house we were at I began to interrogate him, rather aggressively about if he truly believed what he had said minutes earlier. He owned every word of it, adding that he wanted to kill every terrorist out there. I spent over an hour talking with him trying to make relevant that not every Islamic person is a terrorist, and even farther, not every terrorist is even Islamic. I tried putting his statement into perspective by offering the scenario that a soldier from another country was given the mission to come to the U.S. and eliminate every red neck (just for an example of a small minority of a larger group of people). I asked him if the soldier would be justified in killing several hundred non-redneck people in order to get maybe one redneck. This example did allow him to see the flaws in his plan for killing every Islamic person he saw in hopes of killing the terrorists.
After this devastatingly long hour of talking we had agreed on the fact that killing everyone in sight was an appalling idea however he still had a tainted image of the Islamic religion itself. He still whole heartedly believed that the Islamic religion promoted terrorism. I did not even attempt to shake him from this belief because it seemed so ingrained into the manner in which he was raised. We left agreeing to disagree on the terms that he would keep his beliefs to himself and be open to change his opinion of the Islamic religion as he saw fit during his time spent in the army.