I'm bothered... every once in a while I randomly check other blogs... and the two or three that I found happened to say something about muslims were really terrible, as if muslims were some sort of barbarians. This is not right.

And for those of you who are wondering, I'm not religious. But I'd say that I was raised in a catholic environment, and didn't meet any muslim person until the age of 24.

Yeah, before that, just by reading and watching the news I'd get the impression that those guys were kind of stuck in some unexcusable, retarded way of thinking.

But then I started to meet and make friends with several people of that religion, and found them to be people just "like us, the civilized guys". Some of them are serious guys, some of them are funny, some dress a bit differently, most of them dress "like us, the civilized guys".

The only difference was perhaps that most of them would not drink even beer, and also, that most of them would pray a few times a day, and they don't eat pork either. But that was all. Otherwise, they're just like us: they usually become hungry three times a day, and then they need to go to the toilet, in winter they need to dress thicker clothes, sometimes they fall in love, sometimes they get angry, and so on.

I never saw any of those guys treating women badly. As a matter of fact, some of these guys were veeery popular with non-muslim girls. I never saw any of them carrying dynamite. I probably never even saw them carrying a quran.

So my point is, it bothers me how one-sided are some people's opinions about those guys who happened to be born so far away from us. Yes, they were born and raised in the opposite side of the world, where they speak and dress differently. Does that make them bad? Do they have to start to speak in English and wear jeans so that we feel more comfortable?

If that's the case, wouldn't that justify a degree of hatred from them towards "us" because of the continued support to Israel's occupation of palestinian land? "Us" meaning the christian crusaders who donated arab land to the jews? "Us" from the same neighborhood as that christian extremist Pat Robertson? "Us" who attack Iraq for its oil while giving some bullshit excuse, but then turning a blind eye on Saudi Arabia and North Korea?

See, if Iraq and North Korea are both mistreating their citizens and threatening their neighbors, how come only Iraq is attacked? Some people, especially in the muslim world, might be tempted to jump into the conclusion that it's because of the oil and because of their religion, right? Wouldn't that cause widepread rescentment?

I think we shouldn't put all muslims in the same one bag and all christians in some other one bag. Although I'm a great admirer of things American, I am certainly not in the same team as the "misunderestimated" president Bush. None of my muslim friends have anything, aaanything in common in Osama Bin Laden except that they claim to be of the same religion (but obviously, Bin Laden is either not a good practicer or perhaps hasn't read the quran lately). Whatever that guy is doing, you cannot call it islamism, period.