by James Glaser
February 13, 2004

Yes this is Friday's Column about life in Northern Minnesota. This week I have been talking to some of the Ministers of Churches in the area and I think we have a real problem in our part of the country.

We have Christian Ministers preaching a doctrine of hate. They are telling their people that all Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and most Catholic are going to hell. What makes this doubly wrong is that they are teaching this to the children in their youth groups.

Ever since the attack on the World Trade Center we have been hearing about Muslim schools that are funded by radical Islam, where they teach their children that the United States is the great Satan and that we are evil. We have been trying to figure out how we can stop this because we can see that it will hurt us for generations, plus it is not the truth.

What do you think our children believe, when we teach them that all Muslims are going to hell? Who goes to hell? Evil people go to hell. We are teaching the same brand of hate to our children that we want to stop in Muslim countries.

I have to tell you that I have come to believe that War is evil and wrong. I thought we were getting on the right track when we defeated Communism and the Soviet Union. I don't remember that we ever dropped bombs or sent troops in an attack on Russia. American troops never took on Soviet troops.

We defeated them with the dollar, but we never stopped to see what a great bloodless victory that was. So now we are back to the same old way of blowing people to bits. At one time we taught our children to hate and fear American Indians. Later on it was the Germans and then when I was young it was the Russians. Now it is going to be the Muslims. We are slow learners.

I did a little bit of a survey to find out how far reaching this teaching of hate was up here and found many of the main line Christian Churches, like Lutheran and Catholic are not buying this line of thought, but there are many new demonstrations that are. I even had one church member tell me that this teaching comes right from Washington and that he saw a video of an American General saying that we are in a Religious War with the Muslims and that we must win or they would take over America.

Fear works, but I didn't think Washington's reach had made it up here yet. You know if it has made it to a town of 290 people in Northern Minnesota, that fear has crossed this country from North to South and from East to West. It scares me when we start indoctrinating our children at an early age to hate and fear billions of people they have never met.

What can we do and how do we stop the spread of fear and hate in this country? Education is working to build up this fear and hate. It is going to take education to defeat it. We need prayer and we always need prayer. We need a Government in Washington to lead by example and teach our country that there are good Muslims and yes, there are bad Muslims. We need church leaders to tell our children that only God decides who is going to heaven and who is going to hell.

This is not going to be easy and kids that have been taught to hate on both sides are going to be a problem for many years to come, but to sit there and watch all the hate that Washington is spewing out along with radical Islam is only going to make it worse.