Islamophobia not the problem

According to Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering, who has been assigned by Hillary Clinton to investigate the Benghazi attack, “America is a seething hotbed of Islamophobia” filled with ignorant racist rubes who irrationally fear the benign Muslim religion.

He fears that our lack of familiarity with Islam fuels hostility toward Muslims, and he invoked the Holocaust to argue that American Muslims were somehow in danger.

We don't know much about the Hindu religion either, nor about the Sikhs nor about the Buddhists, but we experience no phobias about them. Could it be because they haven't threatened to bring about our extinction? Could it be that they have not declared war against us? Could it be because they have not perpetrated a total of 60 terrorist attacks on American soil since 1972?

We all understand that it is not all of Islam, that there are peaceful Muslims, that there are Muslims who thank God every day that they live in this great country, Muslims who totally buy into what it means to be an American.

We also know that members of a radical group killed four Americans. We know that our president knew it was happening. We also know that he lied to the American public, to the world, trying to get us all to believe that it was a YouTube film which caused a spontaneous riot. We also know that until the time our president mentioned the film, it had been watched a total of 13 times. It was only after President Obama brought the world's attention to it that it set the world on fire.

Somebody at the top told the military to stand down, and now nobody is owning up to the truth.

This is not Islamophobia. This is a plea for transparency. This is a plea for truth.

Cora Lee Schingnitz

Yuma