They're Sure Their God is Better Than Yours

article in the Arab American News about hatred and religious intolerance. It was about a holier-than thou Christian evangelist group called the Bible Believers, who showed up with a pig’s head and taunted the people at the recent Arab International Festival in Dearborn, proselytizing about Jesus while putting down Islam and the prophet Muhammad.

The article focused on a Youtube video that has gone viral, which shows people at the festival throwing rocks and debris at the poor innocent Bible Believers. The Arab American Chamber of Commerce has accused the group of editing from the video the taunting and the pig’s head -- all with the goal of portraying local Arab Americans as being uncivilized and acting without provocation.

The Bible Believers’ behavior is repulsive.

It’s hard to believe this group, which claims to be devoted to God and Christianity, can be so evil.

For these folks, their mantra is simple: Our God is better than yours-- that is unless you’re Christian and think just like us.

I’m no stranger to religious intolerance and ignorance. My parents were Holocaust survivors who lost siblings and parents in concentration camps. And I’ve seen my fair share of anti-semitism or religious ignorance over the many years.

While I was a reporter at the Washington Post, I interviewed the head of the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) at the Washington Field Office. When I asked if his agents ever negotiated prices with drug dealers during undercover buys, he responded: “Sometimes we try to Jew them down.”

When I was at a D.C. bar conducting interviews for a story for the Post, a patron said: “Why don’t you get out of here and stop acting like a Jew.” When I asked what he meant by that, he said: “You act like everyone owes you.” I won’t tell you exactly what I said in response, but it included a couple four letter words.

We see religious intolerance on a regular basis on the nightly news: Sunni Muslims killing Shia, and vice versa. Muslims killing Christians. Jews killing Muslims. Muslims killing Jews.

It’s frustrating, perplexing, bewildering. And even more so because there’s really little we as Metro Detroiters can do from afar.

But when the hatred spills over into our backyard as it did with the Bible Believers, we need to pay attention, to expose the intolerance, to speak out, be it to friends, neighbors or on Facebook or Twitter.

Because sadly, folks like the scary Bible Believers don’t really believe in the bible.
Unless, that is, they edited out -- like they did in the Youtube video -- the complete story.