The burden of being a young American Muslim
by Hailey Woldt
From Washington Post: On Faith
A group of children leaving a Bridgeport, Connecticut mosque last week, as reported by the Connecticut Post, had to brace themselves as they walked past a group of about a dozen Christian protestors yelling “Islam is a lie” and “Jesus hates Muslims.”
One man shoved his sign at them and yelled, “Murderers!” Flip Benham, organizer of the protest, explained, “This is a war in America and we are taking it to the mosques around the country.”
While this may seem like an isolated incident, it was regrettably part of a growing pattern I encountered across the country as part of the research team led by the well-known anthropologist Akbar Ahmed for his American University sabbatical project “Journey into America.” We traveled to roughly 75 cities and visited over 100 mosques throughout the United States interviewing thousands of Muslims and non-Muslims for the first and largest study of its kind on the Muslim community in America. We set out to learn what it meant to be Muslim in post-9/11 America and discovered some interesting, and at times discomforting, trends. Read the full article at the Washington Post
Journey Into America 
As A Christian I’m appalled at these “Christians”. I know that Jesus does not incite hate, but instead tells us to treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. These incidents are a disgrace to Christianity. We must drive out fear with love and to do that we must first drive out and ignorance with knowledge. Christians, please get to know Islam, study it and you will see that we are ALL brothers and sisters of God.
I’m getting the impression Hailey you believe that we are consciously teaching our children to be Islamaphobes. The incident’s you describe at the school sounds more to me like a textbook case of school bullying rather than some deep seething hatred by our children towards Muslims. In school kids made fun of Hindu’s for not eating meat. I’m not saying bullying is right by any means but to imply that only Muslim students are being bullied is a gross distortion of a problem that many children in this country endure.
As far as the Christian protesters are concerned, who cares. That might sound insensitive, but in the grand scheme of things they’re a nuisance. They are assholes and quite frankly most people ignore them. If they get violent that is completely different.