Hatred by the hated

IT’S ironic that something that a woman wears to protect herself causes her to be attacked. That something she wears as a sign of her goodwill and love for God is the reason why she is hated. By simply covering her head, we already think differently about her when we don’t even pay much attention to people wearing bonnets or caps.

Just because she is covering her head, people look to judge her. We associate her veil with her religion, then associate it again with guns and violence.

At a certain point, everybody will think of their own as better than others, and this is natural because ethnocentrism naturally manifests in all people. It may become in a form of disliking other races or groups and acknowledge that their own is more superior. If it is natural human instincts, it now depends on how you suppress your ethnocentrism and control it in order for it not to manifest.

Nonetheless, some people still fail to do so.

Islamophobia is a dire problem in many parts of the world. From just being an irrational kind of fear, as how the word ‘phobia’ is defined, it yields to hate which further bears tragic ends such as crime and violence, among others. What’s worse is these repercussions happen to both the ‘haters’ and the ‘hated’.

They also noted about the violence Muslims beget, blaming it on their religion.

Recently, during the winter Olympic Games in South Korea, Islamophobes publicly declared their detestation against Muslims, such as refusing to provide Muslims prayer rooms and mocking the religion in public. South Korea was noted to have one of the highest numbers of Islamophobes in the world.

Little do we know that by continuing this hatred, we are producing a monster of our own making.

We are feeding a vicious cycle of hate that results to violence and discrimination, which in turn, through a human’s natural instinct to self-preservation and to protect himself and his identity, will also yield to another series of violence and discrimination. Non-Muslims will mock and hate Muslims, and Muslims will also do so in return. In the end, blatantly displaying your rage solves nothing but fan the problem of violence further.

The more you make your hate manifest, the more they will shift to protecting themselves by all means, and the more you make terrorists out of them.

While hate crimes persist and being partial to giving deserved opportunities because of matters like race, tribe, or religion, the retaliations of this hatred by those who are hated should be reckoned with. Should they “act up” violent tendencies, blame it partly to yourself because you showed them violence first. In the Philippines, all of the religions approved by the state were permitted to practice their religious rites because of the universal values they emanate such as love, compassion, care, and kindness, among others.

Yes, this includes Islam. — Riz P. Sunio