Hello, my name is Sara Petersen, and I am not a terrorist.

I think a lot of people would easily believe me on this statement; I’m a 19-year-old female of German descent with red hair and freckles, and I lived in small-town Northwest Ohio all of my life before I started going to Kent State.

I also believe that Paul Murdoch is not a terrorist. In case you haven’t heard, Murdoch is an architect who designed the projected memorial for the heroes of Flight 93 near the crash site in Pennsylvania. He attended the University of Virginia and UCLA and is part of an architectural firm based out of California.

Murdoch has been accused of disguising the Flight 93 memorial as a mosque, memorializing the 19 hijackers of Sept. 11. Alec Rawls has written a book titled “Crescent of Betrayal” and has stated many “truths” about the proposed design of the memorial.

When praying, Muslims must always face Mecca. Rawls claims the crescent shape of the memorial points to the holy city of the Islamic religion. I find this utterly absurd. Murdoch’s design was selected out of more than 1,000 other designs. Obviously the judges didn’t think his memorial was intended for the hijackers.

A fellow classmate of mine and I were discussing the controversy of the memorial, and she pointed out the earth is a sphere and a lot of things point to Mecca. I found this information very interesting. I discovered that if I am in any way, shape or form heading in the eastward direction, I am facing Mecca. I have also found that if I am in any general direction facing west, I am also facing Mecca.

I guess if I just so happen to be saying a prayer to God while facing east or west, I must be a Muslim because I am facing Mecca, and therefore I am a terrorist.

During Rudy Giuliani’s speech at the GOP convention, he talked about the war in Iraq, a very natural and predictable thing to do. However, Giuliani called the terrorists in the Middle East “Islamic terrorists.” This infuriated me. Since when did it become a fact that if a person is a terrorist, then he or she is a Muslim or vice versa?

I’m not going to insult anyone’s intelligence by assuming no one knows who or what the Ku Klux Klan is and what they did, so I won’t elaborate on them too much. The big thing about the members of the KKK, though, is that they were trying to preserve America because “God” was telling them to do it. The KKK members were most definitely Protestant Christians and truly believed God entrusted them to rid America of blacks, Catholics and many other groups of people.

I think of al-Qaida as a group similar to the KKK. Al-Qaida is a group of radicals who think Allah told them to destroy everything unholy, which just so happens to be America. There’s no denying that the members of al-Qaida are Muslims, but that shouldn’t mean anything. Unfortunately, it means everything.

Sadly, some people see Islam as a heathen religion with an extremely angry god who hates Christians. In reality, the Quran states people must study the Torah and the Gospels to fully comprehend the Quran. The Islamic religion is also very respectful to the Christian religion; it regards Jesus very highly as a prophet, and his lessons are taught to Muslims.

The fear of the Islamic religion is stupid. It truly is a peaceful religion, and it shouldn’t be discriminated against. If Christians still aren’t satisfied, didn’t Jesus once preach about loving your enemies?

Sara Petersen is a junior public relations major and a columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. If you are also not a terrorist, contact her at [email protected].