It has been nine days since America’s consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was put to the torch and nine days since Ambassador Christopher Stevens died at the hands of militant sociopaths.
All across the Muslim world the demonstrations of anger that have targeted our embassies show no sign of abating.
Around the world, emotions are high, and here at home, the recent bomb threat on campus hasn’t helped put any minds at ease.
In the past nine days we have learned that Sam Bacile, the progenitor of that hateful film which first struck the match and ignited this whole debacle, is a fraud — and that members of his crew have been blacklisted as Coptic Christian radicals in Egypt for years.
We have also learned the attack which took the life of Ambassador Stevens was almost certainly the act of a well-armed and organized extremist group.
It was not a crowd of everyday Libyans, so galvanized by this stupid movie they felt murder justifiable and laid siege to our consulate on the 11th.
In fact, it was quite the opposite — a video taken by a bystander and posted to the BBC’s website tells another side of the story.
As our embassy burned, everyday Muslims, horrified by the attack, forced their way through the smoke and flame and carried a still breathing Stevens out of the building’s wreckage.
To the cries of “He lives! God is great, he lives!” the crowd of terrified civilians rushed Stevens to a Benghazi hospital, where doctors worked to save him for more than an hour.
Most importantly, we have learned our world is not as small as we would like to believe.
Despite the World Wide Web and our 24/7 access to smartphones and Facebook, people can still have widely different perceptions of one another’s values.
There is a real clash of civilizations under way. Americans don’t understand the Muslim world because they’ve been taught American values since they were young, and vice versa.
There is nothing wrong with that, especially when we recognize our differences and use those differences as the building blocks of genuine friendship — which can take an almost uncomfortable level of tolerance.
But decrying Muslim outrage as barbaric and uncivilized, however, is not all that different from a red-faced Salafi cleric prognosticating on the decadence of the West because American girls like to wear short shorts.
I decry short shorts as bad fashion, not bad religion, but again: Islam is not a monolith.
And America is not a monolith.
There are those among us who, although they do not understand the emotions which motivate the thousands of protestors, are ready and willing to understand that this travesty does not represent an entire faith or people.
And there are those among us, like the Louisiana Ku Klux Klan — which is holding a recruitment drive in Zachary as you read this — who find the world easier to handle when it’s black and white, albeit mostly white.
At its heart, narrow-minded hate is what allows hardline militant Muslims to dismiss us as nothing but blue-eyed devils.
And narrow-minded hate is also what allows LSU students to take pictures of their Muslim classmates during a bomb scare and post them to Twitter with captions like, “Guess who planted the bomb?”
We’re all guilty of hyper-sensitivity — or hyper-insensitivity — at times. And just as Muslims must understand that Sam Bacile’s hateful film does not represent the majority of Americans, neither does the hatred employed by radicals represent the Islamic world.
The only solution for this crisis is to not pass judgement and to leave the door for understanding open.
Nicholas Pierce is a 22-year old history senior from Baton Rouge.
