An eye for an eye does not work

With the fifth anniversary of September 11 approaching, there are some things that we should remember: Terrorists are not afraid of you or me hating them.

They are not asking us to love them, either.

However, it is important that we remember agape, one of four Greek terms for love. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used the term agape like the early Christians had done in the past.

It seems clear to me God is truly a loving God who also demands justice, which can be seen in his faithfulness to the cause of Israel. This is what agape means.

Though the terrorists' acts were done by a certain radical element of Islam there were many like my hero Mohammad Ali who were deeply affected by these events and who I remember openly admitting on national TV that he would never advocate violence against his own country.

He also said that he did not believe these acts were justifiable.

I think of all that I have read on the topic of nonviolence and I am shocked that I am just now beginning to realize the obvious. Let us not feel that we are confronting a new enemy. King faced the deaths of four young people and because he loved the attackers he was able to resist the urge to be passive aggressive and was able to demand justice.

Then, as now, there exists in all populations of people individuals who hold their noses up at anyone that does not look, act, or think like them because they think they know something that makes them better than everyone else.

Even after several attacks, attacks on his own home, King still said that love was a value that was important enough for his own well being and that all he said he wanted was justice. This man lived through personal attacks and was a victim of the very same type of terror, on a smaller scale, that we were faced with today some five years ago.

We need not feel what would amount to a pathological sense of our wrongness. Rather, we should do as all the prophets and all the supposed great men of God have recommended: That we should love our neighbors.

If we do not do it for them, then let's do it for our own need to move passed the urge to do to them what they have wrongly done to us. That would only make things worse, because an eye for an eye does not work, and the only way to rid the world of hate is to love.

Set an example by being what they are not, and love them while you demand justice.