Dear Future President,

I am writing to you to discuss the topic of Islamophobia. Islamophobia is a huge problem for everyone in the United States. People are afraid of Muslims because of what the media shows on the news. They show Muslims as these terrible people who just want to watch the world burn.

The religion of Islam is the second largest religion on this earth with a population of about 1.3 billion people. If 1.3 billion people started killing everyone else, you and I would not even be alive right now. Just think about 9/11. 3,000 people died because 19 members of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda hijacked 4 planes and crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. What everyone needs to understand is that this is a handful of Muslims who did this terrible act and it wasn't the whole religion of Islam as a whole. It wasn't 1.3 billion people who conspired to destroy the twin towers. People didn’t even care about Muslims and right after the tragic incident, they began hating Muslims.

The American media is the most influential news source in the world. People all over the world watch the news and believe whatever they say without doing their own research. If CNN was to do a segment on terrorism, people will automatically think the terrorists are Muslim. This is not the case. As a Muslim in this country, I can confidently tell you that Islam is the most peaceful religion. Whenever the media talks about attacks by ISIS, they don’t realize that these people are known as extremists and we do not affiliate with them. Documentaries like "Suicide Killers" and "Terrorstorm" discuss the issues of terrorism as a worldwide problem. This means that people from all religions, not just Islam, are wreaking havoc and traumatizing the world. All Muslims want in this world is peace.

On the flip side of the coin, What the media doesn’t show is the most important thing. They don’t show all the Muslims in the Middle Eastern countries like Israel and Syria suffering from oppression from Jews. The world doesn’t see these people and the hardships they are facing because it’s not on the news. The situation in the Middle East is far more serious than you can imagine. Just how black people are getting murdered by the police for no reason, Muslims are getting murdered by the U.S and Israeli military for no reason. They say they are “eradicating the terrorists” by killing innocent men, women, and children.

All in all, I think that Islamophobia is a very important topic of discussion. The main reason for Islamophobia is that the world sees Muslims as these terrifying people who have no heart. Unfortunately, they don’t realize we are all basically the same. We have a lot in common. The same Earth. The same sky. The same air. Maybe if we started looking at what’s the same instead of what’s different, well, who knows?