In his Foreword to a collection of essays, The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of 1967: An Arab Perspective (published in 1967), Malcolm H. Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut observes, “The truly civilized man is marked by his empathy. By his recognition that the thought and understanding of men of other cultures may differ sharply from his own, that what seems natural to him may appear grotesque to others.”

In January of 1983, a Muslim Jihadist shot Kerr twice in the back of his head outside his university office.

Years later, one of his three sons, Steve, suggests, “Put yourself in someone else’s shoes and look at it from a different perspective. We live in the complex world of gray areas. Life is so much easier if it could be black and white, good and evil…It’s really so easy to demonize Muslims because of our anger over 9/11, but it’s obviously so much more complex than that. The vast majority if Muslims are peace-loving people, just like the vast majority of Christians and Buddhists and Jews and any other religion, People are people.”

Unfortunately, that is definitely not the perspective of the “Whac-a-delusion” leadership in the Oval Office.