New campaign: Getting to know our Muslim neighbors

Mike Yeazell, a Cincinnati lawyer and lifelong Catholic, woke Tuesday morning to news that the Islamic State had claimed responsibility for an attack on a French church that left an elderly priest dead.

The act of terrorism would prove to be the latest challenge for a group to which Yeazell belongs, the Bridges of Faith Trialogue, reformed in January to combat anti-Muslim sentiment.

The attack on the church near the Normandy city of Rouen comes on the eve of the Trialogue's release of an educational publication designed to help promote interfaith dialogue and relationships with Greater Cincinnati's Muslim community.

"I look at it this way: where do we want to go as a civilization?" said Yeazell, a 1997 St. Xavier High School graduate who grew up in Monfort Heights. "I am reminded of the Robert Frost poem `Fire and Ice.' We can go up in flames, or we can choose the cold – isolation and fear. Either way is good enough to destroy all that we've created."

The Trialogue is a group of several dozen people from the Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities that traces to previous human relations work done by the organization Bridges for a Just Community. It was known previously as the National Conference for Community and Justice and the National Conference of Christians and Jews under the leadership of Robert "Chip" Harrod.

The new pamphlet is titled "Getting to Know Our Muslim Neighbor: Islamophobia – not in our community." It will be distributed in hard copies beginning later this week at several locations, including the Clifton Mosque and the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati in West Chester Township. The four-page booklet also will be available on the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center website. Trialogue members plan a region-wide campaign known as "Getting to Know Our Muslim Neighbor."

"In the process of promoting interfaith understanding, the campaign will attempt to dispel the negative stereotypes of Muslims and counter the unjust scapegoating of all members of this esteemed world religion based on the terrorist actions of political extremists," Harrod said.

The Cincinnati region's Muslim population is estimated at 25,000.

"While their numbers are relatively small, their civic contributions are large," Harrod said. "Local Muslims are extremely active in and contributing leadership to nearly every major civic enterprise in Cincinnati and its immediate area. The public needs to be reminded of this, and that's our aim."

Trialogue members say the campaign has an urgency to it because of the language and images presented by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his supporters.

In an appearance Sunday on NBC, Trump reiterated his plan to ban immigration of Muslims to the United States, calling for "an expansion" to include "any nation that has been compromised by terrorism."

Some Americans are suspicious of Islam because they say they fear that some Muslims want to kill them. They say they associate the religion and some of its followers with terrorism.

The Trialogue pamphlet addresses terrorism under the heading, "How to respond to untruths."

"Muslims worldwide profoundly reject the hate-filled doctrine espoused by ISIS," it reads. "It is no fairer to say that Islam is to be blamed for ISIS than it is to say that Christianity is to be blamed for the KKK."

Some elements of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi organizations are part of the "Christian Identity" movement that promotes racism. The Klan is a group made up entirely of white supremacists who believe in the inferiority of non-Caucasians and that the United States is the exclusive home to white Christians.

The Trialogue pamphlet says the root of fear is the unknown and that "fearing the unfamiliar reveals more about the fearful than the feared."

Mary-Bob and Jack Rubenstein, who live in Amberley Village, are Jewish members of the Trialogue.

"There is so much phobia now, of all kinds, so much suspicion of Muslim people," said Mary-Bob Rubenstein, 70, who had several members of her extended family from The Netherlands killed by the Nazis in the Sobibor death camp. "What is being said today, the permission and license people have to espouse what they might have kept to themselves, is frightening."

She and her husband, a longtime Cincinnati lawyer, said they know too many people of goodwill – friends – who are Muslim to remain quiet.

"So much of what is going on seems to be coming from a place of ignorance, of not knowing a Muslim," said Jack Rubenstein, 74. "We would like some of our friends who are suspicious of Muslims to meet. They might see what have experienced, all of the things we have in common. We talk about our children. We talk about the community and how we care about it."

To that end, the Rubensteins are planning a dinner part for several couples of various backgrounds: Jews, Muslims, Christians.

The Trialogue pamphlet encourages outreach to increase familiarity and includes a resource page. It lists eight contacts that will provide entry into the Muslim community, ranging from mosques to human relations groups such as the Edward B. Brueggeman Center at Xavier University.