This story in today’s WaTi illustrates all too well why prejudice remains such a bad practice, why it’s never as simple as it might seem, and why it’s almost always a two-way street.

Certain airline passengers in Minnesota may have pre-judged a group of praying imams. In turn, the praying imams may have pre-judged the passengers. Meanwhile, racists often attempt to paint all Muslims with the same violent, anti-Democracy brush that defines only the extremists among them, only to be proven wrong (once again) when a group of Muslims offers to help defend non-Muslims against potential lawsuits filed by Muslims.

The world is indeed a quiltwork of individuals with multiple traits and conflicting allegiances. Shame on any one of us who attempts to over-simplify that quilt by predicting individual behavior on the basis of one allegiance vs. another. Have we learned nothing in the 60-plus years that have transpired since the U.S. imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in WW II?