Hate causes nothing but problems; it has never offered a solution any time, anywhere…

ISIS’ goal is to split the human family. To divide the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims from everyone else. Those in our societies who sow fear, suspicion and hatred of Muslims – the Rupert Murdochs and Donald Trumps – are the best allies the extremists who attacked Paris and Beirut could ask for. 

Muslims are almost one quarter of humanity, and 99% are as horrified by the ISIS attacks as the rest of us. They have been the greatest victims of ISIS, and have the greatest power to help defeat it. So let’s answer hate with humanity, and seize this chance for transformative change. For all of us – Muslims and Non-Muslims everywhere – to fiercely welcome each other into our one human family like never before.

Sign the global “Undivided” message,add your own, and share the page with everyone – if enough us join now, we can start a global wave of solidarity, and make the pain of these attacks the birth pangs of a more beautiful world. When we get to 500,000 signatures Avaaz will run ads in Muslim community papers and online, as well as key right wing papers that spread fear and division.

The real front line of this war is not just in the dusty towns of Syria and Iraq, but in the media and social media forumswhere the stories we tell ourselves compete. There is a fraternity of ignorance and hatred and it stretches across borders, in which extremists on all sides work together to drag the rest of us down into their backward world of spiralling brutality. 

Our governments will need to increase their vigilance in preventing attacks, and support military efforts to defeat ISIS. But our job as people, and our leaders’ jobs as moral leaders, is to ensure that love, the transformational antidote to ISIS’ hate, blooms between Muslims and everyone else everywhere. THAT would be ISIS’ worst nightmare – it might even give some of the angry young men they recruit cause to hesitate – a chance to see an alternative as inspiring to them as the backward brand of faith that ISIS markets. 

At the darkest times, our light as humanity can shine brightest. Human rights were not recognized until after the second world war. The world got it wrong after 9/11, when leaders like George Bush played into Al Qaeda’s hands by stoking Islamaphobia. This time, let’s be wiser, come together as Muslims and non-Muslims more closely than ever before, and brightly shine the light of the world we’re building. 

From a place of love, we might begin to listen to our brothers and sisters among Muslims that have lent ISIS some support. First and foremost those Sunnis from Syria and Iraq, who have been treated unjustly by Iraq’s government, and incredibly brutally oppressed by Syria’s dictator Al Assad. We might begin to understand that when we failed to offer their families protection and relief from the horrors they faced, ISIS offered that protection, and some accepted it. We might focus on learning from this, and offering them a better deal. 

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