For years, Palestinian media and schools have been indoctrinating their children into a culture of death. Suicide bombers, whose goal is to kill as many innocents as possible, are praised in the media as martyrs.

But that just happens over there. Doesn't it?

Well, at a protest yesterday in San Diego there was evidence that the same sort of hate is being taught in the mosques and homes of Arabs here in the United States.

Thousands of miles from the bloodshed, one heard anger, disbelief and a teen-age girl saying that she, too, would blow herself up.

There is no other option, she said yesterday during an Arab-American and Muslim rally to protest the latest developments in the Middle East.

She is 14, a girl of Syrian and Jordanian roots. She wears braces. And she talks of willingly strapping on explosives.

"This is what desperate people do," she said.

The terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are cut from the same cloth of this young girl. Arab-Americans decry when they are stopped more often at airports and their luggage merits closer scrutiny. Why do they get this treatment? Because of statements like the one made by this girl. Can you trust her parents to be peaceful when they are teaching her a kind of hate so vicious and sickening that it has no equal.

There's no mention of this girl's nationality, only her heritage. So I think it is safe to assume that she is in fact an American citizen. I would love to know where this girl goes to school. If she attends a public school, I would be very concerned. While I have decried a lot of the zero-tolerance madness, this girl would worry me immensely. How bad does it have to get in the Middle East before this girl's hateful parents decide to give her her wish, and strap explosives to her body and send her to school?

I'm also troubled by the fact that we don't have this girl's name. Most newspapers, including the San Diego Union-Tribune use anonymous sources very rarely. While I appreciate the impact of the girl's statements, I don't see why she was granted anonymity.

I also fear that if the Muslim community continues to praise terrorism. If it continues to support suicide bombers. If it continues to teach its children hatred. It will soon find itself shunned from the majority of American society much like the Ku Klux Klan. This kind of vicious hatred only serves to marginalize the Muslim community.

Critics of airline security profiling liken the closer scrutiny given people of Middle-Eastern descent to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. While the comparison is insulting to what Japanese-Americans actually suffered. (Read "Farewell to Manzanar" for a taste of what it was like.) Unlike the American Muslims today, Japanese-Americans never asked the American public to understand what could have driven the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor.

All Americans need to be wary of the hatred in our midst. Unfortunately, I don't think it will be long before many Muslims are clumped in with the Ku Klux Klan and the Nation of Islam. Politicians can only proclaim Islam as a "religion of peace" for so long, when so many of its adherents practice hate, terror and praise suicide bombers.