There's so much hateful garbage that gets through on this site. Plus sarcasm does not translate well to the written word. Mr/Mrs Anonymous, if you are indeed criticizing others for being ignorant, my apologies.

Umm, what is the name of this picture's meme?

It's untitled. If you look at your comment history you'll see it's listed as "Untitled Image"

No, I meant the bear image, cause that bear is kinda funny.

Ted Question

Islam doesn't kill people. Islamic Extremists kill people. Hate them instead.

For my part, I think I understood the gist of the message here, and was not implying that the poster was a hater of Islam. I merely wanted to point out that Islam is not some elemental entity taking form and slaughtering innocents - it is people, humans, who practice an extreme form of Islam, that are doing the killing. We must always remember that it is individuals, men and women, who perpetrate these crimes. Ideas are just ideas.

That being said, I think I can offer up an explanation for why the post might have been initially misinterpreted – it all comes down to language and the way things are phrased. The meme text states, “That awkward moment when you hate Islam so much, yet you don’t even have a copy of the Quran.” This first part of the statement is setting up a personal realization of sorts, in the mind of an individual who hates Islam: “That awkward moment when you hate Islam so much, yet…”. However, the second part, instead of completing that realization in the mind of the individual, feels like something accusatory coming from a second party, from the outside: “yet you don’t even have a copy of the Quran.” Alternately, it could be seen as two different personalities, within the same mind, with one chastising the other.

In any case, a much better and less ambiguous phrasing would have been “That awkward moment when you hate Islam, then realize you don’t even have a copy of the Quran.” Or, more to the point, “That awkward moment when you hate Islam, then realize you know nothing about it.” Even here, the “when you hate Islam” is a bit cumbersome. A further refinement might be “That awkward moment when, having been a hater of Islam, you suddenly realize you know nothing about it.” On the flip side of this coin, the meme could also have been phrased more as a rhetorical accusation, taking the form, “How can you hate Islam, when you’ve never even touched a Quran, must less read one?” (again, with the gist being “How can you hate Islam, when really you know nothing about it?”).

Anyway, I hope this helps!

The comment meme I posted above is, I think, along the lines of what the anonymous poster here was going for.

I'm hoping that was their intent. Maybe I jumped the gun, who knows unless the original poster jumps in. Like I said earlier, there's so much hate (often anti-Islamic) that gets through on this site, when combined with how most youngsters use that particular phrasing for self realization, I just immediately read it as intending hate.

I hear you and wouldn't worry. It's perfectly reasonable to assume/expect the worst when you see a post on this topic. And as you mentioned, certain things get lost when translated into text. A lot of non-word-related cues that help us determine meaning/intent get filtered out. And, as I tried to explain, the phrasing was kind of tricky to begin with. Finally, an anonymous post also puts a reader a little bit on guard, since anonymity feels inherently suspicious.