I’m extremely disappointed in the letter “Real Muslims won’t really assimilate?” being published by my hometown newspaper. My family still resides in Montana and has lived in Montana for generations.

News needs to be factual and unbiased in presenting stories to safeguard the credibility of the reporters and the publication. By allowing obviously bigoted letters such as those by Mr. Knutson, it demonstrates a lack of judgment by the newspaper.

It also offends me on a personal level. I have just retired from the Air Force after serving 20 years to the preservation of our nation’s values, way of life, and prosperity. I continue to serve the U.S. still as a civilian working for the Air Force. I also happen to be a Muslim and can speak with intelligence and insight on Islam and what it is to be Muslim, something Mr. Knutson cannot. I can also speak from experience on what countries are like that are predominantly Muslim, as I’ve been deployed to and visited numerous throughout my time in the military.

What I can say about Muslims, as well as any ethnicity from any location I’ve ever been to, is that ultimately we are all humans with the same needs and wants. We all want to raise our children to be happy, healthy, and successful. We want to love our family, we want to be in the company of good friends and enjoy life as every human being on our planet.

People feeling the need to marginalize, ostracize, and/or demean other people for the sake of being different in manner eats away at humanity’s collective soul. We are all far more alike than we are different, and anyone that cannot see this self-evident truth is seeing the world through a jaded lens.

I would like to assume that they are just scared, because fear can be reassured through knowledge. However, there are those who are just mentally unequipped to understand life beyond concrete concepts, and those are the ones that generally spout the hateful rhetoric such as that professed by Mr. Knutson.

I implore you to be more discerning in the future and prevent access to your public platform by those with similar messages of hate that only serves to debase others through hatred and bigotry.

—Jonathan D. Jones, San Antonio (Jones is a Flathead High School graduate, 1992, and was deployed to Iraq twice and to Oman. He retired as master sergeant.)

(EDITOR’S NOTE: We agree that news reporting has to be “factual and unbiased,” but Mr. Knutson’s letter was opinion, not news, and thus by definition could not be unbiased. The Inter Lake allows our readers to voice their concerns about matters of general interest, including immigration.)