On Saturday, The Free Press's Madeleine Rowley brought us the tale of five people who grew up in the Islamic world and were taught to hate from childhood.

Here are some selected quotes from these five brave people:

At my school in Tehran, in my new shapeless uniform, we read the Quran every morning and repeated sayings like, “Down with the USA, down with Israel.” To enter our classroom, we had to step on a painting of the Israeli flag on the ground. There are still universities in Iran that have painted American and Israeli flags on the ground, but most students walk around them.

Iran, of course, is the primary state sponsor of Islamic terrorism in the world. And this exporter of terror is developing nuclear weapons. Their actions have drawn little response from the Biden Administration, which encourages them to even greater efforts.

But it's not just Iran. The hate has spread as far as Canada.

At 19, I was forced to marry an al-Qaeda terrorist named Essam Marzouk. My mother and her husband were sympathizers of a group called the mujahideen, which, after 9/11, would be folded into al-Qaeda, and they knew that Essam was a terrorist. My mother said I needed a man who was strong enough to control me, so that’s who she chose.

He was 36 and acting as Osama bin Laden’s counterpart in Canada. I didn’t want to get pregnant, but in Islam, wives can’t refuse their husbands. I gave birth to my daughter at 20. 

A year later, I took my mother to the hospital, and an agent from CSIS, Canada’s version of the CIA, approached me and told me that I was married to a terrorist. I knew he terrorized me—he beat me mercilessly, and once he punched me so hard that he broke his wrist—but I didn’t know that he was an actual terrorist. 

It took a little bit of time, but eventually, I got out. I did it for my daughter’s sake; my mother and Essam planned to have her circumcised, an abhorrent practice known as female genital mutilation, or FGM.

But perhaps the most chilling tale of all comes from a young man who bought into the hate drilled into him, against not only Jews but against the country he was born in - the United Kingdom.

I was radicalized at age six. My parents practiced Wahhabism, which is a subset of the broader extremist Salafi movement. They taught me that Britain was the enemy, even though I was born in London. 

One day when I was 14, my father and I went to a Jewish home because my father was doing some business with them. The couple had a toddler who smiled at me and wanted to play. The parents told me it was okay to play with him, and as I was playing with the baby, I thought, “I hate them, but they don’t hate me. They trust me with their child.” That’s when I began to question the antisemitism that had been drilled into me for nearly a decade. Another time, I was sitting on the couch, and my father sat next to me and said that Allah punished Jews because they were an evil race of people. I remember thinking, “How is an entire race of people evil?”

This young man escaped, not through a religious conversion or adoption of some "milder" version of Islam, but through recognition of his cognitive dissonance; unfortunately, that's not something you can generally count on people doing.

These people - and read all five accounts, they are chilling - were all taught to hate, and all escaped that legacy of hate. But the common thread, the one thing that binds all of these stories together, is not "white supremacy" or "ultra-MAGA Republicans" or some nefarious secret agenda hidden in Melania Trump's underwear drawer. The common thread is radical, fundamentalist Islam. And, no, understanding this doesn't make one "Islamophobic." That's a canard. The suffix "-phobic" implies an unreasoning or irrational fear, and concern over Islamic terror is anything but irrational. It's rational, and part of the reason it's rational is because of the sheer randomness of terror attacks.

I don’t waste a lot of brain run-time worrying about it myself, as I doubt any fundamentalist Islamic terrorists are going to go poking around in the rural Alaska woods looking for trouble, and even if they did, they wouldn’t last long against a bunch of heavily armed Alaskans. But some folks worry more. And they have a reason. Too many of the Western nations have literally thrown the doors open to unchecked Third World immigration, and this is the result.

One of the few legitimate roles of government is to keep other people from hurting us or taking our stuff. Terrorists operate in those thin areas where the government, for one reason or another, is unwilling, unable, or simply unprepared to provide that protection. That, whether it be in Israel or Chicago, Toronto or London, is unsettling to lots of people, and no, that’s not an irrational viewpoint. Especially in these ever-more-uncertain times. Especially in the wake of Oct 7th and the sudden outpouring of antisemitism, even among the secular left. It all, of course, has a source.

Fundamentalist Islam is the problem. This is the elephant in the room. This is what caused October 7th. This is what caused 9/11. This is what caused the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. This is what caused the Achille Lauro hijacking and murders. This, the teaching of hate for Jews and, indeed, "infidels" of every stripe, has to stop. One way or another, this must end. This teaching of hate has to stop.

You can see more RedState reporting on antisemitism and hate in general at these links:

• Are Younger Americans Becoming More Antisemitic? New Poll Suggests the Answer's Yes
• The 'Ceasefire' Hypocrisy of the Left
• Southern Poverty Law Center Claims Opposing Progressive Gender Ideology is 'White Supremacy'
• SHOCK: Majority of Americans Aged 18-24 Think Israel 'Should Be Ended,' Given to Hamas and Palestinians