How not to hate is a powerful message.
One that's far more powerful than the stoking of fear so rampant in political soundbites and videos right now.
That's why a video made last week by the widower of a young mother killed in the Paris attacks has gone viral and been picked up by major news organizations all over the world.
Antoine Leiris, in a note he first shared publicly on Facebook, defiantly told terrorists from the Islamic State, "You will not have my hatred." Nor, he said, would terrorists have his fear or change the way he'll raise his 17-month-old son.
"I don't know who you are and I don't want to know, you're dead souls," he wrote in French. "If this God for which you kill indiscriminately made us in his own image, every bullet in the body of my wife will have been a wound in his heart."
Leiris also conceded that the terrorists briefly succeeded because he is "devastated with grief," but he added that they would not achieve their ultimate mission to make him live a life of fear and hate. Giving in to that, he wrote, "would be giving in to the same ignorance that made you what you are."
The Facebook post has since been made private, but in its place, Leiris made the video that has a voice-over in English.
"I know that she will join us everyday. And that we will find each other again in the paradise of free souls, which you will never have access to. We are only two, my son and I, but we are more powerful than all the world's armies. In any case, I have no more time to waste on you. [my son] is waking up from his afternoon nap You don't have his hatred either."
It's a warm breeze of inspiration in the cold gloom of hate-talk and fear-mongering.
Meanwhile, on the refugee front
None of the Isis-linked suspects who have ever been charged in the United States came from Syria and the overwhelming majority were born in the United States, according to figures published this week by Center on National Security at Fordham University and reported by The Guardian.
As politicians rush to curb or ban Syrian refugees from states and even the country, research shows that 55 of 68 people indicted over alleged ISIS ties were born right here in America. None, zero, came from Syria. Three had been refugees or asylum seekers.
Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security, has tallied and analyzed these cases dating back to March 2014 when Isis made massive territorial gains in Iraq.
"They are young, they are spread over a wide geography, they are impervious to profiling in many ways," she told The Guardian.
She said the current political rush to suspend America's asylum program is "misguided" because the overwhelming majority of refugees are grateful for the way they are treated. "We've spent 14 years and almost a trillion dollars on our security industry. We're pretty good at vetting them, despite what Marco Rubio says."
Of the 68 indicted, Greenberg found that 18 have been convicted, receiving an average sentence of 10 years and three months.
What about hate crimes?
There is good news, and bad:
According to FBI statistics released last week, reported hate crimes were down nationally in 2014 - except against Muslims.
Anti-Muslim hate crimes in America rose about 14 percent over the prior year, according to an analysis of the FBI numbers by the Southern Poverty Law Center. And, given the barbaric Islamic State attacks in Paris last week and elsewhere recently, that trend seems destined to accelerate, according to SPLC Senior Fellow Mark Potok.
The actual totals of anti-Muslim hate crimes - from 135 in 2013 to 154 in 2014 - were not dramatic for a country of close to 320 million people, Potok writes. But Bureau of Justice Statistics studies also has found the FBI tallies of all "reported" hate crimes has been a drastic undercount compared to people who say they've been victims of hate crimes that went unreported. A comparison of the two studies indicate there are "between about 6,000 and about 11,500 total hate crimes in America each year. That would put the real annual totals in recent years at nearly 260,000 instead of fewer than 200.
Potock says it also means the real 2014 total of anti-Muslim hate crimes could be as many as 6,000 or more.
The "reported" numbers of anti-Muslim hate crimes have been rising slowly but steadily since 2012. In that period, ISIS beheadings and other atrocities have pushed radical Islam into the news in a way that almost certainly has fueled anti-Muslim hatred. In 2015, we also had the Charlie Hebdo and other attacks, including one here in Chattanooga, along with the most recent ISIS-connected slaughter in Paris.
We must - with peace - combat this vicious cycle of hate begets hate.