Christ's message

For World Cultures V, I am in the Middle East section and we were talking today about the conflicts between the Middle East and the West and the so called “Clash of Cultures.”
We brought up the Koran burning and how the American government (Obama, Petraeus, etc), personally requested for Terry Jones to not burn the Korans as he planned. They knew that if Terry Jones burned Korans then the tenuous relationship between the Middle East and the West would be harmed even further. And so it was, as another man (not Terry Jones), did burn Korans and took a video of it and put it online. That video is currently circulating the Middle Eastern countries via the incredible World Wide Web, and the Iran government has even made a statement that the American government was behind the burnings, inflaming anti-American thought in its people.
In the West, we like to consider ourselves the intelligent, tolerant people of the world—and we tend to see the people in the Middle East as ignorant, immoral and/or evil people whom we need to save from themselves. At the same time, the people in the Middle East tend to see Americans (Westerners in general), as immoral, ignorant and/or evil…
While the elites and the educated class of each culture may understand that really these are just misunderstandings about different cultures and different ways of life—the vast majority of people on both sides don’t understand each other and don’t understand that they don’t understand each other—they just judge each other.
Tatum said he wrote an editorial in the Trib about this very issue, and how we as Christians have been called to love (not judge) everyone in the world—especially our enemies. And while this made sense to me, and most Christians I think would agree we have this responsibility and this is what Christ would do, Tatum said the vast majority of the comments on his editorial were negative. In fact, he said all of them disagreed with his major premise (That Christians should love their Muslim neighbors), but they did not present a very arguments about why the shouldn’t. People said things like “Well they Muslims don’t love us” or “Love is a two-way street.”
But I think we are missing Christ’s fundamental message, because that is not what he said. Christ told us to LOVE our ENEMIES. And we are fine with that as long as “our enemies” remains a faceless, nameless entity. As soon as you put a name, a face, or even a group of people as the enemy, the situation changes. The great American ethics are all of a sudden gone and is replaced by a common human emotion—anger and hate. Which leaves Christianity in quite the predicament, because no we aren’t a people set apart. We aren’t the chosen people. We aren’t the city set on a hill that can’t be hid, or the salt of the Earth.
We have become just like every other person on the face of the planet—as ignorant and evil as we claim everyone else is.
I hope we get the message someday. We’ve only had 2,000 years to get it right.