MANCHESTER, Tennessee – Last week, within shouting distance of the peace-love-music temporary village that will be Bonnaroo June 13-16, people packed a meeting room to cheer when a photograph of the firebombed Columbia, Tenn., mosque was shown.

That’s probably not what they planned to do, but the ecstasy of merging with a room of people filled with the unholy ghost of righteous indignation can feel pretty good.

Numerous news reports – from Chattanooga's Time Free Press to USA Today to NPR's "All Things Considered" – and also from some personal accounts I've received confirm that most of the people in that room in Manchester, about 80 miles north of Huntsville, did not resist the temptation.

The meeting on June 4, 2013, was prompted because last month one of the Coffee County commissioners, Barry West, had posted on his Facebook page a photo of a cowboy-hatted white man sighting down a gun barrel pointed straight at the viewer. The picture was captioned, “How to wink at a N****r.”

No, wait. That would have been 60 years ago.

This one was captioned, “How to wink at a Muslim.”

For any other Southern official who doesn’t already know this, let me also spell out public relations for your town: People always believe most readily whatever they hear about a region or a group that coincides with the prejudice they already have formed.

That’s why stories about anything race-conflicted or murderous or ignorant that any one of us does here in the South will spread like a grass fire across the click-seeking social media that masquerade as most news organizations in our nation today. Something high-tech or progressive or loving in the South? Not so much.

So, Commissioner West: You have just cost industrial and business recruiting for your county 30 years’ worth of good press. Shame on you. And shame on the other people who blindly obeyed the islamophobic engineers from around the country who rushed to Manchester to cheerlead the madding throng.

What’s terribly sad, too, is that this story about the Manchester melee, I guarantee, has already spread around the world along the same trigger lines that feed those Muslims who believe all Christians are out to get them. Stories of the interfaith work that happens in Middle Tennessee and in Huntsville? Not so much.

And all this from a meeting where federal agents were attempting to merely explain the difference between “hateful” speech, which is, in fact protected under First Amendment rights, and “violence-producing speech,” which is not.

Where was Manchester’s Atticus Finch to sit down on that stage and gently call his neighbors back to the friendliness that I know happens among most of the people of Manchester most of the time? And where were the other heroes of Coffee County?

There were some in that room who did dare to stand up.

There was the soft-spoken Muslim woman who braved the cries of “Watch out! She might blow up!” as she attempted to tell people what it’s like to be a Muslim in Middle Tennessee. There were the federal officers trying to explain to the people that they are on their side – if that side is the one of law and order that protects all people, no matter where they worship.

There were others in that room who kept their integrity, but most of them did not know what to do to stop the ugly -- although afterwards several personally apologized to the officers and to the Muslim speakers they could reach.

“I came here because I wanted to learn something, but I couldn’t hear because the audience was so disrespectful,” Elaine Smith, 55, of nearby Bedford County, told The Tennessean’s reporter Nicole Young. “I cried when I got here. It makes me really sad especially because these people say they’re Christians. The God I worship doesn’t teach hate.”

As it happens, the God that the great majority of Muslims worship (which, since there is only one God, is the same as the Christian God) does not teach hate, either.

But, from all descriptions, had that crowd been within reach of the stones the wilderness-wandering Israelites had had at hand, I believe they, too, would have heard “God” telling them to pick up the rocks and pelt away.

When you’re more in love with your ideology than with your neighbor, you can trust that ideology is not from God, someone wise told me once.

“Love your neighbor” means weeping, not cheering at the sight of a firebombed prayer hall. “Love your neighbor” means radiating God’s love so that the neighbor wants to know about your faith, not forcing them to dodge your spittle.

And, even more crucially, “Loving God with all your heart,” means understanding that no religion is all wrong and none – not even your own – is completely, infallibly, omnisciently right.

Below is a recent interview with Daoud Abudiab, a leader in the Columbia, Tenn., mosque that was firebombed by white supremacist Christian hoodlums in 2008. His statement encapsulates the extremes of acceptance and hatred that Muslims are living with these days --