We need more sushi Muslims

I saw it in my inbox yesterday morning. It was a photo of a Muslim family from Iraq: A father, a mother and a sweet young girl. The father carried a sign reading, "I am Shia." The mother, in her traditional hijab (headscarf), carried another sign reading, "I am Sunni." The little girl, sitting between the two parents, presented the synthesis: Her sign read "I am Sushi."

Later, I learned that this photo had been altered. The girl's sign actually read, "We are Muslims," but somebody with fun and creative intentions replaced that digitally with "I am Sushi." I don't see a big problem in that, because the messages, "We are Muslims" and "I am sushi," have the same intention: Standing up against the bigoted and disastrous sectarian strife that is haunting the Muslim world and especially the Middle East.

The sects in question, of course, are Sunni and Shia. In both communities, there are fanatics who don't see the other side as "real Muslims." The Salafis, the hardcore end of the Sunni spectrum, often condemn the Shia as outright "apostates." (ISIL, at the hardcore end of the Salafi spectrum, kills any Shiites and Alevis it can find with religious fervor.) Meanwhile Shia hardliners identify Sunnis with "Yazeed," the psychopathic despot who tortured and killed Imam Hussain, the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, in the tragic Karbala incident in the late 7th century.

What has recently made this historical schism much worse is modern Middle Eastern politics. Salafi Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran are in a bitter power struggle, which escalated over the past week with the unacceptable execution of Shiite Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr in Saudi Arabia and the unacceptable storming of the Saudi Embassy in Tehran. Worse, the civil wars in Syria, which arose less from...