“It’s time for some mature thinking. The Muslim month of Ramadan always ends with a joyous feast day called Eids al Fitr. The exact date varies due to the lunar calendar just the way the Christian Easter does. This year it’s on 9/11. Muslims are NOT CELEBRATING the Tower Attacks. Let’s be adults here and not listen to the wack jobs”
Always listen to your father, because you never know. About the only thing you can quibble with in that statement is the spelling of whack. I’ll spot my dad the h as everything else is spot on. I read this during a precious idol moment and thought yeah. He’s right. Right after that, I could hear George Carlin ranting about religion. One of the truisms that is pretty evident through history is that every religion has its own extremists and every religion has some blood on its hands.
Among the things that bother me is the way Islam is being painted in this fear-mongering climate in the land of where we are allegedly free to worship. When General Petraeus has to tell a Florida whack job to shut it with his Koran burning talk, that should tell you something about the level of thinking. Nobody is paying attention to the details. There is factions in the middle east/Afghanistan/Iraq who will burn American anything regardless of what we do. What do we do, we keep giving them stuff for their bulletin board, inspite of the fact we don’t want to seem overly burdened by facts or that we are for freedom of religion until somebody actually wants to exercise that freedom.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that kneeling, facing Mecca and praying are not for me. Heck, I might have issues with the kneeling at this age, but if that helps you, good for you and you entitled to have some peace with that. But think back to when Charleton Heston addressed the NRA convention as they held their convention in Denver shortly after the Columbine shootings. As Jon Stewart pointed out on the Daily Show, Moses was right. We shouldn’t be painting an entire people with one detail-challenged brush. It was wrong then and it is wrong now. There are religious holidays celebrated in the US that have nothing to do with any christian church calendar. That is okay from where I sit. If we are the land of the free, shouldn’t we mean it?
So, yeah, I’m honoring thy father. Mine reads, thinks Glenn Beck is tool and shuts off Keith Olbermann too. I promise next blog will be off this soapbox, but he indirectely encouraged me to get on this one. I think it is great people are talking about this issue, next trick is to get em to say something.
Oh yeah, one last thing, there has been a mosque three blocks from the World Trade Center site, since before there was a world trade center. That forty years of quiet worship must be unnerving, except nobody notices.
We all just folks.
Mike's Pub 