Re: Requesting support for a community-wide open le

hey br na'eem!  was that YOU on the radio yesterday afternoon??

i was driving - which is altogether unusual in midafternoon - and heard
your name!  and your voice!  on free speech radio from my school's
station...  and i almost forgot to go when the light turned green!
hehehe....


hmmmm.... you know, i was thinking... that, though it is often possible
to recognize arabic or indian/pakistani type names or spellings of names
as muslim or christian or whatever, there is no way i would know that
your name is that of a muslim.  i guess i am feeling that it would be
far better for us - americans i mean mostly, but not only - to realize
muslims are everywhere, not just "over there" somewhere, or clustered in
scary isolated communities which shut out non-muslims and hold enmity
towards any who are not "talibanized".  i think if we heard "brother" or
"sister" so-and-so when we heard people's names, it could do a lot to
raise awareness that muslims are everywhere (eeeeek!  they're among us!
eeeek! :p ) and that there's nothing alien about muslims themselves or
about islam....  and it might even do a little to chip away at the
barrier between fundamentalist christians and muslims, since both use
this term to indicate respect and inclusion - and, as it's intended to
mean, unity.


as for the "anti-war" people who don't include palestine in their
agenda:  well, then they're just not anti-war, so they'll just have to
be re-categorized.  ;)  they can participate as "other".  or
"anti-wars-we-don't-like".  there are a lot of people who feel that way
anyway.... that some war is right and some is wrong.

i might even be one of them, but only as a last resort - what i am
really is anti-laziness << the source of all war.  (the secret is out!
:p )  war results from lack of serious effort to work things out, which
is a form of laziness.  yup, pride/arrogance might appear to be the
cause, but in the end there is always a choice to not seek another
solution to whatever the underlying problem is - often one of supply, or
fear of lack of supply, or a desire to keep one's ego from being
punctured, i.e., one's failings to be revealed.  << but these are just
the rationalizations behind the lack of effort...


charmi