A Kind Response To A Call To Boycott the Eid Stamp

My mother forwarded an e-mail to me the other day. She was concerned that a relative of ours was being misinformed about Islam. The forwarded e-mail suggested to the reader that they Boycott the Eid Stamp. My mother requested that I and another friend of mine that she knows, send a response to her regarding the e-mail. What follows is the original e-mail, the request of my mother, two respones, and the follow-up from my mother and our relative. I thought I would share it with everyone to hopefully help pass on some lesson.

How ironic is this??!! They don’t even believe in Christ and they’re getting their own Christmas stamp, but don’t dream of posting the ten commandments on federal property?

USPS New Stamp
This one is impossible to believe.. Scroll down for the text. If there is only one thing you forward today.....let it be this!

REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of PanAm Flight 103!
REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993!
REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon!
REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the military barracks in Saudi Arabia!
REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the American Embassies in Africa!
REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the USS COLE!
REMEMBER the MUSLIM attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001!
REMEMBER all the AMERICAN lives that were lost in those vicious MUSLIM attacks!

Now the United States Postal Service REMEMBERS and HONORS the EID MUSLIM holiday season with a commemorative first class holiday postage stamp.
REMEMBER to adamantly and vocally BOYCOTT this stamp when purchasing your stamps at the post office. To use this stamp would be a slap in the face to all those AMERICANS who died at the hands of those whom this stamp honors.
REMEMBER to pass this along to every patriotic AMERICAN you know.

Hi Talib, Hi Ronald,

I want to thank both of you for taking the time to send your responses to me regarding the USPS Stamp email that my cousin sent to me. Below is the message I sent to her last night and following my response to her is an email I just received back from her. I thought it was great and I am well pleased that we made a difference even with one person. But that is a start. As the song says, “Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me”. Do breeze thru the rest of this email so that you will see exactly what I sent to her.

Once again, thanks a bunch!!

Carmella and Your Mama

Hi Rose,

I am writing to you in response to the Boycotting of the new USPS Stamp email that you sent to me. I know you probably do not realize it, but my eldest son is a Muslim. Don’t worry, I am not offended and neither is my son or my other Muslim friends. What we would like to do is to educate and inform people that is why I am responding to you with responses that I have received from my son and from a very good friend of mine.

My son and my friend are both United States Citizens who have served their country in the Armed Services and continue to serve their country in their current job positions. They are out there protecting you and me against the real enemies, those crazy terrorists and anyone else who would like to inflict harm upon the United States and its citizens. These guys put God and country first. What differentiates them from you and me is the fact that they have now chosen another religion to follow. I raised my son Catholic. He attended Catholichigh school and was an outstanding student and person.But like a lot of Catholic’s and former Catholic’s he had a lot of questions about his religion that no one seemed to want to address.Something that I can attest to myself. And I do not say that to defend my son. I was raised Catholic too. There is good and bad in all things. I have been on a search myself for quite sometime now in my quest to know more about God and to bring myself closer toHim. I have met many former Catholic’s that have left the church for one reason or anotherand have become a part of another religion and they continue to love God. That is their choice and their right. That’s what makes this country so great and so unique. Our Freedom to love and to love one another no matter what our color, creed, nationality or religion.

Anyway, I do not want to sound preachy or get carried away here. What I do hope is that you will read what my friend has written back to me when I asked him for his response to the email that you sent to me and that you will also read the responsemy son has sent to me. Hopefully this can be the start of spreading the love that Jesus Christ Himself taught and commanded us to do. The world has enough hate in it already. Like the song says, What The World Needs Now, Is Love ~~ I am not asking anyone to accept what others believe or how they worship. What I do believe is that everyone has the right to be free to believe and worship however they want providing of course that is does not promote hate or harm to anyone else. God is the Ultimate Judge.

Below is the response from my friend. I know it is a bit long, but it is well worth the read. After his response, my son’s response follows. I willmark where his response starts.Please feel free to respond back to me or to my son should you have any questions or comments. We will be happy to answer any and all inquiries. Should you want to respond to my friend’s response, please let me know that also and I will send you his email address.

I thank you for your time Rose. Take care ~~

Carmella

________________________________________________________________________________

This is the response I received today from Rose

Dear Carmella,

At this moment there are many emotions I feel over the E-mail I sent to you. You and your son’s response was so sensitive. I am very grateful for your effort to educate people to the truth. I regret sending the E-mail. I want to read over again and will write again. There is a lot of information to digest. And to be truthful a lot I did not know. By doing what I did continues to perpetuate bigotry. I don’t want to do that. I want to be a source of correct iinformation. Not hatred

Sincerely Rose

The following is from Talib

Aug 16, 2003
By James Brooks, writer and former business owner, resides in Worcester, Vermont. Currently, Brooks serves as webmaster for www.vtjp.org.,

America’s long festering animus toward Arabs and Islam has finally arrived. From black tie affairs to your local barbecue, you can see it in the U.. S.A. You can hear it, too, whispering in the White House and booming from Capitol Hill. Language that would get people fired if applied to blacks or Jews now passes without comment when used against Arabs and Muslims. It can be found somewhere, every day, in almost every newspaper and TV news show in the land. We tend to view this disturbing trend as the result of two, or twenty, or fifty years of politics and events. But we are children of a history we do not know. The roots of our “new” bigotry stretch through our racist American past to a thousand-year old blind spot, one big enough to drive half the world through. It’s time to learn where we came from.

It’s true that our reaction to September 11, twisted and amplified through the gov-media input stream, opened a dark door in the American heart. Softened up by decades of neoconservative, fundamentalist, pro-Israeli and Hollywood propaganda, we were easy marks for politicians brewing a spirit of national retribution.

But we had already shown our stripes, long before the bigotry got organized enough to establish its own think tanks. From our demonization of Nasser and the PLO to the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, when Iranian-American citizens instantly became “sand niggers” and victims of mobs and hate crimes from coast to coast, we had revealed a wide seam of hatred for Arabs and Islam in the bedrock of our national character.

Today, after years of diligent polishing by powerful friends, this obdurate stone of intolerance is passed off as a sparkling gem, a dynamic, no-nonsense political point of view enjoying the highest official approbation. Bush foreign policy and the continuing round up and incarceration of Arab citizens and immigrants make the identity of the enemy crystal clear.

We have returned to our former habit of publicly attacking races, cultures and religions as a matter of national politics. American racists once again have a “legitimate” language to express their hatred. No longer must the dirty business be kept behind the curtain, when the nation is willing to watch, mute and compliant. Instead, we hide the enemy, especially if she is dead. It seems to be easier to accept what’s going on, if she has no humanity, if the dead and dismembered civilians can’t be seen, if their race and religion are inferior, if “they will have to change anyway, one way or another”, as Tom Friedman might put it. We slip into it so easily, it’s as if we’ve been doing it for a thousand years.

Have you ever stood so close to a Monet that the image dissolves into a sea of swimming color? Step back a pace, and the background begins to resolve. Back another pace, and the foreground jumps out with a sudden force. If we take a few steps back into the deep history of our problem with Islam, we may see the background for what it is. And that may help us to resolve the turbulent foreground of our picture.

For example, what is the background to the new bigots’ favorite claim, that Islam is a “uniquely violent religion”? The scriptural perspective is simply embarrassing. Both the Old Testament and the Torah chronicle God’s recurring commands to the Hebrews to wipe out everyone in sight, so copiously that the Qur’an looks downright tame by comparison. Christian and Jewish fundamentalists defy their own scriptures when they defame Islam as a violent religion.

Empirically, since the beginning of Islam fourteen centuries ago, the Europeans have been far more bloodthirsty, perhaps by a power of ten or more, than the followers of Mohammed. (“Christendom” casts a wider net than my argument intends, so I will use the term “Europeans”, i.e. people of European stock and heritage, wherever they may be.) Not only did Europeans leapfrog the Muslim world in developing sheer killing power, they have also been at each other’s throats in large conflicts far more frequently than have Arab Muslims in their own sphere. And of course Europeans nearly invented large scale genocide and colonization of foreign lands as a state-commercial enterprise. What do Muslims have in their history that even begins to compare with the seizure, annihilation, and occupation of an entire hemisphere?

And what, to cite just one example, do Europeans have to compare with the Moorish occupation of Spain? Instead of sowing lasting bloodshed and dispossession, Islamic Spain allowed Muslims, Christians and Jews to live together in fairly peaceful co-existence for 800 years, as they co-developed the beautiful Spanish language and culture. You could take a lot of Spanish in a lot of American schools without learning much of anything about this rich and instructive heritage.

In a recent article in the New Statesman, Ziauddin Sardar gets to the heart of the matter when he writes that “the west’s hatred of Islam stems from, more than anything else, the denial of its true lineage. The western world as we understand it is a child of Islam. Without Islam, the west - however we conceive it today - would not exist. And, without the west, Islam is incomplete and cannot survive the future.”

If you’re having trouble with “the western world...is a child of Islam”, welcome to your blind spot. Happily, it’s not about theology, but to clear it up we’ll have to go back thirteen hundred years, to the first contacts between Islam and Christian Europe. You may experience some embarrassment along the way, especially when you realize that it’s a natural and important part of the history that Arabs and Muslims learn today.

In the year 700, Islam and the Arabic language were on the move. Soon their influence would stretch from India to Spain. Europe was entering its Dark Ages, nursing its dwindling links to a dead Roman culture. Arabic scholarship, science and invention surpassed Europe in every way. Arabic scholars would soon include Greeks, Persians, Indians, Africans, Christians, Jews and more. Arabic would become as essential as English is today. Europe would cling to Latin, already a dying language.

Four hundred years later, Europe began to catch on. Translating more Arabic texts in Latin, we began to learn. Not only did we imbibe the fundamentals of our math, science and technology in Arabic, we learned the very roots of our culture and democracy at the feet of our Islamic neighbors. At a time when very few in Europe could even read Greek, the Arabs were already rescuing the genius of ancient Greece from oblivion. They translated Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, the whole Pantheon of Greek learning and art into Arabic, and brought it back to life in Islamic culture.

We learned “our” Greek heritage by translating the Arabic translations into Latin. For centuries, the fundamental texts of budding European scholarship were based on Arabic translations, and Europe’s scholarship continued to be informed by its more learned Arabic contemporaries. Europeans even copied principles of Islamic scholarship and academic organization in building their own nascent academies. But soon we were spinning the myth that we’d got it all directly from “our” Greek ancestors. Which may have made it easier to launch the Crusades, to begin murdering our teachers.

The injection of ancient Greek learning and art into Church-bound Europe is generally held to be the engine of the Renaissance, and the beginning of our humanist traditions. The fact that we learned it all from our Islamic intellectual superiors has been blotted out of Western history for a thousand years. The language of algebra and the concept of zero were also vital to the growth of Europe. By the year 800, Arabic mathematicians had learned these tools and the place-valued decimal system from the scholars of India. Four hundred years later, Fibonacci wrote his groundbreaking Liber abaci to introduce modern (Arabic) numerals and the Hindu-Arabic decimal system to a Europe still muddling with Roman numerals.

The word ‘algebra’ is Arabic, from the book “Hisab al-jabr w’al muqabala”, written around 830 by the renowned astronomer and mathematician Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khowarizmi. When translated into Latin, it caused a sensation in Europe - 310 years later. Where would Newton have been, without the Arabs? On what would he and Leibniz have based the calculus? Whither Maxwell and Einstein, without Islam? How can we receive such gifts and perpetually rebuke the giver?

There are many other examples, including the Arabic roots of European music and musical instruments, and the rich Islamic/Arabic influence spanning the people and cultures of southern and eastern Europe, to name but two. We have a lot of history to recover. Who would we be, without this cornucopia of gifts?

Even the engines of our world dominance are built with intellectual handtools forged in the Muslim mind. If we are not the child of Islam, we are at best its kid brother. The one that likes to blow up frogs with firecrackers.

Being a kid brother myself, I know the signs, when it’s time to grow up and show your big brother some love and respect. A time to reconcile the past, and talk man to man. You find out he’s not such a bad guy after all. And he sure knows a lot.

The following is what I wrote to my son and his response back to me after receiving the USPS Stamp email.

Hi Ronald,

Like the bottom line says, I am forwarding this to one Fantastic Patriotic
American. Your response please. Thank You.

Love,
Mom

Dear Mom,

There are few things to address in the e-mail you sent me that I have included below:

1. The idea that Muslims Celebrate Christmas or that we have a Christmas;
2. That perhaps somehow, Muslims are against the posting of The Ten Commandments on Federal Property;
3. The Muslims are the enemy of the United States;
4. That boycotting a stamp will somehow be a slap in the face of every Patriotic America;
5. That every Patriotic American is something other than a Muslim.

1. Eid means holiday. Eid Mubarak Means Happy Holiday. The Eid Stamp says in Arabic, Happy Holiday. It is a universal greeting. One that is used by Arabic Speaking Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other faiths in areas where Arabic is the pre-dominant language. It is also true, that Arabic is the Universal language that Muslims use since it is the language of the Quran. However, only 15% of the Muslims in the world are Arab and perhaps only a small percentage of the non-Arabs understand Arabic fluently. Most non-Arabic speaking Muslims understand a small set of Arabic words, much like many Americans understand some Spanish, French, or even Latin.

Muslims celebrate two religious Holidays. The first is called Eid ul-Fitr or The Festival of the Fast Breaking. The second is called Eid ul-Adha or The Festival of the Sacrifice.

Eid ul-Fitr is celebrated at the end of the lunar month, Ramadhan. Ramadhan is a month in which the Holy Quran was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammas (Peace Be Upon Him). Muslims fast in a manner similar to those who came before them.

2:183 O ye who believe! fasting is prescribed to you as it was prescribed to those before you, that ye may (learn) self-restraint.
http://www.islamicity.com/quransearch/default.asp?ref=fast

Eid ul-Adha commemorates the near sacrifice of Abraham’s son.

Chapter 37
100. “O my Lord! Grant me a righteous (son)!”
101. So We gave him the good news of a boy ready to suffer and forbear.
102. Then, when (the son) reached (the age of) (serious) work with him, he said: “O my son! I see in vision that I offer thee in sacrifice: Now see what is thy view!” (The son) said: “O my father! Do as thou art commanded: thou will find me, if Allah so wills one practising Patience and Constancy!”
103. So when they had both submitted their wills (to Allah., and he had laid him prostrate on his forehead (for sacrifice),
104. We called out to him “O Abraham!
105. “Thou hast already fulfilled the vision!” - thus indeed do We reward those who do right.
106. For this was obviously a trial-
107. And We ransomed him with a momentous sacrifice:
108. And We left (this blessing) for him among generations (to come) in later times:
109. “Peace and salutation to Abraham!”
110. Thus indeed do We reward those who do right.
111. For he was one of our believing Servants.

2. Atheists are against religion being a part of our public life. They believe that the idea of “Separation of Church and State” is a Constitutional principle, when we all know, for those who have read the Constitution, that no such principle is ever expressed. Muslims believe that we cannot take God out of our daily life at all. That is why we pray five times daily and which is why you will find many flags in the Muslim world have sayings such as “God is Great” and “There is no other diety but God” on their flags. .I know of no Christian nation today whose nation flags reflect Christianity save the Vatican City which is a special case. To this regard, Christians who want to fight Muslims are fighting a group of people who could be penitentially an ally. Remember, Islam recognizes “The People of the Book” and grants them special status. Judaism and Christianity has no such provisions.

3. The original e-mail makes the following statements:

REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of PanAm Flight 103!
REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993!
REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon!
REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the military barracks in Saudi Arabia!
REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the American Embassies in Africa!
REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the USS COLE!
REMEMBER the MUSLIM attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001!
REMEMBER all the AMERICAN lives that were lost in those vicious MUSLIM attacks!

These statements are of course inflammatory and biased. From one point of view, a list of attacks by people who belong to nations or groups who profess to be Christian could be listed. For example:

REMEMBER the CHRISTIAN bombing of Oklahoma City!

Of course, Muslims are wise enough not to say things like this. First, we know well enough that the people who commit terrorist acts are doing so as humans, not as Muslims. We know that because if they were to act as Muslims, they would not do such things. Similarly, many Christians would take issue for saying that the Oklahoma City bombing was done by Christians because they know that if they were acting as Christians, they would not have done such a thing. It boggles my mind then how people make illogical statements, let alone inflammatory and similarly damaging to their own cause.

4. As an individual amongst many who served this nation and continues to serve this nation both as an Active Duty Service Member and currently as a Civilian in the DoD, there is no greater slap in my face to have my fellow country men disrespect me, my beliefs, and my fellow brethren in my belief. It is the kind of thing that is used by terrorists to fuel their calls that America is an Enemy of all Muslim people. Therefore, by boycotting the Eid Stamp, it is actually an act that assists the enemy in his recruitment of additional conscripts. Now what kind of patriotic American wants to assist in the propaganda of the Enemy?

5. America is a nation composed of many people from many lands. This obviously means that these many races bring with them their many religions. If America was to turn its back on any one part of its group, it would be like a cancer in its body. Therefore, like any cancer that threatens the health of the entire body, we must cut it out. We must eradicate the cancer of racism and intolerance. Furthermore, since the beliefs of Islam share nearly the same values and morals of Jews, Christians, and other major faiths, it would be senseless to fight. The enemy of America are those who wish to destroy what America stands for.

There are enemies that are External and those that are Internal. It is a trying time. However, hysteria and misunderstanding will not help. Calmness and understanding is the key. Terrorism strives to create the former, while justice strives to create the latter. Join with me in Justice and Peace to eradicate all elements of terrorism, both within and without.

Mom, I hope that helps. I know I wrote a lot but I thought that a terse response would look to much like a tit-for-tat. As you know, I am not concerned in arguing with those who want to make petty remarks. I am interested in reasoning with those who possess intellect. The rest will never change their mind unless it is God’s will

Love your son,

Ronald Lee Leuschen II
AKA Abdul Rashid Abdullah

PS Oh incidentally, we do believe in The Messiah (Christos).

2:136 Say ye: “We believe in Allah, and the revelation given to us, and to Abraham, Isma’il, Isaac, Jacob, and the Tribes, and that given to Moses and jesus, and that given to (all) prophets from their Lord: We make no difference between one and another of them: And we bow to Allah (in Islam).”