Dear Doves,
 
          Eid-ul-Fitr (Id al-Fitr) is a two day celebration ending the Muslim Holy Month of Ramadan. It falls upon September 10th and 11th. The beginning of the Jewish Ten Days of Awe, or Rosh Hashanah also falls upon September 9th and 10th. One Five Doves poster actually claims that Rosh falls upon September 11th this year! This is both a extremely rare and unsettling conjunction.
          In the past when is-lam and Judaism shared these holidays, truly historic and earth shaking events transpired. In these days of the Hussein Regime, we have been conditioned to think that both doom and gloom are everywhere. We have been shaken to our very core by lost jobs, home foreclosures and high crimes committed by our elected officials against the very liberties and God given rights that once set these United States apart as that 'shinning city upon the hill'. It seems that nothing good is yet to come, we have been primed to expect that life can only get more difficult for us.
          If what's yet to come must 'stand out' as truly earthshaking events, I'm afraid the future is full of many horrific challenges. In this post 911 era of universal terrorism America and her allies are fighting two foreign wars. What could be worse than than fighting two foreign wars? After natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, Central Asian, Middle Eastern, Indian, Haitian and Chilean earthquakes have killed many hundreds of thousands of poor people, what kind of natural calamities could be any worse? After an unprecedented environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that spilled millions of barrels of oil onto America's already battered Gulf shore, what man-made pollutant could possibly surpass the poison leaked into our oceans. We have witnessed the collapse of the American dream, the idyllic suburban lifestyle made possible by capitalism is no more. That freedom to be inventive and successful by entrepreneurial hard work, and ingenuity has been stolen away from us. Finally, the certainty we all shared that our children's future could always be better than our own no longer exists.
               The last years when these holidays shared the same date was 1984, 1973, 1967, 1948, 1939 and 1914. I didn't even examine the 18th, 19th Centuries for it's calamities. Please make your own conclusions. It's time for us to pray.
 
                                                      Agape Love,
                                                                       Mike