Football and Ramadan

All around the United States, high school and college football teams are beginning to practice for the fall season. This year, it coincides with the Muslim observance of Ramadan, when believers fast from food and water from sun-up to sundown. So what is a Muslim football player to do?

It’s a real question for Fordson High School in Dearborn, Michigan, where Muslim students are a majority of the team. The solution? Football coach Fouad Zaban, also Muslim, is holding practices which begin at 11 p.m. and end at 4 a.m. He explained that this enables players to break their fast at sundown and attend services at the mosque before practice, and end in time for a meal and morning prayer before sunrise.
Players loved the change:

“I was really excited, I love it — all the guys do,” said running back/cornerback Rabeah Beydoun. “For one thing, it’s under the lights. It’s like game time. Second, we can actually eat and come out here. Third, we’ve got fans who come out and support us at night.”

Non-Muslim players have bought into the change as well.

Defensive tackle William Powell, one of the team’s few non-Muslims, initially thought the coach was “out of his mind,” but he’s come around. In fact, he’s even fasted.

In this time when anti-Islam feelings seem to be rapidly growing in this country, it warms this football fan’s heart to see another example of how sports can bring out the best in us — even in interfaith understanding.

Candidate to President

Roger Simon opines about the President

The problem for Obama is that he appears to have taken seriously all the “change” stuff he promised during his campaign. And he has been unable to make the transition from candidate to president.

A candidate says, as Bobby Kennedy did, “Some men look at things the way they are and ask why? I dream of things that are not and ask why not?”

A president says: “What do the polls say?”

Why have I become so cynical about Washington? 

Living By Faith in Afghanistan

As reflection on the killing of ten aid workers from the International Assistance Mission (IAM) in Afghanistan continues, two pieces today highlighted its significance. Fr. Francis X. Clooney uses Hebrews 11, the honor roll of faith, to comment:

The author of Hebrews is not an optimist, but rather admits that all these noble women and men lived in-between lives, on missions provoked by rare, fragile encounters with God’s word, missions that were rarely or never completed in their lifetimes: ”All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.”  They lived by faith, caught in between a Word that gave them a life and a mission, and the inevitable failings and ultimately death that cut short such missions. As in Afghanistan the other day. They gave themselves to a risky and unexpected work, and died before there was peace in Afghanistan, before every eye was healed, every sick person attended to: by things hoped for, things unseen.

And Lisa Schirch of the 3D Security Initiative based at Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice & Peacebuilding suggests that while U.S. government diplomats and development workers spend their time inside well-guarded concrete security compounds,

Humanitarian groups like IAM have a unique perspective on the plight of Afghanistan and what could be done to build peace here. While they risk their lives, they also are able to help thousands of Afghans with medical care, clean water, schools and all the other forms of development that help build security from the ground up.

The role that people of faith have in a situation such as Afghanistan, and what policymakers could learn from their willingness to take risks in order to serve, are two important lessons from the lives and deaths of IAM’s martyrs.

Mennonites

Why I'm humbly proud to be Mennonite.

Yesterday

But that was yesterday, and yesterday's gone.

Trifecta

A trifecta this morning of three of my favorite op-ed writers.  Bob Herbert on the economic pain facing American families as "rampant joblessness and skyrocketing medical costs are among the biggest factors tearing at the very fabric of American economic life," Eugene Robinson on the Afghan Papers showing us a "long-running, morally ambiguous conflict that has virtually no chance of ending well," and Leonard Pitts on the "conservative outrage machine" that exists to maintain "a state of perpetual apoplexy on the political right by feeding it a never-ending stream of perceived sins against conservative orthodoxy."  Preach, brethren.

Top Secret America

The Washington Post today blanketed the front page with this lede:

“The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”

The story, first of a three-part series on Top Secret America, resulted from a two-year investigation.  It found that there are approximately 1,300 government organizations and 1,900 private companies, employing an estimated 850,000 people in 10,000 locations, working on programs involving homeland security, counterterrorism and intelligence.  And as you might imagine, it results in duplication and waste, with no coordination and no one able to even be aware of all the activities. The Post has created a web page with interactive maps, graphics, and database of information it gathered.

A retired Army general asked to review the programs last year for the Defense Department was quoted in the article as concluding: “Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste. We consequently can’t effectively assess whether it is making us more safe.”

So, we’re spending an unknown amount of money on an unknown number of programs that collectively aren’t making us any more secure. Seems to me that if we’re interested in cutting big government, this would be a very good place to start.