13 October 2007

And if the fucking Empire State Building wasn't bad enough...

...there's purportedly a new stamp out from the Post Office.
Okay, I had to check. According to Snopes, it's real: The Eid stamp was introduced by the United States Postal Service as part of their Holiday Celebrations Series on 1 September 2001, just ten days before the 11 September terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The Eid stamp has been reissued at updated first-class postage rates in 2002, 2006, and most recently in September of 2007.
The word eid is roughly equivalent to the English word 'celebration' or 'festival'. The three-day Eid al-Fitr celebrates the end of the month-long fast of Ramadan, while the three-day Eid al-Adha commemorates the willingness of the Prophet Abraham to sacrifice his son Ishmael in response to God's command, and it marks the end of the Hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca.
The Muslim population in the United States is estimated at being somewhere between two and six million; according to the State Department, by the year 2010 the Muslim population of the United States is expected to surpass the Jewish population, making Islam the country's second-largest faith.

See Accommodation or surrender below for more Eid explication...

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