Our Quote of the Day actually is a post by Greg Gross, from his award-winning blog “I’m Black and I Travel.” Here’s a small part of it:
The true meaning of Christmas can reveal itself anywhere — including a pair of predominantly Muslim countries in West Africa.
At some point before the end of this Christmas Day, after you’ve opened all the presents, stolen your mistletoe kisses and polished off Christmas dinner, take a moment to read a little something from the Associated Press. The dateline is Dakar, the capital of French-speaking Senegal, on the coast of West Africa.
It tells how the country’s 95 percent Muslim population also celebratesChristmas, which is the country treats as a secular national holiday.
To prove the point, the article includes a pic of Dakar’s Independence Square, decorated with a fine set of Christmas lights.
Americans who have grown comfortable with their blind fear and loathing of Islam may look at this in stunned disbelief, having never heard of this before. The Senegalese people might well look at those same Americans and ask, “Where have YOU been?”
Not to Senegal, obviously.
To read the entire AP story, click here. Click your way through the pics accompanying the article and you’ll see a cheerfully lit Christmas reading “Bienvenue à Dakar” — Welcome to Dakar — right in front of a mosque.
While the world in general and America especially focus on the conflicts created by Muslim extremists trying to force sharia law on portions of African countries like Nigeria and Mali, both Senegal and its tiny neighbor, the Gambia, quietly go about life as they always have, with Christians and Muslims getting along just fine.
There’s a lot more — so go to the link to read the rest.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.