Closure…or Not

I woke up ridiculously early Monday morning, around 3:50 a.m., and just could not get back to sleep, so I went to the computer. Ah, Bin Laden’s dead. Hmm. Where’s my fist pump? Maybe I’m still too tired.

I came across Kevin Marshall’s piece, which was entitled “No closure from Osama bin Laden’s death”, and even before I read the actual piece, I realized that he was on the right track. Key half sentence: “I became confused as to why I didn’t feel that level of joy that everyone else seemed to be expressing.” It reminded me of

H is for Halal and Haram

I was watching ABC News (US) last month, and there was a piece about Air National Guard members from Illinois putting pallets of meals onto a C-130H at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan. The Meals Ready to Eat would be delivered to Pakistan as part of a relief mission after the devastating floods. What I noticed is that every single box I saw was labelled, in a very large font, HALAL.

So what IS halal? The best site I’ve come across is from IFANCA, the Islamic Food and Nutitional Council of America, who defines it: “Halal is an Arabic word meaning lawful or permitted. The opposite of halal is haram, which means unlawful or prohibited.