It's the Brian Laird

show on WNYC.

Good morning again everyone.

The Islamic Holy Month of Ramadan

began at sundown on Sunday at a time

when the killing of so many civilians in Gaza,

as we discussed earlier in the program, is causing worldwide grief

and horror, not just among Muslims, but for any people when it's your people dying at that

kind of rate, you tend to feel it that much more personally and

viscerally I think it's fair to say. And when it's your own relatives, here is

a Palestinian American from San Francisco named Marwan Sabata on NPR's weekend edition on Sunday

on beginning the daily fasting ritual for Ramadan but thinking about his

relatives back in Central Gaza. They will not have a meal.

So it chatter me.

When I eat, when it's time to break my fast,

I'll be taking bites with a great deal of pain, sorrow, suffering, agony, and consumed with

guilt. Marwan Sabata on Weekend Edition.

Another group for whom Ramadan is especially intense this year is Muslim asylum seekers here in New York,

largely from West Africa, who literally flew to Central or South America and made their way up.

We talked on the show recently about those two furniture stores in Queens and the Bronx where

scores of African asylum seekers were sleeping.

Our local news website Gothamist has a story called New York mosques

...