Five days before the holiday, Aaron Goldberg, 7, searched his family's heavily decorated Christmas tree for his favorite ornament: a scarf-wrapped snowman whose body is a football with a Gator logo.

The snowman is a nod to his dad's alma mater, but Aaron's father, Stuart Goldberg, didn't help decorate the tree.

That's because he's Jewish - just as Aaron's parents agreed to raise their child.

"We celebrate both holidays," said his mother, Alisa Goldberg, who is Christian. "Both religions are important to us."

While anxious parents across the country worry about whether their children will be happy with their Christmas gifts, others are having to decide how - or whether - to adapt their non-Christian faith to the country's dominant religious, social and commercial event of the year.

In Tatarstan, Almira Adiyatullina is a prominent social figure. President of the Muslim Womens' Union, editor of the newspaper Muslim Woman, holder of the title Honored Cultural Worker of Tatarstan, she was even nominated in 2005 for the Nobel Peace Prize as part of the campaign to nominate 1,000 women for this prestigious award. Rafik Mukhametshin talked to her about the nature of the Muslim revival she has witnessed in recent years and the role of women within it.

Since the early 1980s, commentators have argued that Islam is suffering a crisis of identity, as the crumbling of Islamic civilization in the modern age has left Muslims with a profound sense of alienation and injury. Challenges confronting Muslim nations -- failures of development projects, entrenched authoritarian regimes and the inability to respond effectively to Israeli belligerence -- have induced deep-seated frustration and anger that, in turn, contributed to the rise of fundamentalist movements, or as most commentators have preferred to say, political Islam. But most commentators have been caught off guard by the ferocity of the acts of mass murder recently committed in New York and Washington. The basic cruelty and moral depravity of these attacks came as a shock not only to non-Muslims, but to Muslims as well.

A number of prominent world historians and scholars supported the recent remarks of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Holocaust.

The former social scientist, Serge Thion kicked out of his job for revisionism, declared his own and his colleagues approval of Ahmadinejad's outlook and referred to his comments as logical, fair and courageous.

"I wish to assure you that French and international revisionist scholars will support entirely the Iranian President Ahmadinejad.

They found his speeches remarkably accurate, his ideas very sound, and his proposals very rational and just.

"We find a great solace in the courageous behavior of the highest Iranian authorities," added Thion.

. . . (first paragraph in this article has been removed for this realnews247.com version because it was on another subject unrelated to the title of the article) . . .

"Today, seven Jewish Americans run the vast majority of US television networks, the printed press, the Hollywood movie industry, the book publishing industry, and the recording industry. Most of these industries are bundled into huge media conglomerates run by the following seven individuals:

Gerald Levin, CEO and Director of AOL Time Warner

Michael Eisner, Chairman and CEO of the Walt Disney Company

Edgar Bronfman, Sr., Chairman of Seagram Company Ltd

Edgar Bronfman, Jr, President and CEO of Seagram Company Ltd and head of Universal Studios

Sumner Redstone, Chairman and CEO of Viacom, Inc

Dennis Dammerman, Vice Chairman of General Electric

Peter Chernin, President and Co-COO of News Corporation Limited

By Ana Rodriguez-Soto, Miami Gardens

Jihad and suicide bombers, Osama bin Laden and terrorism: That image of Islam, prevalent in the West, may not be representative of the majority of Muslims in the world.

But neither is it a false image, says Archbishop Cyril Salim Bustros, an expert on Christian-Islamic relations who currently serves as eparch of the Melkite Diocese of Newton, Mass., and spiritual leader of all the Melkite Catholics in the United States.

While visiting the Melkite communities in Miami and Delray Beach at the beginning of March, he spoke at St. Thomas University on the "clash of civilizations" between Islam and Christianity.