Omar Hassan paying his dues.

Omar Hassan is hands down one of the top bowl skaters in the world. All you have to do is watch the first 10 seconds of this video to prove it. He has been paying dues for well over 30 years and like a fine wine, Hassan seems to just get better with age. In this new little bit of hotness, dropped onto the inter-webs by Thrasher Magazine, the creators chose a title for the video that some might consider controversial, strange, offensive or just weird in our western culture. “Omar Hassan’s Concrete Jihad”.

So what does Jihad Mean? It conjures many things to different people & cultures because the term has many possible applications. But the literal translation of the Arabic word Jihad means “Exerted Effort”. The term itself at its core relates to personal struggle and inner conflict within one’s Soul, much like “Ying and Yang”.

So with the Summer Olympics coming up in London, let’s all take a page out of Omar’s book and exert effort to self-reflect in order to realize just how similar all of Humanity is to one another. Exert effort to seek out what makes us the same and focus less on our differences. Like one guy said, sometime, somewhere, “There are only two things I hate in this world. 1: People who are intolerant to other peoples’ cultures. And 2: The God Damn Dutch.”