California Conservative

Read all about this amazing woman, described by the NYTimes as a Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside of Los Angeles. From the article:

Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.

In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world, Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries.

She said the world’s Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews, have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.

Dr. Sultan said the world was not witnessing a clash of religions or cultures, but a battle between modernity and barbarism, a battle that the forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose.

In response, clerics throughout the Muslim world have condemned her, and her telephone answering machine has filled with dark threats. But Islamic reformers have praised her for saying out loud, in Arabic and on the most widely seen television network in the Arab world, what few Muslims dare to say even in private.

“I believe our people are hostages to our own beliefs and teachings,” she said in an interview this week in her home in a Los Angeles suburb.

Dr. Sultan, who is 47, wears a prim sweater and skirt, with fleece-lined slippers and heavy stockings. Her eyes and hair are jet black and her modest manner belies her intense words: “Knowledge has released me from this backward thinking. Somebody has to help free the Muslim people from these wrong beliefs.”

Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, “The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling.”

She went on, “We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people.”

She concluded, “Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.”

Here’s a partial transcript of that interview. If you want to view a video of it, click here. It’s so powerful that you might be compelled to stand up and clap at the end of it.

I salute the efforts of Dr. Sultan, and other brave people like her, who take the ultimate risk (their life) in speaking out against Islamofascism.

HAT TIP:
Dafydd at Big Lizards.

RELATED:
Alexandra at All Things Beautiful blogs about a call from Muslim clerics in Denmark for an official apology from the Danish goverment over the Mohammed cartoons as well a demand for laws that would punish those who offend Muslims. Exact quote from the UK Daily Telegraph piece:

“We want the laws in Denmark and the European Union to be changed, either to have free speech for everyone including on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, or to change the law to respect religious figures like Mohammad,” Suweidan said.

Michael van der Galien responds appropriately.

MORE: Watch Dr. Sultan’s first English language interview, done yesterday on Tovia Singer’s Israel National News Radio show. (HAT TIP: Powerline)

Cross-posted at SisterToldjah

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 11th, 2006 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Author: SisterToldjah, Culture, Middle East, Quotable, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.