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March 8, 2006

Wafa Sultan On Islam And The West: A Clash Between The Mentality Of The Middle Ages And That Of The 21st Century

Topics: Understanding Islam

There Is No Clash of Civilizations but a Clash between the Mentality of the Middle Ages and That of the 21st Century - Wafa Sultan, MEMRI.

On February 28, we posted on Wafa Sultan's destruction of attempts by her interviewer to shift the blame from rioting Muslims to a Western scholar (Samuel Huntington and his thesis), and the circular commentary of the imam (who avoids debate by resorting to name-calling), all on MEMRI TV. Wafa Sultan is an Arab-American woman of Muslim background, who is apparently comfortable in saying what would garner a Western pundit charges of racism, neo-colonialism, and Islamophobia, and offers a very lucid argument in support of free speech, Western Civilization, Western science, and secular modernism, while being most critical of the Muslim response to criticism and cartoons.

(...) The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete.

(...) The Jews have come from the tragedy (of the Holocaust), and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror, with their work, not their crying and yelling. Humanity owes most of the discoveries and science of the 19th and 20th centuries to Jewish scientists. 15 million people, scattered throughout the world, united and won their rights through work and knowledge. 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. The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. 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.

At the time, we linked to both the VIDEO and the TRANSCRIPT, a must see and a must read.

Today, Michelle Malken notes of numerous emails about what she describes as one of the hottest downloads in the past week, and speaks of the Wafa Sultan's tongue-lashing of the Islamist host on Al-Jazeera TV. It's good to know that the video and the message are getting the attention they deserve. Now, if only the Dhimmi Times would take the time to catch up on the real state of affairs within Islam.

Posted by Richard at March 8, 2006 12:30 PM

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