Knud Larsen skrev:
> Jeg havde tænkt på hvordan det gik dr. Sultan efter hendes optræden på al
> Jazeera, og her er svaret - for dem der ikke har set hende på al Jazeera, så
> tag et kig på Menri og søg på hendes navn.
>
> En modig kvinde som siger det, der bør siges, og som man kun kan sige mod at
> blive dræbt eller som minimum truet på livet, det er sådan nogen vi skal
> støtte, og ikke kuweitiske klerke med slet skjulte trusler i ærmerne.
>
> Læs den, selv dem der ikke er så stive i engelsk!
>
>
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/international/middleeast/11sult
> an.html?_r=1&ei=5094&oref=slogin
>
> The Saturday Profile
> For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats
> By JOHN M. BRODER
> Published: March 11, 2006
>
> LOS ANGELES, March 10 - Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a
> largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los
> Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow
> Muslims.
>
> J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
>
> "I have no choice. I am questioning every single teaching of our
> holy book." - DR. WAFA SULTAN
>
> 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."
>
> Her views caught the ear of the American Jewish Congress, which
> has invited her to speak in May at a conference in Israel. "We
> have been discussing with her the importance of her message and
> trying to devise the right venue for her to address Jewish
> leaders," said Neil B. Goldstein, executive director of the
> organization.
>
> She is probably more welcome in Tel Aviv than she would be in
> Damascus. Shortly after the broadcast, clerics in Syria denounced
> her as an infidel. One said she had done Islam more damage than
> the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad, a wire service
> reported.
>
> DR. SULTAN is "working on a book that - if it is published - it's
> going to turn the Islamic world upside down."
>
> "I have reached the point that doesn't allow any U-turn. I have
> no choice. I am questioning every single teaching of our holy
> book."
>
> The working title is, "The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a
> Monster."
>
> Dr. Sultan grew up in a large traditional Muslim family in
> Banias, Syria, a small city on the Mediterranean about a two-hour
> drive north of Beirut. Her father was a grain trader and a devout
> Muslim, and she followed the faith's strictures into adulthood.
>
> But, she said, her life changed in 1979 when she was a medical
> student at the University of Aleppo, in northern Syria. At that
> time, the radical Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try
> to undermine the government of President Hafez al-Assad. Gunmen
> of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the
> university and killed her professor as she watched, she said.
>
> "They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, 'God is
> great!' " she said. "At that point, I lost my trust in their god
> and began to question all our teachings. It was the turning point
> of my life, and it has led me to this present point. I had to
> leave. I had to look for another god."
>
> She and her husband, who now goes by the Americanized name of
> David, laid plans to leave for the United States. Their visas
> finally came in 1989, and the Sultans and their two children
> (they have since had a third) settled in with friends in
> Cerritos, Calif., a prosperous bedroom community on the edge of
> Los Angeles County.
>
> After a succession of jobs and struggles with language, Dr.
> Sultan has completed her American medical licensing, with the
> exception of a hospital residency program, which she hopes to do
> within a year. David operates an automotive-smog-check station.
> They bought a home in the Los Angeles area and put their children
> through local public schools. All are now American citizens.
>
> BUT even as she settled into a comfortable middle-class American
> life, Dr. Sultan's anger burned within. She took to writing,
> first for herself, then for an Islamic reform Web site called
> Annaqed (The Critic), run by a Syrian expatriate in Phoenix.
>
> An angry essay on that site by Dr. Sultan about the Muslim
> Brotherhood caught the attention of Al Jazeera, which invited her
> to debate an Algerian cleric on the air last July.
>
> In the debate, she questioned the religious teachings that prompt
> young people to commit suicide in the name of God. "Why does a
> young Muslim man, in the prime of life, with a full life ahead,
> go and blow himself up?" she asked. "In our countries, religion
> is the sole source of education and is the only spring from which
> that terrorist drank until his thirst was quenched."
>
> Her remarks set off debates around the globe and her name began
> appearing in Arabic newspapers and Web sites. But her fame grew
> exponentially when she appeared on Al Jazeera again on Feb. 21,
> an appearance that was translated and widely distributed by the
> Middle East Media Research Institute, known as Memri.
>
> Memri said the clip of her February appearance had been viewed
> more than a million times.
>
> "The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of
> religions or a clash of civilizations," Dr. Sultan said. "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."
>
> She said she no longer practiced Islam. "I am a secular human
> being," she said.
>
> The other guest on the program, identified as an Egyptian
> professor of religious studies, Dr. Ibrahim al-Khouli, asked,
> "Are you a heretic?" He then said there was no point in rebuking
> or debating her, because she had blasphemed against Islam, the
> Prophet Muhammad and the Koran.
>
> Dr. Sultan said she took those words as a formal fatwa, a
> religious condemnation. Since then, she said, she has received
> numerous death threats on her answering machine and by e-mail.
>
> One message said: "Oh, you are still alive? Wait and see." She
> received an e-mail message the other day, in Arabic, that said,
> "If someone were to kill you, it would be me."
>
> Dr. Sultan said her mother, who still lives in Syria, is afraid
> to contact her directly, speaking only through a sister who lives
> in Qatar. She said she worried more about the safety of family
> members here and in Syria than she did for her own.
>
> "I have no fear," she said. "I believe in my message. It is like
> a million-mile journey, and I believe I have walked the first and
> hardest 10 miles."
>
Hendes "tilfælde" viser ihvertfald, at det er farligt at bilde
sig ind, at problemet med islamismen ville forsvinde, hvis blot
vi indførte en "blasfemi-paragraf" for at undgå sådan noget som
Muhammedtegningerne.
Der er tydeligvis tale om, at man ikke vil acceptere *kritik*.
Hendes kritik af især islam, men også religion generelt, er helt
klart meget skarp - men det har den også lov til at være.
Man har lov til at være anti-religiøs. Og at give udtryk for det.
Artiklen kan også ses her:
http://essayus.blogspot.com/2006/03/muslims-blunt-criticism-of-islam-draws.html
--
Mogens Michaelsen
http://mogmichs.blogspot.com/