Former Muslims United co-founder, Dr. Wafa Sultan was in Amsterdam this week to provide expert testimony in the Amsterdam Court ’show trial’ of Geert Wilders, leader of the PVV (Freedom Party) and critic of Islam. Wilders had taken stands critical of the Koran, in favor of controls over Muslim immigration to the Netherlands, and even a tax on Sharia head coverings for Muslim women. He has in the view of many fellow Dutch and supporters in the West of being falsely accused of engaging in hate speech and racism. Wilders nearly trebled the tallies of the PVV in the June 9th general election winning more than 24 seats in the new Hague Parliament. Wilders has rejected offers to join a Conservative coalition in the wrangling to form a new ruling group.
The defense of Wilders by Dr. Sultan in this Dutch pv1 video is from an interview courtesy of FaithFreedom.org.
Al Jazeera debate:
Following that debate, Dr. Sultan gave the following interview on Israel National Radio:
Part 1:
Part 2
Sultan is a Syrian-American psychiatrist (from an Alawi family). She resides in Los Angeles, California. She emigrated to the US in 1989, and is now a naturalized citizen. Sultan has become notable since the September 11, 2001 attacks for her participation in Middle East political debates, with Arabic essays that circulated widely and some television appearances on Al-Jazeera and CNN.
On February 21, 2006, she took part in Al Jazeera’s weekly 90-minute discussion program The Opposite Direction. She spoke from Los Angeles, arguing with host Faisal al-Qassem and with Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli about Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations theory. A six minute composite video of her remarks was subtitled and widely circulated by http://www.MEMRI.org on weblogs and through e-mail. In this video she is scolding Muslims for treating non-Muslims differently and for not recognizing the accomplishments of non-Muslim society, while using its wealth and technology.
The New York Times estimated that the video of her appearance was viewed at least one million times as it spread via weblogs and email.
Sultan revealed to the Times that she is working on a book to be called The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster.
Recently, she sat in on a free-speech discussion at the University of California at Los Angeles, organized by the Ayn Rand Institute with Yaron Brook and Daniel Pipes as speakers.
Sultan describes her thesis as witnessing “a battle between modernity and barbarism which Islam will lose”, has brought her telephone threats, but also praise from reformers. Her comments, especially a pointed criticism that “no Jew has blown himself up in a German restaurant”, brought her an invitation to Tel Aviv, Israel by the American Jewish Congress.
Sultan believes that “The trouble with Islam is deeply rooted in its teachings. Islam is not only a religion. Islam (is) also a political ideology that preaches violence and applies its agenda by force.”
Sultan said she was shocked into secularism by the 1979 atrocities committed by Islamic extremists of the Muslim Brotherhood against innocent Syrian people, including the machine-gun assassination of her professor, Dr. Yusef al Yusef, an ophthalmologist renowned beyond Syria, in her classroom in front of her eyes at the University of Aleppo where she was a medical student.
“They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, ‘Allah 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.”
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