Wafa Sultan to Muslims: Emulate the Jews.

Here's a piece about the Syrian-American psychiatrist Wafa Sultan, who gave "an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21" and became "an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die."

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....

"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."

It's good to know that Dr. Sultan's voice is being heard so widely via the internet.

A biographical detail:

[H]er 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."

Many individuals give up the religion they were taught as children. Usually the events that lead to the change of heart are not so dramatic. Yet here, the thing that repelled the believer was intended to lock believers more tightly into the faith. Does frightening people keep or lose believers? The answer lies in Sultan's statement: "Knowledge has released me from this backward thinking." It is by keeping people in the dark that a religion succeeds through fear. Why would the educated persons within the religion want to proceed in that fashion? Isn't the answer quite obvious? Those people seek political power.