Pierre Tristam: The False Seduction of Wafa Sultan /Candide's Notebooks

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Islam-Bashing’s Head Cheerleader
The False Seductions of Wafa Sultan
Pierre Tristam/Daytona Beach News-Journal, August 8, 2006

Islam's Ann Coulter

It’s one of those forwarded e-mails that propagates at the speed of gossip on crack: “You gotta see this.” “Impressive.” “What do you make of her?” The link takes you to the video of a woman saying things about Islam, on al-Jazeera, as you’d never expect to hear them on the Qatar-based satellite channel.

She speaks in a voice as impassioned and rhythmic as Malcolm X’s at his best: “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,” the woman says. “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. …”

The woman is Wafa Sultan.

Read the rest of the essay at my site at About...

The Daily Byte

V. S. Naipaul Flatters Himself (As He So Often Does)

“That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present. An oddity among the estates and big houses of the valley, and I a further oddity in its grounds. I felt unanchored and strange. Everything I saw in those early days, as I took my surroundings in, everything I saw on my daily walk, beside the windbreak or along the wide grassy way, made that feeling more acute. I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country.”

—From “The Enigma of Arrival” (1987)