CANADA: MOSLEM WOMEN SPEAK OUT AGAINST ISLAM

Muslim women speak out against Islam

MONTREAL - For Lebanese-born Christian Brigitte Gabriel, the epiphany came in 1982 at an Israeli hospital, where her wounded mother was ministered to with mercy and compassion.

Syrian-born Dr. Wafa Sultan first recognized it when she saw a favourite teacher murdered by the Muslim Brotherhood.

It began more gradually for Egyptian-born Nonie Darwish, but her real soul-searching started after 9/11.

Iranian-born Nazanin Afshin-Jam knew she had to do something when a raped woman in her native land who stabbed her assailant was sentenced to death.

“We were always told Israel was the devil,” Gabriel told a hushed and attentive audience almost filling the sanctuary at the Beth Israel Beth Aaron (BIBA) Synagogue. But at the hospital, “an Israeli nurse put her arm around me and told me everything would be fine. It was the first time in my life I experienced such compassion.”

Each woman received a heartfelt standing ovation when they related the moment that they realized that Jews and Israel were not the devil, but the very opposite: part of a nation and religion that cherished ethics, compassion, democracy, and other Western social ideals.

It was a far cry from what most of them had been indoctrinated with from birth -- the idea that Jews were infidels of Islam and devils incarnate and that Israel must be destroyed.

They all live now in the United States and Canada and live westernized, secular lives.

The group of women delivered their same message – and got a similar reception – earlier in the day at a policy conference organized by the Institute for Public Affairs at a downtown hotel.

They stated that few other women –- or anyone – in the Arab world dared to speak out against the hate-filled, misogynist Islamic fundamentalist culture and in favour of pluralism, equality, tolerance and democracy.

“For 32 years, my life was stolen by Islam,” said Sultan, whose famous debate with a Muslim cleric on al-Jazeera television has been seen by millions.

Sultan, however, characterized all of Islam – and not just Islamic radicals – as intrinsically unaccepting of any other religion. She said the Koran views any non-Muslims as infidels who must be converted or killed. “Terrorists and [Osama] Bin Laden are just following their prophet [Mohammed],” she said.

“In the last 1,500 years, Islam has not changed because its leaders don’t want it to change.”
That view was not shared by Afshin-Jam, a former Miss Canada who successfully launched an international effort to have the execution of 18-year-old Nazanin Fatehi commuted in Iran. The campaign succeeded, but Fatehi continues to languish in an Iranian prison.

While Afshin-Jam agreed that Iranian women are horribly abused and treated like chattel, she saw all religions as “fundamentally good.” It is only when the religion is perverted for “political” ends that it becomes corrupt, she suggested.

Darwish, a founding member of Arabs for Israel, recalled how her father, a founding member of the Fedayeen violent resistance movement in Egypt, was Israel’s first “targeted assassination” in 1956 when she was a child. A friend asked her and her siblings: “Which one of you kids will avenge your father’s death by killing Jews?”

“We were just speechless,” she said. “Everything, everything was blamed on Israel. When you fill the hearts of children with hatred, hatred comes very easily.”

In 1978, Darwish met her Jewish person. “He was nice,” and Darwish came to discover, “that I had been lied to all my life.” Her brother was also treated for a stroke with complete compassion and care at Hadassah Hospital and she realized that, “I lived for 30 years blindfolded about a whole people.

“After 9/11,” she said, “I realized that I must speak for Israel,” leading her to found Arabs for Israel.

Gabriel, a one-time news anchor who founded the American Congress for Peace and wrote the book, Because They Hate, spoke vehemently against the “hatred, bigotry and intolerance” against the Jews and Israel that consumes the Muslim world.

During question period, all four women said they regularly receive threatening e-mails, including death threats, as well as rejection from some family members. Sultan said she has not conversed with her mother in two years.

Still, the group held out hope that the situation could one day change, inch by inch.

Beryl Wajsman, founder of the Institute for Public Affairs, urged the audience to “come out of here angry and committed to doing more” to support the people such as these women who were “risking their lives to promote common universalities.”

The four women, similarly, all urged the audience to rally behind them in a struggle that they seemed to acknowledge has no end in sight.

“What you’ve been hearing today has been heard throughout Quebec,” BIBA’s Rabbi Reuben Poupko assured the women and the audience.

“If I can save one woman’s life, I will have achieved my goal,” Sultan said.


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1) Muslim women speak out against Islam