STRAIGHT TALK

The Heretic Infidel

Not many people could muster enough bravado to duke it out with an Islamic cleric in an all out, no holds barred debate in front of public television and emerge a winner, at least in the eyes of those people who had been keeping silent for many years, except for Dr. Wafa Sultan, a Syrian-American psychiatrist, activist for Muslim women rights and fearless anti-terrorism crusader. Dr. Sultan, who is also a Muslim seems unwary of the retribution that fundamentalist Islamists might exact on her, with her use of unconstrained yet candid and forceful language that prompted the cleric to call her a heretic on the airwaves.The world had been waiting for someone who could confront the issue head on minus the fear of political incorrectness and harsh backlash and Wafa Sultan chose to do it. We still remember the fatwa and the $5 Million reward the Ayatollah Khomeni of Iran offered for the head of Salman Rushdie when the latter published his controversial novel Satanic Verses, considered an affront to the religion of Islam. Fearing for his life , Rushdie was forced to hide for many years and re-emerged only when the tension had subsided. Dr. Sultan’s crusade against terrorism seems unabated by the pleas from friends and family who fear for her safety.

You may have already seen this but here’s the video of that famous debate on Al-Jazeera TV in Qatar.

 

When It is Thy Time To Go

When you hear a person slip on a banana peel and break his head and die we refer to such as a freak accident, something unusual and senseless that wasn’t supposed to happen. But accidents do happen and the more unlikely it becomes, the more we feel the pain of the tragedy . We dread to see it happen to any human being for that matter. A case of a misstep that resulted in a mishap. Our hearts are filled with a deep sense of loss and our thoughts murmur – ” if only he slowed down and looked he could still be alive today”. Now here’s another scenario. A man driving a car with a passenger in the front seat safely stops at a railroad crossing waiting for the train to pass. He made sure the car was at the right distance from the level crossing. All of a sudden, a speeding Mercedez Benz slams the rear end of his car pushing it onto the path of the moving train. Whammm… Lights out. Theory No 1. It was a Mafia hit. The hit man driving the Mercedes planned the “accident”. Theory No. 2 The driver of the Mercedez was talking on his cell phone, lost his orientation and totally forgot he was driving. Theory No. 3 The driver of the Mercedez was drunk. Whatever – but the outcome was regretfully sad indeed. The driver of the Mercedez deserves to be hanged but does it change the outcome? The man stopping his car on the level crossing did everything right. There was no misstep, no miscalculation on his part. There was absolutely no reason for this to happen. It was just his time to go.