Gaza-born, former Muslima, Nonie Darwish, lectures a group of Israeli-Americans about the bigotry in Islamic culture towards Christianity and especially Judaism which underlies the conflict against Israel and Christian minorities.
Mrs. Darwish authored three books, ‘Now They Call Me Infidel”, “Cruel and Usual Punishment”, and “The Devil We Don’t Know; the dark side of revolutions in the Middle East."
Nonie holds a Bachelors degree in Sociology and Anthropology and was a journalist at the Middle East News Agency. She founded www.ArabsForIsrael.com, 1994, to promote understanding, peace and a new paradigm for Arabs to view Israel. Recorded July 20th in Los Angeles, California
The American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and its Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) program, along with Former Muslims United (FMU) on Saturday, 23 June, hosted the first-ever "Summer Night for Human Rights" Town Hall dedicated to defending the freedom of conscience. Dedicated to Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, who has been sentenced to death in Iran for leaving Islam, the Summer Night for Human Rights featured Muslim apostates from around the world, and called upon Muslims in the U.S. and the world human rights community to defend their right to change their religion or have no religion at all, and to denounce the Sharia that mandates such punishment.
AFDI/SIOA Executive Director Pamela Geller chose that location because of its proximity to the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations' "Summer Night for Civil Rights" event being held at the same time down the block in Redondo Beach. The Summer Night for Human Rights will call upon the CAIR spokesmen to renounce Islam's death penalty for apostasy and defend the human rights of those who choose to leave Islam. It will ask CAIR leaders to stop creating roadblocks to Sharia prohibitions in the U.S., pointing up CAIR's hypocrisy in sponsoring a "civil rights" night while supporting a system of governance that denies the freedom of conscience, as well as the freedom of speech and equality of rights of all before the law.
9-segment presentation of varying (each 10-minutes or less) lengths. Filmed live at the San Fernando Valley chapter of Act for America in Los Angeles. Audio becomes clearer after 8:47 of first video.
Includes Question and answer with audience. Final segment interview includes "EscapingIslam.com" publisher, Manu Bakh.
S.F. Valley Chapter of Act for America meets 20th July in Sherman Oaks - featuring presentation about rising Statism & Socialism in America.
Outspoken critic raises public awareness of civil-rights concerns about Islamic orthodoxy.
Former Dutch parliamentarian, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is presented the inaugural, "Ziegler Prize for Courage of Convictions," from Community Advocates human-rights group, led by David A. Lehrer in Los Angeles. Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan introduced and presented Ms. Ali with the award.
Ms. Ali describes her courageous transformation from a repressed woman under Islamic culture, to a Western freedom-icon. For exposing the repressiveness of orthodox Islam (including oppressing women, subjugating non-Muslims, and hatred towards Jews), she has been forced to live under constant fear of murder for perceived apostasy. She gives an acceptance speech in this video (runs about 20 minutes): (Please note that the stage-microphone kicks-in at around 10:55 & adjusts to normal volume at 14:22).
Ms. Ali (also) describes how horrified she felt as an adult after Sept. 11, 2001, reaching for the Koran to find out whether some of Osama bin Laden's more blood-curdling statements -- "when you meet the unbelievers, strike them in the neck" -- were direct quotations.
"I hated to do it," she wrote, "because I knew that I would find bin Laden's quotations in there." And there were consequences: "The little shutter at the back of my mind, where I pushed all my dissonant thoughts, snapped open after the 9/11 attacks, and it refused to close again.
I found myself thinking that the Quran is not a holy document. It is a historical record, written by humans. . . . And it is a very tribal and Arab version of events. It spreads a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war."
That moment led Hirsi Ali to her most profound conclusion: that the mistreatment of women is not an incidental problem in the Muslim world, a side issue that can be dealt with once the more important political problems are out of the way.
Rather, she believes that the enslavement of women lies at the heart of all of the most fanatical interpretations of Islam, creating "a culture that generates more backwardness with every generation."
Ultimately, it led to her most controversial conclusion too: that Islam is in a period of transition, that the religion as it is currently practiced is often incompatible with modernity and democracy and must radically transform itself in order to become so.
"We in the West," she writes, "would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life."
That sentiment, when first expressed in Holland, infuriated not only Hirsi Ali's compatriots but also Dutch intellectuals uneasy about criticizing the immigrants in their midst, particularly because both Hirsi Ali and Theo van Gogh went further than the usual criticism of radical, political Islam: Both believed that even "ordinary" forms of Islam, such as those practiced in Hirsi Ali's Somalia, contain elements of discrimination against women that should not be tolerated in the West.
Thanks to this belief in female equality, Hirsi Ali now requires permanent bodyguards. But having "moved from the world of faith to the world of reason," Hirsi Ali now says she cannot go back.
