"Stand up: Wafa Sultan is passing

Among the most moving scenes in film history occurs in "To Kill a Mockingbird," in which the little girl, Scout, who has been watching her lawyer/father plead for the life of a falsely accused black man in the old South, is exhorted by an elderly black spectator in the gallery to rise to her feet. "Your father is passing," he explains.
 
I thought of that after viewing video of a woman who must be one of the bravest souls on earth. A Syrian-born psychologist who now lives and works in Southern California, Dr. Wafa Sultan caused a sensation when she appeared on Al-Jazeera TV in a debate with an Egyptian professor of Islamic Studies named Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli. Speaking (in Arabic) as if the words could not come quickly enough to keep up with her thoughts, Dr. Sultan offered the most impassioned defense of Western civilization I have heard in a very long time. Certainly she was more ardent for the values we hold dear than most liberal Democrats.

She began by describing the struggle in which we are engaged as one between "two opposites, between two eras." It is a clash, she said, "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. It is a clash between human rights on the one hand, and the violation of those rights on the other hand . . . "

Dr. Al-Khouli was clearly taken aback.

Are you saying, the host asked, "that what is happening today is a clash between the culture of the West and the backwardness and ignorance of the Muslims?"

"Yes," replied Sultan, "that is what I mean."

She wasn't finished. Not by a mile. She went on to scorn Muslim clerics who say out of one side of their mouths that Islam forbids them to offend the beliefs of others, a....