Power to the Women!

Wafa Sultan and Irshad Manji have courage. Both women not only have denounced Jihadist Islam and the despotic regimes in the Middle East, but they have also made positive comments about Jews and Israel, which is largely taboo among Muslim reformers. On Al-Jazeera, Wafa Sultan, the Syrian-born psychiatrist argued:

The Jews have come from the tragedy (of the Holocaust), and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror, with their work, not their crying and yelling. Humanity owes most of the discoveries and science of the 19th and 20th centuries to Jewish scientists. 15 million people, scattered throughout the world, united and won their rights through work and knowledge. We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them. (Transcript: here)

Manji went a step further, and defended Israel in the New York Times (link unavailable):

Like all Muslims, I look forward to the day when neither the [IDF] jeep nor the wall is in Abu Dis. So will we tell the self-appointed martyrs of Islam that... before the barrier, there was the bomber? And that the barrier can be dismantled, but the bomber's victims are gone forever?

Manji and Sultan offer stinging criticism to the Muslim world. Their support for Jews or Israel's defense tactics would be enough to make an Al-Jazeera watcher boil-over with anger. But they go a step beyond, by using these examples to highlight the weakness within Muslim society and to strengthen their case for reform.

Why go to such lengths to make this argument? Why risk alienating their audience? Saul Singer, in his sharp column on both women, offers one answer:

My hunch is that Sultan and Manji felt they had to go so far as defending Jews and Israel because they recognize that it is impossible to fight the Islamist jihad without exposing its Jew-hatred in an unapologetic manner. They realize that we - Jews, Christians, and non-jihadi Muslims - are in this together.

I think their rhetoric has even greater implications. Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism serve as the lynchpins to pan-Arabism and Islamism. In other words, it is the one issue that unites Sunni and Shia, Arab and Persian, and so on, and by targeting this fundamental premise, Wafa and Manji undermine the two ideologies that have crippled the Middle East. Further, they question the favorite scapegoat employed by despots in the region, namely that Israel and the Jews are the source of their countries' ills. The less their citizens believe this lie, the more vulnerable their tyrannies become to reform.

And finally, it is noteworthy that both commentators are women. According to my friend Oubai at Syria Comment PLUS, "It's going to be the woman of the middle east that liberate it." They certainly suffer more than anyone else and are the most immediate beneficiaries of reform. Sultan and Manji are just the beginning. Just wait until more women follow in their footsteps and lead the way.