Israel and Hamas: For the Shocked and Confused

 

Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel: a primer

 

Some friends on social media remain unclear about the following. What did Hamas do in Israel on October 7? Why have so many around the world responded with anti-Semitism? Let's take these questions one at a time.

 

What did Hamas do in Israel on October 7?

 

Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and murdered, tortured, and kidnapped defenseless Israeli men, women, and children, ordinary civilians doing ordinary things like eating breakfast.

 

The extensive evidence of Hamas' atrocities includes the corpses of a father and child tied together with wire and then burned alive, and twenty children tied together and burned; bodies with hacked off limbs and gauged out eyes; and bodies bespeaking gang rape so severe that victims' leg and pelvic bones were broken. First responder Asher Moskowitz found a baby that Hamas had cooked to death in an oven. The oven's heating element was still attached to the corpse.

 

Captured terrorists offered full confessions. One said, "We became animals. We did things that humans do not do." One confessed that the corpses of young women were raped. Stephen D. Smith reports that there was "an instruction to bring back the dead body of an IDF soldier and posthumously crucify him."

 

Hamas made and shared, via social media, videos. They videorecorded the murder of a helpless grandmother, and posted the video on her Facebook page, so that her loved ones would watch. A child hostage was forced to watch Hamas videos. If the child cried, Hamas members pressed a gun to the child. In videos, terrorists shoot household pets dead.

 

Ben Shapiro posted a compilation. A YouTube poster responded. "As a US Iraq war Vet I started to watch this episode and stopped … I've seen a lot, done a lot but I caved … Tears streamed down my face as I watched without stopping, without looking away, gritting my teeth ... If I could return to the battlefield and join your brothers and sisters and do what I could to avenge/protect/free those that are captured I would in a heartbeat … I salute Israel … I bow my head in prayer multiple times throughout the day that this evil will end."

Female Genital Mutilation. First Person Account by Nawal el Saadawi from "The Hidden Face of Eve"

Source

I was six years old that night when I lay in my bed, warm and peaceful in that pleasurable state which lies half way between wakefulness and sleep, with the rosy dreams of childhood flitting by, like gentle fairies in quick succession.

I felt something move under the blankets, something like a huge hand, cold and rough, fumbling over my body, as though looking for something. Almost simultaneously another hand, as cold and as rough and as big as the first one, was clapped over my mouth, to prevent me from screaming.

They carried me to the bathroom. I do not know how many of them there were, nor do I remember their faces, or whether they were men or women. The world to me seemed enveloped in a dark fog winch prevented me from seeing. Or perhaps they put some kind of a cover over my eyes. All I remember is that I was frightened and that there were many of them, and that something like an iron grasp caught hold of my hand and my arms and my thighs, so that I became unable to resist or even to move.

I also remember the icy touch of the bathroom tiles under my naked body, and unknown voices and humming sounds interrupted now and again by a rasping metallic sound which reminded me of the butcher when he used to sharpen his knife before slaughtering a sheep for the Eid.

My blood was frozen in my veins. It looked to me as though some thieves had broken into my room and kidnapped me from my bed. They were getting ready to cut my throat which was always what happened with disobedient girls like myself in the stories that my old rural grandmother was so fond of telling me. I strained my ears trying to catch the rasp of the metallic sound. The moment it ceased, it was as though my heart stopped beating with it. I was unable to see, and somehow my breathing seemed also to have stopped.

I imagined the thing that was making the rasping sound coming closer and closer to me. Somehow it was not approaching my neck as I had expected but another part of my body. Somewhere below my belly, as though seeking something buried between my thighs. At that very moment I realized that my thighs had been pulled wide apart, and that each of my lower limbs was being held as far away from the other as possible, gripped by-steel fingers that never relinquished their pressure. I felt that the rasping knife or blade was heading straight down towards my throat.

Then suddenly the sharp metallic edge seemed to drop between my thighs and there cut off a piece of flesh from my body. I screamed with pain despite the tight hand held over my mouth, for the pain was not just a pain, it was like a searing flame that went through my whole body.

After a few moments, I saw a red pool of blood around my hips. I did not know what they had cut off from my body, and I did not try to find out. I just wept, and called out to my mother for help.

But the worst shock of all was when I looked around and found her standing by my side. Yes, it was her, I could not be mistaken, in flesh and blood, right in the midst of these strangers, talking to them and smiling at them, as though they had not participated in slaughtering her daughter just a few moments ago. They carried me to my bed.

I saw them catch hold of my sister, who was two years younger, in exactly the same way they had caught hold of me a few minutes earlier. I cried out with all my might. No! No! I could see my sister's face held between the big rough hands. It had a deathly pallor and her wide black eyes met mine for a split second, a glance of dark terror which I can never forget.

A moment later and she was gone, behind the door of the bathroom where I had just been. The look we exchanged seemed to say: 'Now we know what it is. Now we know where lies our tragedy. We were born of a special sex, the female sex. We are destined in advance to taste of misery, and to have a part of our body torn away by cold, unfeeling cruel hands.

***

Nawal El Saadawi's account of her genital mutilation appears in the book "The Hidden Face of Eve."

***

In "Save Send Delete" I provide my own account of why I am a Christian. "In Christ, there is no male; there is no female." Jesus Christ is the best friend women ever had.

Unveiled by Yasmine Mohammed: Buy It, Read It, Share It

"My whole body was suffocating. My head throbbed, and my skin oozed sweat from every pore … dressing like the kuffar was evil. I would go to hell if I dressed that way … when the Caliphate rises, if you're not wearing hijab, how will you be distinguished from the nonbelievers? If you look like them, you'll be killed like them … wearing a niqab [face veil] you feel like you're in a portable sensory deprivation chamber. It impedes your ability to see, hear, touch, smell. I felt like I was slowly dying inside … I didn't even know who I was anymore – if I even was somebody at all."

Yasmine Mohammed is a spitfire, a term once applied both to World-War-II-era combat aircraft and to superstars like Jane Russell who played hotblooded women who didn't let anyone push them around. Yasmine is a forty-something Canadian ex-Muslim, atheist, educator, and activist. (I'm going against convention here and referring to the author by her first name. She shares a last name with Islam's prophet and founder, and I want to avoid confusion.)

Yasmine was raised by a strict Muslim mother who was the second wife of an equally strict stepfather. She was in an arranged marriage to an Al-Qaeda member. She left Islam and she is now married to a non-Muslim. Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam is her first book. And what a first book it is. Unveiled is a can't-put-it-down instant classic. Authors Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan, Kate McCord, Jean Sasson, Nawal el-Saadawi, and Phyllis Chesler, move over. There is a new star in your literary firmament.

The subtitle of Unveiled, How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam, is a bit misleading. Yes, Yasmine takes on actor Ben Affleck's October, 2014 appearance on Bill Maher's Real Time HBO show. On that broadcast Maher and Sam Harris, both atheists and critics of Christianity, bemoaned their fellow liberals' attacking them for also criticizing Islam. Ben Affleck exploded – no pun intended. Affleck, a normally cool and ironic actor, devoted a freakish amount of zealotry to shielding from analysis clitoridectomy, throwing gay men off roofs, and suicide bombings. Affleck yelled, waved his arms, furrowed his brow and interrupted. Any criticism of Islamic doctrine is "gross, racist, ugly." Affleck offered zero facts. Facts are not necessary. Become apoplectic, smear any critic of jihad or gender apartheid as racist, pose and preen and signal your own superior, culturally relative virtue, and the good liberal is done. We've all met versions of this Islamapologist, though most are not as good looking as Affleck.

Affleck's Islamapologism outraged Yasmine Mohammed. She notes that Affleck made a film, Dogma, that mocks Christianity. She insists that liberals like Affleck do great harm to real, live human beings. "It was unforgiveable for Ben Affleck to deflect criticism of this ideology that has caused so much suffering in the world … no one in the West cares if Muslim women were being imprisoned or killed … for not covering their hair … that bloggers in Bangladesh were being hacked to death … because they dared write about humanism … this seemingly well-meaning, white-guilt ridden man was standing in the way!" Affleck's immorality, cowardice, narcissism and ignorance, so paradigmatic of Islamapologists, prompted Yasmine to write her book. Unveiled, she says, "is for anyone who feels a duty to defend Islam from scrutiny and criticism … you are deflecting the light from shining on millions of people imprisoned in darkness."

"At times Western corporations actively support the very things brave women fight against. The 2019 Sports Illustrated featured a burkini." Nike put a swoosh on "religiously prescribed modesty clothing … How can we fight Western patriarchy while simultaneously supporting Islamic patriarchy?" Yasmine asks.

Liberal Islamapologists' constant shielding of Islam from critique is not merely a debate question for Yasmine Mohammed. Decades ago, young Yasmine told her teacher, Rick Fabbro, that she was being abused. She showed Fabbro bruises on her arms, caused by her stepfather's beatings with a belt. Her stepfather wasn't punishing Yasmine for any wrong-doing; he was merely taking out his own personal frustrations on her body. Fabbro reported the abuse. A Canadian judge ruled that Islamic culture allowed severe "corporal punishment." "I never felt so betrayed in my life … how disgusting to allow a child to be beaten because her abuser happens to come from another country!" Children are being abused, Yasmine reports, "because their government is hell-bent on cultural and moral relativism."

Yasmine is not alone. In 2010, a New Jersey judge refused a restraining order to a teenage Muslima who was raped and tortured by her arranged husband. The husband told the wife, "this is according to our religion. You are my wife, I can do anything to you. The woman, she should submit and do anything I ask her to do." The judge agreed, asserting that spousal abuse is sanctioned in Islam. The Islamapologism of useful idiots like Ben Affleck causes real harm to real victims.

Though Yasmine opens and closes with mentions of Ben Affleck, The bulk of the book is not about liberals empowering radical Islam. Rather, it is a riveting memoir of child abuse and recovery. Yasmine's mother is one of the most vile characters I have ever read about, and I've read a fair number of books about Nazism. "Mama" quite literally tortures her daughter, all in the name of making her a good Muslima.

Islamapologists will no doubt hit upon this aspect of the book. "Yasmine Mohammed's critique of Islamic gender apartheid and jihad can't be taken at face value. She was raised by an abusive mother and molested by her mother's male companions. Child abuse is her problem, not Islam," they'll say. Further, some will accuse Yasmine of stoking the flames of xenophobic hatred. "By speaking in such detail about your abuse, you make all Muslims look like monsters!" they'll say.

No, Yasmine does not stoke the flames of xenophobic hatred. In fact, Yasmine dedicates her book in part "to those of you who feel compelled to demonize all Muslims. I hope you will see that we are all just human beings and we battle our own demons." She rejects racist terms like "sandn----r" and insists that no one should misconstrue her "personal journey out of faith as an invitation to be hateful to those still in it." After reading this book, I felt great compassion and fellow feeling for Yasmine Mohammed, a woman who lived most of her life as a devout Muslim. Yasmine will, no doubt, arouse that same compassion and fellow feeling in many readers.

It's also very true that horrific child abuse occurs in non-Muslim societies as well as Muslim ones. There are several features, though, that distinguish Muslim child abuse and non-Muslim child abuse.

In her book Wholly Different, Nonie Darwish discusses the Islamic emphasis on hiding sin. Darwish contrasts this emphasis with the Judeo-Christian tradition of confession of sin and subsequent redemption. Darwish heard an Egyptian sheikh say on TV that if a follower of a sheikh witnesses the sheikh committing a sin, the follower should say, "it is my eyes that committed the sin" for having witnessed a power figure do wrong. The holy man is "masoom," infallible or free from sin. The Islamic view of public exposure of sin feeds a culture based on pride and shame. The Koran is replete with references to "shame," "disgrace," "humiliation," and "losers." These concepts contribute to thwarting attempts at rescuing abused children. If you can't see, or talk about child abuse, you can't address it.

Another cultural factor: submission to an overwhelming sense that everything "is written." "Any effort to try to create your own destiny is meaningless … your whole life is written before you take your first breath," Yasmine writes.

Yasmine describes Islam as a pyramid-shaped power structure, with unquestioning obedience required at all levels. Men submit to Allah, women submit to men, and children submit to adults. Yasmine cites a hadith that describes power descending from the ruler, to the man, to the woman, and then to the servant. There are ethnic pyramids of worth as well. Rich Gulf Arabs are superior to poor Muslims from Pakistan and India.

In such a system, "women rarely support one another. Each woman is too concerned with saving her own skin … We hold down our screaming five-year-old daughters and allow a woman to take a razor to their genitals because a man will prefer her that way." Girls are close to the bottom of the pyramid of power. Yasmine mentions the 2017 Norwegian film What Will People Say. In the film, the main character, a child of Pakistani parents growing up in Norway, abuses a cat. Why? Because she's on the bottom. She's been taught that you deal with frustration by abusing the person, or animal, beneath you on the pyramid of power. The cat is the innocent and defenseless target.

The Allah who is the pinnacle of the Islamic pyramidal power structure is a sadist whose graphic torments are detailed in the Koran. Don Richardson, in Secrets of the Koran, writes that one in every eight Koran verses is a threat of damnation. Hell is graphically described as a place with vivid tortures. By contrast, according to Richardson, the Old Testament mentions Hell once in every 774 verses, and it is never described so graphically.

In the Koran, Allah burns off the skin of the damned. They grow new skin, and that skin, in turn, is burned off, for all eternity. Young Yasmine dared ask her mother, "Won't I eventually get used to it?"

No, her mother replied. "Allah will make sure that every single time it hurts as much as the first time."

The hadiths, as well as the Koran, contain graphic tortures of Hell. In one hadith, Mohammed reports that he saw women hanging by their hair, with their brains boiling. Their crime? They refused to wear hijab.

Total, unquestioning obedience under pain of eternal damnation is pounded into Muslims several times a day, with the daily prayers. Islamic prayer indoctrinates Muslims in mindless obedience and group, not individual, behavior. Yasmine details the robotic movements that must accompany each syllable. These syllables, she says, are meaningless to most Muslims, who don't understand classical Arabic. They must merely memorize syllables and repeat them over and over to the point where the mind is numbed. When praying in a group, they must stand touching other Muslims. This physical contact provides an extra layer of surveillance. If a Muslim shirks a given, required movement, other Muslims will not only see it, they will feel it. Too, Muslims are assured that their prophet is watching them pray, "Make your rows straight for I can see you behind my back." Any deviation from prescribed activity is automatically a ticket to Hell. If you don't touch another Muslim while praying, you leave room for Satan, and you will be punished. "Do not leave any gaps for the Shaytaan. Whoever complete [sic] a row, Allaah will reward him, and whoever breaks a row, Allaah will forsake him."

"The prayers are mind-numbingly repetitive. There is no room for the slightest variation. Every ceremonial motion and every word is specific and methodic, stripping … Muslims … of any individuality. Get in line. Follow the herd. No distractions … The meaning [of prayer] was never discussed … Questioning only lead to anger and admonishment," Yasmine writes. Islam is so thorough in outlining how Muslims are to live that there is a specific ritualistic way to cut fingernails and dispose of clippings.

When Yasmine finally does learn the meaning of the words she's been repeating, she realizes she's been indoctrinated. "Nearly twenty times a day, I was referring to non-Muslims as the enemies of Allah. I was chanting that Muslims who became friends with non-Muslims were doomed to Hell, that non-Muslims were the vilest of animals, only fit to be used as fuel for the fires of Hell, that Jewish people were sub-human … I remember one of my aunts lamenting that the cucumbers were smaller this year because the Jews were putting cancer in the vegetables … At least five times a day over a billion people are droning on, calling for the death of all non-Muslims."

Yasmine describes her younger self being bound, whipped, caned, and locked up. Mama tells little Yasmine that she has no value whatsoever. Indeed, Yasmine is told again and again that she is a slut, prostitute, and whore, even though she is a chaste virgin, and, later, a dutiful wife in an arranged marriage. Don't worry that reading a book about graphic child abuse will be too upsetting. Yasmine's descriptions are searing, but brief. The reader never forgets that the author of these nightmarish accounts is an adult powerhouse who managed to break free both of her tormentors and the Islam that her tormentors cited as justification.

After each incident is described, Yasmine offers a corresponding quote from Islamic sacred texts that is used to justify such tortures. Young Yasmine must kneel at her mother's feet and kiss them. This is because Islam teaches that "Paradise is under the feet of mothers." Mama determines whether Yasmine will go to Heaven or Hell. Yasmine is bound and hung upside down from a hook used to hang the lamb sacrificed for the Eid holiday. A woman, a sacrificial animal, little difference. "Hang your whip where members of your household (your wife, children, and slaves) can see it, for that will discipline them," says one hadith. Another, "Teach your children to pray when they are seven years old, and smack them if they do not do so when they are ten."

Yasmine does not cite Koran 18:65-81. In this passage, Musa, meant to be the Biblical Moses, is depicted as following and learning from Khidr, a "slave of Allah." Khidr murders an innocent child. Musa objects. Khidr reprimands Moses for objecting. Khidr explains that the boy's parents were Muslims and "we feared lest he should make disobedience and ingratitude to come upon them." In the place of the child Khidr murdered, Allah "might give them in his place one better than him." The Koran itself offers a passage often interpreted to mean that Muslim parents have the right to life and death over their own children.

When discussing honor killing, Robert Spencer reminds his readers that, "A manual of Islamic law certified as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, says that 'retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.' However, 'not subject to retaliation' is 'a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring's offspring.' ('Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2). In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law."

I admire Yasmine for being so frank as to recount how long she stayed loyal to her abusive mother, and to religious observance that she felt to be destroying her very sense of self. Again and again the door swings open and Yasmine walks past that open door and back into the sick, twisted prison of her mother's oppressive hold. Again and again, Yasmine sees utterly plainly how destructive her mother is, and yet Yasmine continues to live with her and crave her love, a love this poisonous viper would never bestow on her precious daughter.

Yasmine marries the man her mother tells her to marry, though she does not love him. This man, Essam Marzouk, beats Yasmine so badly she miscarries their second child. Eventually, slowly but surely, Yasmine breaks her conditioning, leaves her family, abandons her veil, and marries a non-Muslim man. The reader rejoices for her.

This reader has one problem with Unveiled and other media produced by some Ex-Muslims, including the Ex-Muslims of North America. These ex-Muslims decide, "I discovered that Islam is oppressive, therefore, all religion is oppressive nonsense." Their dismissals are based not only on scanty knowledge of the scripture and dogma of other faiths, but also ignorance of how other faiths have influenced society.

Yasmine says, again and again, that her encounters with non-Muslims were like encounters, as she herself puts it, with "angels." There's a reason that the non-Muslims Yasmine encountered treated her with concern and decency. That reason is their training, very different from her own. They were raised in a Judeo-Christian society, that upholds Judeo-Christian values.

In the Old Testament, God orders Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. God stops the sacrifice. For hundreds of years, Jews and Christians have understood this story as separating God's chosen people from the surrounding Canaanite society, where child sacrifice to Moloch was practiced. Archaeology confirms Biblical accounts. Various Phoenician societies around the Mediterranean, including the Canaanites and Carthaginians, left evidence of child sacrifice. Child sacrifice was also practiced by several Native American cultures, including Chimu, Inca, Maya, Aztec, Mississippian and Pawnee; it possibly occurred in Ancient Greece, and child sacrifice occurs today among Hindus in India.

Contemporary scholars debate whether or not the Isaac story was originally understood as a stand against child sacrifice, but Christians and Jews themselves understand it that way, and that interpretation was explicitly advanced by a Jewish scholar eight hundred years ago. In any case, Biblical verse after verse condemns parents killing their own children.

The New Testament could not be more dramatic in emphasizing the value of children. God, the omnipotent creator of the universe, enters time in the body of a helpless infant born of a lowly peasant girl, among stock animals in a stable. Jesus famously says, "Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as little child shall in no wise enter therein."

Pregnant with Jesus, Mary recites the Magnificat, "He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek." Jesus says, "The last shall be first, and the first, last," and "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." Again and again, the Bible overturns the pyramid of power.

Early Christian critic Celsus, a Greek Pagan, dismissed Christianity as a religion that attracted those on the bottom. Christianity, Celsus sneered, is a religion of women, of children, and of slaves. The Pagan Roman legal code attributed to Romulus allowed for the murder of female children, and female infanticide was common in the ancient, Pagan world. A Greek comedy from the third century BC records, "Everyone, even a poor man, raises a son; everyone, even a wealthy man, exposes a daughter." Rodney Stark theorizes that Christianity's remarkable success can be attributed partially to Christianity's remarkable respect for the personhood of women and children, even female infants. "Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born," said the Didache, "a first century manual of Church teachings." Early Christianity's valuing of young, female human beings is unforgettably depicted in The Acts of Paul and Thecla, about a Pagan girl who converts to Christianity and boldly asserts her own full worth in the face of murderous Pagan opposition. Finally, of course, Christianity mandates confession and repentance, rather than the hiding of sin.

Non-believers have only a partial picture when they refuse to consider how Judeo-Christian teaching and Christian faith have fostered the features they value in Western Civilization. Yes, child abuse occurs in Christian families and institutions as well as in Muslim ones. But there is a difference between, say, Jordan, a relatively modern Muslim-majority country, and the United States. In Jordan, honor killing is a perpetual problem. Families practice it; authorities look the other way. The ancient Koran story of Khidr, a revered Muslim character who killed a child because the child might someday embarrass his devout Muslim parents, is carried out daily in Muslim countries. In countries with a Judeo-Christian heritage, killing your child because the child might embarrass you is not supported by the wider society. Some cultures provide guardrails and tools that can be used to dismantle human dysfunction. Other cultures provide scriptures that uphold hate and abuse.

Not just honor killing oppresses Muslim women and girls. Clitoredectomy, child and forced marriage, and polygamy are all part of day-to-day life. Sharia dictates that women inherit half of what men inherit, and the testimony of two women equals the testimony of one man. Women cannot pray when they are menstruating. In a hadith, Mohammed himself cited the ban on women praying during their menstruation as proof that women are "deficient in religion" and make up the majority of the damned in Hell. A woman, Mohammed insisted, must satisfy their husband's demand for sex, even while riding on a camel's back. One could go on. Denigration of the value of the lives of girls and women is deeply embedded in the Koran and hadiths.

Rodney Stark ended his book The Victory of Reason with a quote he attributes to a Chinese scholar. "One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world. We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West is so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don't have any doubt about this."

I hope (and pray) that the aversion that immersion in Islam taught ex-Muslims to feel for all religion does not blind them to the impact of the Judeo-Christian tradition on what they value in kuffar society – including the right to self-identify as an atheist, and not be killed for doing so.

Yasmine Mohammed's book is receiving terrific reviews on Amazon. Yasmine deserves more. Krista Tippett hosts On Being on National Public Radio. Tippett markets a soft-focus, touchy-feely Islam. Terry Gross frequently features memoir authors on Fresh Air. Tippett, Gross, the New York Times, all should provide Yasmine Mohammed with a platform. Truth and courage demand it.

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery

Defiance A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria Book Review

 

Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria

A must-read book by a Syrian heroine

Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria was published by Viking on February 24, 2026. It is 432 pages long.

Syrian photojournalist Loubna Mrie was born in 1991. Mrie's father was an assassin for the Assad regime. Mrie describes a relatively privileged childhood followed by more straitened circumstances after her parents' divorce. She witnessed, and then participated in, the Syrian civil war (2011 - 2024). Her participation alienated her father. Eventually Mrie moved to the United States where she remains.

Defiance is one of the most remarkable books I have ever read. The writing is exquisite. Sensuous vignettes engage the reader's sight, hearing, scent, taste, and touch. Descriptions initially evoke a privileged girl's Syria: the smell of the bills in cash gifts from daddy, and the smell of hairspray on date night as girls stroll along a seaside corniche. The book progresses, and we enter a courageous journalist's Syria at war. We visit an apartment that Loubna has never bothered to clean, until a date with a sexy American aid worker inspires her to tidy up before his arrival. We witness protesters, shot by government thugs, bleed to death on Syria's streets. We cringe as ulcers pock the faces of victims of leishmaniasis, caused by sand-fly bites.

Defiance is intimate, written with an unflinching courage and profound insight found only in the highest literature. Too many other authors, recounting their adventures in danger zones, depict themselves as purely heroic. Mrie is humble enough, and values truth enough, to expose the good, the bad, and the ugly in her own character. I suspect that she is far more admirable than she herself realizes. In her writing, she reveals her own admiration for others who gave the ultimate sacrifice for their ideals. I hope she overcomes whatever survivor guilt that may haunt her.

Carl Rogers' dictum "the more personal, the more universal," applies to Mrie's writing. As Mrie explores her own motivations, reactions, and perceptions, she increases our own insight into ourselves. Yes, if we had been raised as she was raised, we, too, would find it hard to voice a protest against even a monster like Hafez al-Assad. Yes, if we had lived through what she had lived through, we, too, might succumb to alcoholism, one-night stands, and blackouts.

Bassem Youssef and the Self-Imposed Limitations of the Nice Muslim

Bassem Youssef and the Self-Imposed Limitations of the Nice Muslim

Review of Tickling Giants and Revolution for Dummies

Tickling Giants is a 111-minute, 2017 documentary that tells the story of "Egypt's Jon Stewart." Tickling Giants is produced, written and directed by Sara Taksler. She's a relative unknown who does a technically excellent job, earning her 100% fresh rating at RottenTomatoes.

Bassem Youssef is a cardiothoracic surgeon with movie-star looks and charisma. In 2011, when he was 37, he began broadcasting satirical commentary on the Arab Spring. He produced videos in the laundry room of his apartment and posted them on YouTube. He hoped for a few thousand hits. He reached millions of viewers.

Youssef graduated to TV. An estimated forty million viewers watched his show – the largest ratings in Egyptian TV history. Jon Stewart had around two million viewers per show. Tickling Giants' account of Youssef's career is captivating and inspirational, occasionally funny and often quite sad. It was shot mostly in Cairo. Unless I blinked and missed it, you never see a pyramid, but, rather, street scenes, traffic, the Nile, and protests in Tahrir Square. Tickling Giants depicts appreciative Egyptian audiences gathering in outdoor cafes to laugh at Youssef's show on big-screen TVs.

Youssef satirized Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hosni Mubarak, Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian army and Egypt's current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Youssef faced tighter and tighter restrictions on what he could say. He and his staff faced greater and greater personal threats. Thugs, possibly paid by the government, chanted "Death to Youssef" outside his studio. An imam discussed whether it would be permissible to kill Youssef. The imam counseled, "Not yet." Youssef's collaborator, Tarek, had to abandon Egypt. Tarek's father and brother were arrested and held for months without any reason. Youssef himself eventually was forced out of Egypt. Tickling Giants ends with Youssef in exile, giving talks in support of free speech at prestigious awards ceremonies in Western nations. He now lives in the US with his wife and children.  

Youssef's show had a large staff of creative, young, dynamos. The scenes of these idealists gazing out the window of their offices at the thugs calling for their deaths, and the arrival of armed troops to form a cordon in front of their studio, reminded me of life in Poland in 1989. The year that Soviet-imposed Polish communism breathed its last, I participated in demonstrations organized by the Orange Alternative, a group that undermined the authorities through humor. We held a rally celebrating the Red Army. Young Polish rebels gave elaborate, satirical speeches expressing "gratitude" for being "liberated" by the Russians.

As fine as Tickling Giants is, and as much as I could identify with its revolutionary spirit, I kept seeing the empty spaces where the censor's X-Acto knife had sliced out key elements of the Arab Spring story.

In 2011, the year Youssef's show launched, journalist Lara Logan was beaten and sexually assaulted by hundreds of men in Tahrir Square. They called her a Jew. She is not Jewish. The assailants used their cellphones to record their assault.

That same year, the otherwise anonymous "Girl in the Blue Bra" was dragged across pavement, beaten with batons, and kicked by Egyptian military. After they stripped off her abaya, one soldier stepped directly on her breasts, clothed only in a blue bra. Her abused image traveled round the world. Hillary Clinton decried "the systematic degradation of Egyptian women."

Tahrir Square is inextricably linked with taharrush. Men encircle women, sexually assault them, and video-record the assaults. Al Akhbar describes taharrush as a "prominent feature" of life in Egypt, and reports that Egyptian women as well as men tend to blame the victim. President Sisi visited a taharrush victim in the hospital. The Guardian, a liberal newspaper, ran an article entitled, "80 Sexual Assaults in One Day – The Other Story Of Tahrir Square." During New Year's celebrations in 2015-16, Muslim men committed mass sexual assaults in Europe. Maajid Nawaz and others pointed to Tahrir Square as the possible petri dish of this contagion.

In Tickling Giants, the protestors are all right-thinking idealists, engaged in a communal effort as wholesome as an Amish barn-raising. Women are prominent as onscreen spokespersons.

The Arab Spring included notorious attacks by Muslims on Christians in Egypt and throughout the Middle East. "Arab Spring, Christian Fall?" asked many observers. Numerous deadly attacks occurred in Egypt alone. "In post-Arab-Spring Egypt, Muslim attacks on Christians are rising," The Washington Post reported. Youssef lived in a city, Cairo, where the army killed dozens, and injured hundreds of Christians in the October, 2011, Maspero Massacre. Asianews reported that on August 16, 2013, a Christian cab driver was dragged from his vehicle by a Muslim mob and beaten to death. His body was later beheaded. In 2015, by which time Youssef was a resident fellow at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, ISIS decapitated twenty-one Copts. There is an archive of similar attacks of Muslims on Christians here. This incomplete list includes 129 attacks on Christians in Egypt since 2004. Tickling Giants makes no significant reference to the Arab Spring's deadly persecution of Christians.

It's possible that Sara Taksler left out some of the darker aspects of the Arab Spring because of time constraints. In a June, 2017, "Talks at Google" interview, though, Taksler may have provided a clue as to another reason. "Oprah was the first black friend many white Americans ever had," Taksler said. "In a time of Muslim bans I want viewers to feel close to a Muslim." Perhaps Taksler concluded that her viewers, to feel close to a Muslim, required a whitewashed version of the Arab Spring.

Two more things the X-Acto knife left out of Tickling Giants. What, exactly, was Bassem Youssef risking his life to resist? And what, exactly, was Bassem Youssef risking his life to support? In Poland in '89 we knew what we were against and what we were for. "Sowieci do domu," "My chcemy boga," and "Niech zyje Polska niepodlegla," we chanted: "Soviets go home," "We want God," and "Long live independent Poland." In the documentary, the closest Youssef comes to a manifesto is in pro-humor statements like "If people can laugh at their differences maybe they can laugh at each other rather than hate each other."

Youssef's 285-page, 2017 Harper Collins memoir, Revolution for Dummies: Laughing through the Arab Spring offers a bit more of a manifesto than does the film. Youssef writes that the revolution's liberals wanted something like the American Bill of Rights. "Islamists were fighting for a divine cause but we liberals were viewed as wusses who had nothing left in us to fight for our cause … maybe because other than not wanting to be ruled by religious dogma or a military dictatorship and seeking equality for all and other hippie principles, we hadn't really settled on a clearly defined cause." His "hippie principles" included "human rights and freedom."

Youssef, in his book, is much more aware of Muslim anti-Christian violence and hate, and much more open in his contempt for religious demagogues than is the Youssef of Tickling Giants. The beating of The Girl in the Blue Bra caused him to break down in tears. "I can't remember if what I was writing was funny or not, but I remember that I wanted to go after all those assholes with a vengeance." He procured a video of "one of the most watched religious channels that showed the scumbags making fun of her." On his own TV show, Youssef was depicted watching clerics denigrating The Girl in the Blue Bra. While he watched this, he spat. "It gave the message that I was literally spitting on the 'holy sheikhs.' … In the Arab world, this is a major insult at religious authority. I didn't care. I was proud of my defiance."

Youssef is insightful and frank about his fellow Muslims' hypocrisy. While vilifying the West, Muslims yearn to enjoy everything the West has accomplished. "We hate your guts, but we would kill to get your visa," he writes. "Outside the American embassy, you can find lines for visas longer than the ones outside of best Buy on Black Friday." "If Muslims were given a choice to vote for either a secular or a religious state they would vote for the religious state and flee to live in the secular one." A Salafi who publicly justified an attack on the American embassy, was, three years later, finishing up a Harvard degree. The mother and sister of another Salafi, Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, are American citizens.

The book makes clear that Youssef's idealistic colleagues were not representatives of an organized, politically viable demographic in Egypt. Youssef's own mother criticized his show. This caused a rift so severe that he did not speak to her for a long time; after he did so, she died in her sleep. Tarek's father and brother were Muslim Brotherhood supporters. Show staff were pressured by their own families. When "even some of your extended family members share posts on Facebook accusing you of treason," you lose enthusiasm to continue the revolution.

In his memoir, with thudding repetitiveness, Youssef voices cultural relativism. I can list only a few examples.

* "If the Muslim Brotherhood were the Southern Baptists, the Salafis were the Westboro Baptist Church."

* Tahrir Square protesters are comparable to Occupy Wall Street protesters.

* "Salafis who cover women in black potato sacks are no different from what the extreme Hasidic Jews do to their women."

* Muslim men want to have sex with "four teenage brides" while Catholics want to have sex with "An altar boy in a Catholic church … then it's God's will."

* On meeting Jon Stewart: "When we compared the politics of hate and xenophobia in both of our countries we found things to be sadly similar."

* Salafist politician Hazem Salah Abu Ismail insists that Pepsi stands for "pay every penny to save Israel." He wants an Egyptian morality police comparable to Saudi Arabia's, that enforces the mandatory veiling of women. Abu Ismail also recommends hand amputation for thieves. According to Youssef, Abu Ismail is comparable to Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Michelle Bachman, and Sarah Palin.

* Salafis, "with their stupidity and bigotry," are "our Muslim rednecks" or "Muslim hillbillies."

* Islam is "just going through puberty. Christianity and Judaism have already gone through their rebellious phases. Judaism with its ancient weird rules and destructive wars and Christianity with the Inquisition and the Crusades."

* Youssef worries about his daughter. "I wondered if her beautiful brown skin and her curly black hair will cause her any trouble" in America.

* Youssef suggests that American media invented the problematic side of Islam. "Exhausted stereotypes of women wearing black potato sacks from foreheads to pinkie toes depicted in Indiana Jones movies." There were no "scary terrorists" in the "1940s, 50s, and 60s," he says. Only after "the real Soviet Union collapsed and the American media needed a scarecrow" did Muslims "step in to fill the gap."

* Youssef blames America for supporting Israel "every time they bombed the shit out of the Palestinians." Youssef never mentions Palestinian-on-Israeli violence. Youssef reports that Israel "has fought four wars with Egypt." Youssef does not report that Egypt invaded Israel and threatened Israel's very right to exist.

Youssef sought asylum in the US. Since arrival, he has used American freedom to criticize America and Christians as hateful, xenophobic, and Islamophobic, and responsible for the problems in the Muslim world. See for example here, here, and here.

Bassem Youssef really did risk his life to criticize, not just Middle Eastern strongmen like Mubarak, Morsi, and Sisi, but he risked his life to criticize Muslims and Islam. And this Muslim, this heroic, chance-taking Muslim, this brilliant, multilingual heart surgeon and TV star, is still wrong about Islam, Christianity, and even what he himself is fighting for. Youssef's failings give us a clue about the hope for reform from within the Muslim world. If a courageous, celebrated risk-taker and iconoclast like Bassem Youssef can't bring himself directly to critique what Islam has done to his own people, who will?

I wish I could address Bassem Youssef directly. I wish I could grab his impeccably tailored lapels and say to him, "Let's get real. No, the Crusades are not comparable to Jihad. No, the Spanish Inquisition is not comparable to Islamic repression. Read these articles, here and here. They both take on the Inquisitions and Crusades logical fallacies. When you are done, come back, because, Bassem, I want to talk to you about what you were fighting for, and what you were fighting against.

Bassem, you can't yet bring yourself to come out and say it, but what you were fighting against is what Islam has done to your beloved country. What you were fighting for were not, as you put it, "Hippie principles," but, rather, Judeo-Christian, Western values.

Back in 2002, the Arab Human Development Report shocked readers. In spite of being awash in petro-dollars, the Arab world, the heart of Islam, is rotting. Non-Muslim nations, including formerly poor nations like South Korea, surpass it. Hindu India, once part of the same land as Muslim Pakistan, has been able to create and sustain democracy. In the Arab World, the New York Times wrote, "Per capita income growth has shrunk in the last 20 years to a level just above that of sub-Saharan Africa. Productivity is declining. Research and development are weak or nonexistent. Science and technology are dormant. Intellectuals flee a stultifying – if not repressive – political and social environment."

Why does Islam affect countries this way? Bassem, you say you hate authoritarianism. In Islam, half of the human race is placed inextricably beneath the other half. It's as if, 1400 years ago, a building collapsed on half of all humanity in the Muslim world, and those crushed humans have had to function as best they can with unbearable compression on their lungs, brains, and hearts. Men are advised to beat women. Women are unworthy to testify as men do. Women inherit a fraction of what men inherit. In the diya, or blood money, system, human inequality is enshrined. Blood money for a Muslim man is magnitudes higher than blood money for a non-Muslim female.

Bassem, you fret about your daughter's fate in America. Please. Muslim countries, including Egypt, consistently monopolize lists of the worst places on earth to be a woman. Ten of the worst ten countries for women in the World Economic Forum list are Muslim-majority countries. Eight of the ten countries on The Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security's list are Muslim-majority countries. Bassem you know darn well, but don't want to admit, that your daughter's horizon in the US is much brighter than it would have been in her Muslim homeland.

A third of Egyptian women are illiterate. Egypt's abysmal gap between male literacy rates and female literacy rates is echoed throughout the Muslim world. Approximately 90% of females in Egypt have undergone some form of FGM. Your fellow Egyptian physician, Nawal el-Saadawi, describes her FGM as an act of misogynist terrorism. You can read Dr. el-Saadawi's first person account here. Egypt is a "high sex ratio" country, where there are more males than females. Women and girls are simply less likely to survive in Egypt than in Judeo-Christian cultures.

Bassem you say you support freedom of conscience. Muslims have told me that verses like Koran 49:15 inform them that even a second's doubt in Allah will result in their going to Hell. The only assurance any Muslim has of avoiding Hell is dying in jihad.

Bassem, you want an Egypt where power can be criticized. Islam dictates that whoever insults Mohammed, the Koran, or Islam must be killed. Whoever loses his Islamic faith must be killed. Even merely stating that the Koran was created is a capital crime. Bassem, show me a Muslim-majority nation with freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and political satire. Turkey is often held up as a Muslim democracy. Turkey jails more journalists than any other nation, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Turkish Nobel Prize Winner Orhan Pamuk was put on trial for mentioning the Armenian Genocide. Booker Prize Winner Salman Rushdie lives with a death threat hanging over his head. Egyptian Nobel Prize Winner Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck for writing a novel that an imam didn't like.

Andrew Bostom quoted Bernard Lewis in his piece on "Totalitarian Islam." "The political history of Islam is one of almost unrelieved autocracy … authoritarian, often arbitrary, sometimes tyrannical. There are no parliaments or representative assemblies of any kind, no councils or communes, no chambers of nobility or estates, no municipalities in the history of Islam; nothing but the sovereign power, to which the subject owed complete and unwavering obedience as a religious duty imposed by the Holy Law." Bassem, you blame US interference for the Middle East's totalitarian regimes. Please address Lewis' points, above, and tell me how free the Muslim World was during the millennium before the US came onto the world stage.

Bassem, you say you want a world without hate. You write, "It was normal for Christians to hear hateful speeches against them during Friday prayer sermons blasted through the microphones from mosques near their homes" but this is "not necessarily a religious thing. It is more of an authority thing."

Bassem, Muslims pray five times a day not to be like Jews, who anger God, or Christians, who have gone astray. Tell me how you can eliminate hate in Egypt when the Koran tells Muslims not to take Jews or Christians as friends, that non-Muslims are "vile," and to be harsh to non-Muslims. Tell me, Bassem, how you will bring about your cherished hate-free, equality and human-rights-respecting Egypt under the Pact of Umar, which commands the complete subjugation of non-Muslims, a subjugation that is detailed in multiple Islamic canonical sources.

Bassem, you used your star power to mock and humiliate Andy Hallinan, who responded to jihadi murder of innocent Americans by declaring his Florida gun store a "Muslim-free zone." Bassem, rather than humiliating Hallinan, you could talk to him as an equal. You could say, "I'm sorry that Muslims murder innocents. Let's work on solving this problem together." You say that "The overwhelming majority of Muslims deplore" terrorist acts, "just as much as the rest of you." Bassem, the 2013 Pew Poll revealed that millions of Muslims endorse suicide bombing, including almost one in three Egyptians. Seventy-five percent of Egyptians don't believe that Arabs carried out the 9-11 terror attacks. Seventy-four percent of Egyptians want Sharia as the national law. Eighty-seven percent of Muslims in your region say that a woman must obey her husband. Only about half of Egyptians say they have a positive view of Christians – more Americans have a positive view of Muslims. And yet you insist that Americans "hate Muslims." And you trot poor Andy Hallinan out on your American TV show and insist that American "rednecks" are the real problem.

Bassem, in your book, you wrote, "Secularism is a fair playground. … When I disagree with a liberal or a socialist, I can knock his theories and politics out the window. I can simply tell him that they are wrong by logically arguing my position. But how can … I tell you that you are wrong when you claim to be speaking in the name of God? I can't compete with God and I can't tell you that God is wrong … If you are labeled as someone who disrespects Islam it is like having an opponent with a royal flush in a game of poker. Nothing beats it; there is no trump card." The Salafist Abu Ismail, you report, defended his "ISIS-like thoughts" with "I didn't make this up; they are only God's words."

Bassem, you understood what you were up against when you wrote the above lines. Why, then, when you came to the US, did you attack Christians? Why not take your critique of Islam to its logical conclusions, as did you fellow Egyptian Nonie Darwish?

Bassem, you insist that Islamism is merely a product of American media. You say it didn't exist before the 1940s. You chastise "extremists" who called for the destruction of the pyramids, just as the Taliban vandals, in 2001, destroyed Afghanistan's 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddhas, once the largest standing Buddha sculptures in the world, just as ISIS destroyed ancient treasures. You say that any Muslim targeting the pyramids "could be viewed as a crazy man who had no weight and no real merit in the Islamist community." Bassem, would-be pyramid destroyers represent canonical Islam. And Islam was like this well before the 1940s. There is a gash in the Menkaure pyramid. It was put there by Saladin's son, hardly a fringe figure. On the basis of Islamic values, al-Malek al-Aziz Othman ben Yusuf tried to destroy the pyramids. The only reason he stopped was because destruction was too much work.

Bassem, you make excuses for Islam. "It's young," you insist. Mormonism, at about two-hundred-years-old, is much younger. Mormons are not destroying pyramids, murdering apostates, and sexually mutilating the genitals of defenseless little girls. Some argue that regional cultures and poverty are the problem. Let's look at Africa, your natal continent. African Christians, living side-by-side with Muslims, are more than twice as likely to be educated than Muslims. I lived in an African village, in the C.A.R. The village had no electricity, running water, or paved roads. Christians attended a Western-style school, where they learned math, science, and foreign languages, and Muslim males attended a madrassa. They squatted, day after day, memorizing the Koran – the alpha and omega of their education.

In your beloved Egypt, Bassem, the story goes that the books of the great library of Alexandria were used to heat the bath water of a Muslim conqueror's troops. "If these books contain material already in the Koran, they are redundant," he said. "If they contain material that is not in the Koran, they are heretical." No one knows if this story is true, but an astute observer commented that people believed it to be true, because of Islamic hostility to formal education.

Want current statistics rather than ancient anecdotes? Again, from the UN Arab Development Report, "The total number of books translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years is fewer than those translated into Spanish in one year. Greece – with a population of fewer than 11 million – translates five times as many books from abroad into Greek annually as the 22 Arab countries combined, with a total population of more than 300 million, translate into Arabic … only two Egyptians per million people were granted patents, compared to 30 in Greece and 35 in Israel (for Syria, the figure was zero)."

Bassem, you recently said that "Religious fundamentalists and military fundamentalists are basically the same. They both want to ignore the truth and replace it with propaganda." You reject hate, you embrace equality, human rights and women's rights, and you want a world safe for political satire. Bassem, you aren't at the point where you can admit it yet, but you reject Islam, and you have embraced Western Values. I look forward to the day when you can say so openly. You'll be joining a great bunch of people, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Mosab Hassan Yousef, Nabeel Qureshi, Wafa Sultan, and Nonie Darwish.

Danusha Goska is the author of Save Send Delete, Bieganski, and the upcoming God through Binoculars

 This first appeared in Front Page Magazine here

Ten Truths about Hijab: Let's Expand Our Definition of "Diversity" to Include Rebellious Muslimas

Ten Truths about Hijab

Let's Expand Our Definition of "Diversity" to Include Rebellious Muslimas

In a city I cannot name, on a date I cannot specify, an anonymous woman and I embarked on a risky drive to an institution whose address I cannot disclose. "Aisha" and I had eaten, gabbed, laughed, worked and dreamed together. I had met her family. They were lovely people. They planned to kill her. She had violated their Islamic expectations. Thus our drive to a remote safe house. In the United States. In the twentieth century.