Meanwhile, read this by Ayan Hirsi Ali

I left last Monday night's Free Thinking Film Society and International Free Press Society so chilled that I have not been able to write about it yet.

In the meantime, here's an interview with Sam Solomon, who was one of the speakers Monday night.

Here's a link to an interview with Bat Ye'or also by Vlad Tepes.

Listen and see why I have such a sense of alarm, mostly about how decayed and in denial our western civilization is. If we do not wake up and revive our foundations, we are toast.

Meanwhile, read this excerpt of Nomad by the courageous Ayan Hirsi Ali, in today's National Post.

This sense of honor and male entitlement drastically restricts women’s choices. A whole culture and its religion weigh down every Muslim, but the heaviest weight falls disproportionately on women’s shoulders. We are bound to obey and bound to chastity and shame by Allah and the Prophet and by the fathers and husbands who are our guardians. The women along Whitechapel Road carry the burdens of all the obligations and religious rules that in Islam focus so obsessively on women, as surely as their counterparts in East Africa.

I still felt pained by the shame that I had cast on my father’s good name. Because I was an apostate, an unbeliever, because I now lived as a Western woman, I had hurt him and harmed him, even defiled him by my rebellion. But I also knew that my rebellion was necessary, was vital.

Sahra had taken the contrary path. She did not rebel. Sahra was deeply religious and that she wore the jilbab, a long black robe that covers your hair and all your body past your ankles and wrists, but not your face. Sahra’s black shroud extended beyond the tips of her fingers and trailed on the ground; she sought with every word and gesture to express her submission to Allah’s will and to the authority of men.

The Muslim veil, the different sorts of masks and beaks and burkas, are all gradations of mental slavery. You must ask permission to leave the house, and when you do go out you must always hide yourself behind thick drapery. Ashamed of your body, suppressing your desires — what small space in your life can you call your own? The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex.

Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/06/12/ayaan-hirsi-ali-the-wests-silent-toleration-of-sexual-subjugation/#ixzz0qeRSEFGe
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