Critical Thoughts

Here’s the thing about Wafa Sultan, that crazy Arab-American byotch whose video was and is being circulated around by her adoring legion of Islamophobic fans. The video, originally released by MEMRI, was heavily sanitised and censored. What came out was merely a fraction of the whole show. Of course it was not mentioned that in the later part of the show Wafa Sultan got owned by the guest visitor of the show: Ibrahim al-Khouly, a professor at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt.

I am only mentioning Wafa Sultan now because I find that even months after the actual show (it was in early January 2006…could be wrong here), Islamophobes are still circulating links to her video, whether it is to MEMRI or it is to YouTube, vis-a-vis the fallacy of appealing to authority , i.e. that she is an Arab and that she knows what she is talking about.

The full transcript of the actual debate can be seen here. Downloadable PDF file is here. In fact if I do come across some idiot singing praises of Wafa Sultan, I think I’ll just pass the link of this post to them.

Seriously. When I listened to that clip on YouTube of that interview between him and Al-Jazeera, once it was over I was totally speechless at the end of it. Not because he explained his side of the story well, but because he totally made a fool of himself with his broken English and lack of understanding regarding the situation on the ground. He even contradicted himself in several parts of the interview. In the end, I do not know who was more embarrassed: the journalist conducting the interview with him or yours truly for having a moron like this as Information Minister.

And I still wonder what was the criteria that got him into the Cabinet in the first place, or even standing for a seat in Parliament.