With eyes wide open

'Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these [Muslim] dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.'

- Phyllis Chesler writes in the Times, recalling the experience of two years as a bride in Afghanistan. Read it all.