I lived in countries that had no democracy... so I don't find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don't know what it is not to have freedom.

We had a world dominated by the Soviet Union on the one hand, and the Americans on the other hand. They called it the Cold War. But it wasn't cold. I am someone who comes from the third world. In the third world, the cold war wasn't cold. Millions had been killed. It was a proxy war.

But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can't acquire knowledge.

The demand that Islam makes of women is to not attract attention to yourself, and if you are in a secular society, that attire does exactly that, and it is a political symbol, no longer religious.

What I find daunting always is to stand on a stage and talk to people, whether they agree with me or not.

I'd love to go and visit the Mosque in Mecca again, just for the sheer beauty of it, not for God - much the way a non-Catholic might go to Vatican City because of the beauty of the buildings and the artifacts.

After the horrific massacre Wednesday at the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, perhaps the West will finally put away its legion of useless tropes trying to deny the relationship between violence and radical Islam.