When someone comes under abuse or attack a characteristic response is to blame yourself, especially if you are locked into a relationship of being attacked regularly, and making apologies for your abuser. It actually affects Christians living in Islamic circumstances more, and one Palestinian Christian spoke about that problem of needing to defend Islam in order to protect yourself.

There are three foundational issues or three divisions that I should say that Sharia fits into, one is penal law of course and that is what gets all the attention, there's two countries in the world right now that actually have a Federal mandate to enact penal law according to the Sharia, that's Saudi Arabia, and Iran.

There's no such thing as values in Sharia law, that is what I was trying to explain, it's understood in thousands of different ways by tens of thousands of different institutions, who really disagree with each other far more than they disagree with people of other religions.

The values that you bring to Sharia are whatever values you yourself have, if you are a bigot, misogynist and a violent person, your interpretation of Sharia will be bigoted, violent and misogynistic, if you are a democrat and a pluralist and someone who is peace loving, that's how you'll see the Sharia.

Some people in the west have responded to the terrorist attacks by trying to look for everything that is positive in Islam. I think that was a strong response after 9/11, was to try to reach out as positively as possible.

There are some disturbing messages in the Koran, there were declarations of war against non-believers, there's a declaration that Islam should be triumphant over other religions, the problem is this is not just in the book, but preached throughout the Islamic world that are preached, we in the West hear about that.

We only have one penal code in the United States, and it applies in every single state, every city, no matter who is there. This is part of the fear mongering, that has gripped the United States, the notion that we need to pass a law forbidding the institution of a foreign Law in the United States when it is forbidden by the constitutions is yet another example of targeting Muslim communities because they are seen as different, or exceptional in other ways.