Nonie Darwish, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji are brave women, as was the murdered Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi.

They are some of the few women who have told the world what it’s like to be a Muslim woman today, not only in a Muslim country (as in the case of Hirsi Ali and Darwish) but also in the West, where women like Hirsi Ali live under the threat of death.

Recall that she is the woman who was forced to go into hiding after the murder of Theo van Gogh, her filmic collaborator and critic of Islam.

Others are stepping forward: Marina Nemat, a Christian Iranian woman and Zarah Ghahramani (Iranian-Kurdish) have recently published accounts of their torture in the Evin prison, where Kazemi perished.

I don’t condemn the practice of Islam per se. But I do stand horrified when it has come to be a religion of terror, oppression, suicide and murder. For those who would excuse the repressive countries these women come from – and others as well – I have no time.

A four part discussion series, “Manufacturing Islam,” is taking place here at the University of British Columbia’s St. John’s College. It featured a keynote address by Zarqa Nawaz, producer of the CBC sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie. (Unfortunately, the dialogues are on Saturday, so I could not attend.)

In her talk, as reported Jan. 14 in the Vancouver Sun, Nawaz replied to critics who say the show should deal more directly with Muslims engaged in armed conflict by noting that Seinfeld failed to deal with the contentious issue of Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory.

It would be refreshing to have someone who produces a feel-good show about Muslims in the Canadian heartland say, “I don’t defend Muslim terror bombers, rapists and people who kill women and children. I denounce Muslims who bomb and kill. It’s shameful and un-Islamic, and I condemn it unapologetically.”

Instead, she deflects the question away from extremism by mentioning a show about a Jewish comedian.

Back to those courageous women. Some, like Hirsi Ali, have undergone female genital mutilation. The Jan. 20 New York Times ran a picture essay on female mutilation in Indonesia, where 95 per cent of girls are “purified” through this horrendous rite. Right now, my ears are filled with the screams of these innocent girls. Where are the Muslim voices that will defend them?

On Jan. 14 on the suppertime CBC news, a Palestinian woman was interviewed about her work with abused women in the Palestinian areas. The real problem, according to her, was the Israeli occupation. Once that’s gone, women will somehow become miraculously safe from honour killings and beatings meted out righteously by their husbands.

So it’s not an interpretation of Islamic law that allows beating and killing – it’s the Jews’ fault. How silly of me not to understand this.

More excuses for not facing the facts: Simon Fraser University professor and former CIA agent Graham Fuller claims: “A world without Islam would still see most of the enduring bloody rivalries whose wars and tribulations that dominate the geopolitical landscape” (Vancouver Sun, Jan. 18). Without Islam, the Middle East would see Orthodox Christians taking up the gun. To him, western colonialism caused the rise of terror in the Muslim street.

I agree that the colonialism of the 19th and 20th centuries did terrible harm. But let’s look closely. The Arab Middle East has tried Pan-Arabism, which was killed by rivalries among states and leaders. It tried secular nationalism, which, along with state socialism, ruined economies and left broken promises of triumph in its wake. And now it’s turning to radical Islam, which is the new messianism in countries that lack the civil institutions necessary for democracy. The trend is spreading throughout the Muslim world.

Former New York Times journalist Ari Goldman, now a journalism professor at Columbia University, argues that the media don’t portray moderates in Islamic thought. But it scares me that the leaders of North American Muslim organizations have not been able to articulate a position that distances them from terror, mutilation and rape, or take to task Muslims who perpetrate horrors in the name of Islam.

“The relentless quest for national deliverance” that Fouad Ajami describes in his book Dream Palace of the Arabs has taken an ugly route. Rather than examine their own repression of women, Muslim societies today seem to be lost in a nightmare.