Anyone who is willing to end a relationship because of a reasoned difference of opinion is not worthy of your friendship. - Gad Saad

If one had to identify the legal system most antithetical to the American one, sharia law fits that bill. Many Westerners might be repulsed by sharia's extraordinarily harsh corporeal punishments for theft (cutting off the hand) and adultery (stoning). And you might think that the lower status of women when it comes to the validity of their legal testimony or their bequeathing rights (half that of men) might be grotesque to Western sensibilities. Surely most Westerners would find it astoundingly cruel and unjust, if not insane, that under sharia law a female rape victim needs the eyewitness testimony of four men to be believed. But sharia law is even more fundamentally opposed to Western legal standards because Islam rejects the Western idea of impartial justice applied fairly regardless of an individual's identity. Under sharia, punishments are applied as a function of the identity of the victim and perpetrator. A Jewish man who kills a Muslin man is judged very differently than a Muslim man who kills a Jewish man. Sharia law specifically states that no retaliation can take place when a Muslim kills a non-Muslim and that indemnities depend on the identities of the parties in question.

When we think of a pandemic, we often conjure images of deadly infectious diseases that spread rapidly across countries causing unimaginable human suffering (like the Black Death, the Spanish influenza, AIDS, or the ongoing COVID-19 crisis). The West is currently suffering from such a devastating pandemic, a collective malady that destroys people’s capacity to think rationally. Unlike other pandemics where biological pathogens are to blame, the current culprit is composed of a collection of bad ideas, spawned on university campuses, that chip away at

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” — John Stuart Mill1