Good day, humans.

Welcome to installment number two of my collaboration with the University of Technology, Sydney.

This is a series called Permission to Think.

It's a public event speaker series of online conversations.

The man behind this is Professor Alan Davison, who's the dean of arts and social sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney.

I am a professional fellow there, which basically just means that I have these fascinating conversations with interesting people who the university and I decide are worth speaking to in this series which tries to bring

intellectuals and into the institution who are not necessarily predictably university-ish

and who don't play into the sort of thought bubbles that a lot of educational institutions

are currently captured by.

And today's guest doesn't, in every way you could possibly want her to not be predictable.

She's not a knee-jerk reactionary who is anti-Islam.

She is not a pandering left-winger who's jumping at shadows and terrified of criticizing Islam.

She knows what she's talking about because she's a deeply wise and experienced person.

Dr. Elam Manea is an associate professor at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

And she's a Yemeni originally, who's a specialist in the Middle Eastern North Africa,

and is essentially an expert in the ways, well, among many other things, with regard to Islam,

but in particular, of particular interest to me is her

expertise in the ways in which Western countries sort of have gone limp in defending human

rights when it comes to anything to do with Islam. And not just abroad. You know, we all know

the bombast of the George W. Bush administration, for example, trying to spread

human rights across the Middle East to mixed success, should we say? Not just that, but the failure

to actually stand up for the human rights of our own citizens who happen to be Muslims in the West,

...