Interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali

An extraordinary interview! The tragedy is that she is calling for an Islamic ‘reformation’ when, in all probability, such a thing is a contradiction in terms.

However, it is strange( but equally sad) that in an age when one can’t mention Christmas or add AD after a date because it might offend Moslems, this lady is making a sequel to Submission!

Perhaps she should become the next Archbishop of Canterbury?

The last 5 minutes of this interview are a tour de force, particularly when Ali speaks of the dangers -- with multiculturalism -- of Western democracies "decaying from within" when liberal societies are unable or unwilling to criticize the clearly heinous religious tenets of Islam, i.e., those that run counter to universal human rights.

If a white non-Muslim had said this, he would surely be branded a racist and a bigot by the BBC, MCB, MPAC, etc. and prosecuted under the UK's religious incitement bill. Ali is immune from these ad hominem attacks and that's what makes her so powerful (and dangerous to Muslim apologists).

Reformation of Islam is not possible. Enlightenment is. Containment must be.

Hugh,
I suppose by now you have seen this:

The pope, according to Fessio, believes Islam cannot become compatible with democracy because a radical reinterpretation of the religion would be required, which is "impossible, because it's against the very nature of the Quran, as it's understood by Muslims."
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=48464

What I cannot understand is how enlightenment is possible with a religion so intractable in its concept.

Enlightenment, Les Lumieres, Die Aufklarung, which might come, very slowly, if uninhibited study of the origins of early Islam, and the non-divine composition of the Qur'an, as not an uncreated text outside history, but one created by men (where it was created, in what language or mix of languages, and by whom, and for what purpose, and what changes it underwent for time it took for the Qur'anic text to be fixed, are all questions which, if educated Muslims were willing to discuss openly, and to allow such matters to filter down to the Muslim masses, could weaken the fervor and fanaticism -- over many generations). There is no way to change the texts. There is a way to change the attitude of some Muslims toward those texts. But no one should count on that as a reason for not containing Islam, and allowing the conditions to be created within the world of Islam that will force intelligent Muslims to comprehend that the political, economic, social, and intellectual failures of Islam are a result of Islam itself, its habits of mental submission, its glorifying aggression and the warlord, its canonical and immutable dismissal of the rights of non-Muslims and insistence on the inferiority, and inferior status, of women, its inculcated belief in "Allah knows best" and in the inshallah-fatalism that limits economic development.

A Norwegian parliamentarian has nominated Ayaan Hirsi Ali for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize who is a conservative and argues that there is no better candidate. "She fights for equality, equal treatment, freedom of opinion and expression and freedom of religion with its life as a commitment

Mr. Tybring-Gjedde finds MP Hirsi Ali - who focuses on democracy and women's rights issues and is arguably Europe's most vocal critic about Islamic extremism - to be a "fantastic woman" and admires her because she is busy continuing her screenplays of "Submission" short films about Islam and social issues, even though she gets around-the-clock protection due to death threats since the murder of Theo van Gogh, who filmed "Submission", and was fatally shot, bladed, and nearly beheaded by a Moroccan-Dutch Muslim extremist...who then knifed a five-page death threat letter addressed to MP Hirsi Ali into Mr. van Gogh's chest).

MP Hirsi Ali is far more deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize nomination than the late Tookie Williams, who co-founded the Crips, murdered four people (the ones we know about) and then claimed redemption and was nominated for the Prize. However, MP Hirsi Ali is surely too politically incorrect for the Nobel Prize committee. She won't win. But sometimes it takes a sista (LOL) to bluntly lay out a political case about individual freedom and the need to be vigilant about freedom of expression, as Europeans are increasingly finding out.

If you haven't, Check out the Ayaan Hirsi website, this should come up in English.

http://ayaanhirsiali.web-log.nl/categorie/46044

The very worst work of fiction ever, the Koran, seems to always breed more fiction. Moslems fictionalizing so as to kid themselves about what they're doing, and infidels kidding themselves about the bad things the Moslems are gonna to do them.

Ficiton ladled atop fiction. Almost all of these emissions comprising happy-happy-joy-joy scenes of delusion that segue into the slash and stab horror scenes to follow.

If nothing else, at least the Koran was an honest work of bullcrap. If Hirsi Ali refuses to pull back the veil on the horrors of Islam, then who will?

It must be a Westerner who commits this historical act, not an apostate. Only that way can the self-delusions fall from their incessant rise and into a long overdue and clarifying decline.

I am sitting here in tears. I homeschool my children, and they listened to the interview, too. THis is so important that we closed our math books for the day and learned about humnan rights, and bravery, and one very small woman who will, God willing, have a place in history. What a wonderful interview. If Muslims can't hear one who speaks with both knowledge and compassion, then there really is no hope.

in the interview - she's against multiculturalism.

jaw dropping moment.

GIVE THAT WOMAN A CONGRESSIONAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM !

she has so much bravey that its heart breaking.

it truely is.

and somebody should send her over to London to have a talk with Ken "IslamExpo" Livingstone.

typo : "she has so much bravery that its heart breaking"

Mackie:

What a thought... ...a truly worthy candidate for Nobel Peace Prize! Hasn't been one of those since... ...maybe the woman being held under house arrest by the viciously totalitarian generals of Burma.

It will be interesting to see how far this goes with the august body that made Harold Pinter the most recent Nobel lauriate for literature for solely political reasons and not any merit in anything he has written.

i'd love it if Dubya had the balls to give her the medal of freedom. the islamo-fundie backlash would be extreme, but what the hell. give it to her - she is so deserving of it.

She would make an excellent Archbishop of Canterbury, Peterborough. She is black, and a woman, and would have all the Politically Correct principles of the CofE on her side. And she is an atheist, which puts her in with most current bishops. (I am not exaggerating. A man I know who teaches non-Christian religions in one of Britain's leading universities once was on some sort of panel with half a dozen Anglican bishops. He himself is of Jewish descent, and he described to me his increasing astonishment as the conversation slowly proved that not a single one of his fellow panelists believed in Jesus, God or the Christian Creeds.)

Seriously, courage is what will save us all. Always. As C.S.Lewis once said, courage is not a virtue, it is the shape that all virtues take when it comes to the point. In her case, it is the form that the perception of truth and the love for human beings have had to take when dealing with Islam.

Ms. Ali's courage is amazing. She will not back down, even if it costs her her life.

I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for her to get or even be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. They once gave it to that corrupt terrorist Yasser Arafat, didn't they? 'Nough said!

Paolo:

Per my reply to Naseem on the Christian-Muslim Forum & Expo thread, it's gotta be nigh onto 15 years ago or perhaps more when Yes, Prime Minister had an episode in which the Prime Minister had to select a candidate for Archbishop of Canterbury and the choices narrowed down to an athieist and a convert to Islam, with the edge being given to the convert to Islam because at least he believed in God.

From the article on Hirsi Ali

"She remembers the moment when she realised that Mohammed Atta, the leader of the hijackers, had studied the Koran, like her, in the mid-1980s.

She says: "I grabbed the Koran and I started to read what Bin Laden had written and... I put (his) citations next to what is written in the Koran and I realised that, yes, a lot of it is part of my religion and what do I think of that?"

...She wrote the play Submission to "challenge the conviction that what is written in the Holy Koran is absolute"."

Hirsi Ali did something that most Muslims can't bring themselves to do: Open their Korans and admit that the verses promoting terrorism and misogyny (4:34) are there.

She deserves a Nobel Prize (but probably won't receive it) for her bravery and intellectual and moral courage in publicly exposing and criticizing Islamic intolerance and intransigence. She also helped us here in Canada during the Sharia debate, for which we are grateful.

MARTEL: "If a white non-Muslim had said this, he would surely be branded a racist and a bigot by the BBC, MCB, MPAC, etc. and prosecuted under the UK's religious incitement bill. Ali is immune from these ad hominem attacks and that's what makes her so powerful (and dangerous to Muslim apologists)."

This is all true...and clearly indicative of the racist, bigoted society the Liberal/Left has constructed in the West, that content of speech is so hostage to the skin color of its enunciator.

I hope she gets the Nobel Prize and won't accept it.

Very slightly off track.
Did anybody watch "Gay British and Muslim" on
C4 ?

Below is a link to the C4 website.
I honestly thought it was a wind up, it was however just absurd.

There were lesbian "muslims taking the stand on the podium at the London Gay Pride festival.
And announcing "islam is not homophobic, its a peaceful tolerant religion"

Then why the disguise ?

Then we had the site of a very handsome western convert to islam, complete with silver earing telling the camera that because the word homosexual does not appear in the koran then its all a matter of "interpretation"

He was doing research at a Dutch university on gays and islam.

then we had the pakistani moslem who claimed that islam does not discrimnate against gays and it is a fantastic peaceful religion, so tolerant.

there was another brief scene where a moslem was quoting the verses in the koran that condone/authorise the killing of gays.
of course this was another mistake in translation because there was a reference to "lust" whereas this "gay moslem" "loved his partner and so lust dinn't really come into it.

It was bizarre, absurd, comical.
however at no time was anybody allowed to give the veiw that this is justified by the koran, that would be "islamophobic" wouldn't it ?

I must confess that I did laugh alot.

Regards

AI

http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/can_you_believe_it/debates/gaymuslims.html

I caught the last half hour, my husband called, Quick, quick you won't believe this.....
One chap whose face we did not see, just his hands and cigarette, as my husband said how unlucky can one man get? Gay. Muslim. Geordie. That's not meant to offend anybody from the North east, a fine body of people with a accent I personally find very attractive, but you have to be married to a Yorkshireman to appreciate the remark.

A young woman who called herself "the Imam" in a camoflague boiler suit and burka speaking to the crowd, who agreed to be interviewed so long as she could remain veiled, was refered to as Rashida because that was not her name, and had her voice electronically altered. She said that lesbians should dress with Koranic modesty.

The bit that wasn't funny was the young chap who spoke of how many of his friends had ended their gay relationships, taken wives from Pakistan and had children. He expected to have done the same within the next 5 years.