It's -- and unusual -- to see this in the Philadelphia Inquirer (thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist): "Freedom fighter: Under threat of death, bodyguards always near, Dutch politician and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali keeps on fearlessly criticizing Islam."
Hirsi Ali believes the Dutch now split into "appeasers" who don't want to upset Muslim communities, and a growing number of "confrontationalists" like herself.Hirsi Ali concedes she had already leaned toward leaving Holland for many reasons: the death threats and security; eviction from her most recent apartment in the Hague after neighbors won a court judgment that Hirsi Ali's dangerous proximity violated their human rights; and the chance to come to the United States as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. So she resigned from Parliament.
"It is difficult to work as a parliamentarian if you have nowhere to live," she told a news conference....
Her critics contend that Hirsi Ali takes the worst aspects of Islam, such as instances of racism and abuse of women, and projects them onto all Muslims. To Hirsi Ali's credit, she includes their criticisms in her book and seeks to answer them.
But you need talk only briefly with Hirsi Ali, or read The Caged Virgin - a crisp, very clear indictment of Islamic misogyny mixed with autobiographical scenes and reflections about her own liberation - to understand that the lady pulls no punches.
This is not Rodney King and "Can't we all just get along?" Not "We respect Islam and, hey, everyone has a few bad apples."
Hirsi Ali aims at Islam's heart. She insists that the beliefs and life of Islam's prophet, Muhammad, must be confronted, analyzed, and, in many respects, rejected.
"If 1.2 billion to 1.5 billion abide by, follow his rules," Hirsi Ali observes, "and say we want to be like him, then I think it's urgent, it's necessary."
She concedes that Muhammad urged Muslims to do some good things, "such as his advice to be charitable toward the poor and orphans." But, Hirsi Ali insists, on the whole he's not admirable.
"He borrowed a little bit from Judaism," she says, "he borrowed a little bit from Christianity, and he invented some things, especially the fierceness with which he dealt with his enemies, the killing, the way he violated special tribal rules."
Long before radical Islamists threatened violence in return for any criticism of Muhammad (thus violating the Islamic principle that Muhammad was a man with flaws and should not be idolized), Islamic scholars accepted that Muhammad was a warrior of his time, contending that he shouldn't be judged by modern standards.
Even Lewis, the great scholar of Islam, leans to that interpretation, though Hirsi Ali sees his graciousness as prudence: "I think Bernard wants to leave the Arabs some dignity... . He wants to give them an opening, which is really noble... . "
Her own view, however, is that "following this man [Muhammad] can lead to only one thing, fascism... ."
Hirsi Ali says she decided to confront Muhammad's history after Nigerian Muslims rioted over the planned 2002 Miss World contest there. A British-educated Nigerian journalist poured fuel on the fire by writing that Muhammad himself would have married one of the contestants. The rioting killed 200 people.
"So I said," Hirsi Ali confides, " 'You know what, darling Europeans? I'm going to tell you about Muhammad!' "
True to her gloves-off approach, Hirsi Ali talked about how Muhammad, who had nine wives, fell in love with his wife Aisha when she was 6 and married her when she was 9. Hirsi Ali outraged Dutch Muslims by accusing Muhammad of pedophilia.
Hirsi Ali says some took the issue seriously. She emphasizes its relevance because "there are more and more men taking minors as wives, and saying that Muhammad is their example."
Hirsi Ali says the debate gave her hope - she received one letter from a Muslim that read, "I don't know what you started in me, but I am thinking... . "
In the same way, Hirsi Ali explains, she'd like to challenge the beliefs of Black Muslims in America. She finds it as unfathomable that African Americans would convert to Islam as that Jews would convert to Nazism.
"I want to tell them about Darfur," she asserts firmly. "The people in Darfur are being exterminated just because they are black. So [Islam] is also a racist doctrine... . People don't know what's going on in Saudi Arabia. All these palaces are full of black slaves! So the black community here converting to Islam is like converting voluntarily to slavery.
"I think if they hear it from a black person," she says hopefully, "it will help."
These days, Hirsi Ali reports, she's working on a book about Enlightenment values - Voltaire remains a great hero. She plans to have it translated into Arabic, Urdu, and other key languages and distributed around the world in video and audio.
"I'm going to resurrect Muhammad, and he's going to have conversations with [British philosopher Karl] Popper and me and [economic theorist Friedrich] Hayek."
Hirsi Ali smiles. "I hope I live long enough to complete it," she says.
"I'm going to resurrect Muhammad, and he's going to have conversations with [British philosopher Karl] Popper and me and [economic theorist Friedrich] Hayek." ---Hirsi Ali
That'll make a great comedy skit. Mohammad can tell them they are deaf, dumb, blind, have no sense, are the worst of created beings, and threaten to behead them.
Mohammad on economic theory: "The booty has been made legal for me."
Mohammad on philosophy of science: "Allah hates you for asking too many questions."
America is the home of the free and the brave...many died so we could have the freedom to call our home wrong.........the ones fighting for us....killers...robots of America....how funny...we allow the very people who would kill us the freedom to destroy us......only in America is a killer a freedom fighter and people like this brave woman are called wrong.....we have forgotten what hero....really means.....how sad.
Ali makes statements unknown to almost all Muslims i.e. that Mohammad borrowed from Judiasm and Christianity. Yes he also borrowed fairystories from gnostic Christian and Jewish sources but couldnt tell that they werent scripture!
Where is "truthspeaker" ? He needs to read Ali's comments. I can provide him with numerous examples of fairy tales and Talmudic tales to compare with the Koran.And dont get me started on the brilliant illustration of Mohammad's (Allah's)"evolution" of knowledge about the Torah - the example of Lot, his family and his wife( I mean here the old "woman" who gradually evolves into being Lot's wife (as she is firstly recorded in the Bible) after numerous tentative suras.
The truth will indeed set you free!
She concedes that Muhammad urged Muslims to do some good things, "such as his advice to be charitable toward the poor and orphans." But, Hirsi Ali insists, on the whole he's not admirable
This "alms giving" in islam. The muslims saw off the heads of animals and give some to the poor. This is all that I have ever come across muslims being charitable. And the head has to be sawn off. If it was a "clean kill", they will not eat the meat. I had an argument with several muslims about killing animals. They always said "we have to give the poor something". When I said could not the poor eat bread or vegetables, they fell silent. Then I conceded some, and said why not a clean kill, why do you expressly eat meat from sawed=off animals ? To this they always said "halal is holy". But even then, they hardly distribute 5 % of it. The rest they take to their homes to eat. I think that this sawing off of heads was one more tactic of mohammad to make his men entirely feelingless. This, coupled with the hatred for infidels, creates human killing zombies.
The real joke here is that IF they wanted her dead she would be dead tomorrow no matter how many protectors are looking after her.
Like Salman Rushdie the real and organised jihadists do not worry about small fry like her no matter what their personal dislike as she (and others like he) are left to the willing blades of the local jihadic lunatics. It is from these that she has to be most protected; the muslim shop assistant or taxidriver, ie the muslim guy next door.
Interesting you should mention taxi drivers. I assume I'm not the only person who has come across Muslim 'frothing at the mouth' anti-semitic taxi drivers threatening to knife any Jew they come across. Before the BNP bombed Brixton (to kill blacks) I had the same impression of workers on the London Underground, a racist social network developing. The bomber did in fact work on the underground. Lucky the guy in the taxi did not admit he was born Jewish.
Good Luck Hirsi Ali!
Hirsi Ali is such a brave women, and the cowardly press and governments as well as muslim appologists will one day understand her and admire her courage.
by coming to the States, she will gain significant
Will Oprah have the courage to have Hirsi Ali on her TV show? Lets see which women you would most admire>?
acornbutter....family experience...my wife often caught a taxi to get to her school in the mornings...it is a direct trip over the bridge and was worth 15-16$.This particualr day the taxidriver decided to take her there via Parramatta( a very big loop) and the cost would have been about 60-80$.
She wondered what was going on and pointed out that her destination was north over the bridge not in the far west. He then screamed at her that he was the driver and he knew what he was doing. So she then told him that she had been making this trip for years and that 16$ was the most he was going to get.
He then changed direction and headed north via another bridge and started to scream at her about what she was, who she was and what he could and should be doing to her. She had the presence of mind to use her mobile to phone the police station near her school. he continiued his bad language, his threats and his general abuse right until he dropped her off at the school and when he did, he took off before she was even out of the door properly fortunately without injury.
As she had pointed out her destination loudly several times to him the police intercepted him as he drove away. He lost his taxis driver's licence, was fined, as was his company as it was not the first time and they had ignored previous complaints. However he did NOT go to gaol and my wife received regular anonymous death and violence threats for years afterwards(addressed via the school), had her tyres slashed when she actually drove to work for once and later on had a window broken and the lights turned on.
Nothing was ever proven about all of this. It only ceased when she left that school.
This happened well before 9/11 and it was only years afterwards that she finally understood what he had been saying and why:he was Muslim male and she was a kaf'r female.
With the digital answering services now, eg press one if this is an emergency etc, I am not certain that this would be possible now.
"Even [Bernard] Lewis, the great scholar of Islam, leans to that interpretation, though Hirsi Ali sees his graciousness as prudence: 'I think Bernard wants to leave the Arabs some dignity... . He wants to give them an opening, which is really noble... . '"
-- from the article above
More thjan charitable, is Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Bernard Lewis. But he has refused to ever to explain his own great errors of judgment (enthusiasm for the Oslo Accords, support for remaining in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was overthrown for this idiotic dream of remaking Iraq into a model of something -- a mistake that Lewis carefully attributes now not to the idea itself, but to all the supposed mistakes of execution by the Administration). He has refused to explain why in "The Middle East," a book of 400 pages, designed for the mass audience that needs instruction, he devoted a mere three paragraphs out of 400 pages to the treatment of non-Muslims under Islam, and two of those paragraphs were exculpatory on the institution of the dhimmi. He has never offered, as both Maxime Rodinson and S. D. Goitein did, support for either the important work of Bat Ye'or in her systematic study of the institution of the dhimma or, as in Rodinson's case, seeing the significance of Ibn Warraq and other articulate defectors from Islam.
Lewis took a long time to recognize that Kemalism was not a permanent feature of Turkey but an institution, and an idea, that required constant vigilance to defend, and it has taken 80 years (that is, three or four generations) to create enough beneficiaries of Kemalism to give them a fighting chance to sustain the system -- for as Erbakan and then Erdogan showed, Islam is forever, and despite everything that Ataturk did, can keep coming back and can by degrees undo what he achieved.
Lewis cannot, it seems, ever find fault with his own views. He spends a lot of time now in Israel, but he has never helped the Israelis themselves understand the Islamic basis of opposition to them, and rather than champion, as he ought to have, the work of Bat Ye'or, has often belittled it as "polemical." Exactly how her work is more "polemical" than his own attempts to locate, for example, the sources of Muslim anti-Jewish feeling in "European models" (i.e. the Nazis and other antisemites) instead of in the Qur'an and Hadith (much of it, I am told, nicely summarized in a 700-page text of Tantawi, former Sheik al-Azhar), and his inattention to the subject addressed by Bat Ye'or in her "The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam," not to mention silence on the subject of Zoroastrians (he can be forgiven, Lewis, for not writing of what happened to Hindus and Indian civilization under Islam because he limits himselfgeographically to the Middle East and the Ottoman domains) -- all of this is unfinished business, and he owes it not so much to his critics, but to his former students (who are not so much students as acolytes, and acolytes are a kind of true believer) to signal that he was wrong, not that he has been so sadly misunderstood, and to address, in some way, not two audiences at once, but Infidels alone. For it is they, in Europe, who are threatened, and their much more advanced civilization that is under growing siege by the primitive fact of demographic conquest.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali may be right that Lewis's reluctance or inability to state truths may be a product of his unwillingness, at this point, to completely break with Arab Muslims whom he has known, whom he has found attractive in some ways, and who cannot themselves dismiss Islam for it would be too difficult. The problem for them is that Uruba, Arabness, and Islam are so intimiately connected. For non-Arab Muslims it is a different matter. They, or some of them, can see for themselves, or be led to see, that Islam is in many ways a vehicle of Arab supremacist ideology, and if a good many of them can come to that conclusion, they can find other sources of identity, of history real or imagined, with which to soothe themselves and to replace Islam. Whatever Zoroastrianism may in fact have been, it remains as a name, an identity, an option, available to Perisans who might wish to jettison Islam. But what is available to those who pride themselves on their
Arabness -- surely not the paganism of the time of the Jahiliyya?
Lewis never fails to tell interviewers of the fact that many (but not all) of his books have been translated into Turkish, Arabic, Persian, and so on. This tells us nothing of the success of those books, of their effect on the readers they may have. But they tell us something about Lewis, and about his writing these books with two audiences kept constantly in mind. One are the Infidels, the non-Muslims. Another are Muslims who may be open to ideas if their amour-propre is not offended. But the amour-propre of Muslims is tied up with Islam itself, and Lewis, keenly aware of that, in many of his works simply cannot engage in the analysis of Islam that would tell Infidels the full truth, because he dare not offend the amour-propre of that audience of Muslims -- of the Prince-Hassan variety, that are really quite few in number.
If the camp of Islam were weak, if there were not trillions flowing in to that camp, if mosques and madrasas were not being built all over the world, if there were not tens of millions of Muslims now deep behind what they they, those Muslims, have been taught to regard as enemy lines, all over Western Europe, conducting campaigns of Da'wa, making life much more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous for the indigenous Infidels (and other non-Muslims, including Hindus and Buddhists, who may be non-indigenous but are perfectly willing to integrate, as peaceful and productive citizens, of Western lands) -- if all of this were not taking place, then one could perhaps be more indulgent with Lewis's own misstatements and his ability to win sympathy from so many who, much taken with his ability to fluently formulate sentences, with his learning (even if that learning leaves a good deal to be desired when it comes to Islam as Goitein, or Rodinson, came to see it, or as Arthur Jeffery, St. Clair Tisdall, C. Snouck Hurgronje, and Joseph Schacht always saw it, not to mention Bat Ye'or, of course), and with the mere fact of his great age (as if that should accord what he says automatic respect, so that those who criticizae him are in turn dismissed as "picking on Bernard" out of envy or some other illegitimate prompting).
When Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, and many other ex-Muslims find fault with the velvety velleities of Bernard Lewis, perhaps they at least will be listened to. Ayaan Hirsi Ali may well be right -- that Lewis wants to misrepresent Islam because he knows that the Arabs have nothing else, and he would like them to join in a common project of misrepresentation -- a kind of collective appeal not so much to the "best that is in Islam" as in the "made-up best that is in Islam."
But it is too late for that.
Infidels need to be told the truth. There is not all the time in the world. The confusion and idiocy of much of the West (from American Idol to the pop-contests of San Remo), and the absence of a well-educated, self-assured group of people capable of instructing, guiding, and leading others on the matter of Islam, and the origins, scope, and full menace of Jihad, means that there is little room for indulging someone when he misleads, and misleads at the highest level, even for reasons that, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali suggests, may be those of helping to present a way out for Muslim Arabs. At this point, the only Muslim audience that Infidels need concern themselves with is that of non-Arab Muslims, who can be appealed to on the basis of Islam as the Arab national religion, a vehicle for "Arabism."
There is no way to truthfully write about the history of Islam, its tenets, its Jihad-conquests, its subjugation and treatment of non-Muslims, and to do so in a way that Arab Muslims will ever accept. Lewis must recognize this. If not, if he continues without at long last doing what Goitein did, posterity will not be kind. Surely that matters to him.
One thing I hope that she achieves here is turn the American Enterprise Institute, and after that, the Heritage foundation and other Conservative think tanks that have the ears of the GOP to recognize the truth about Islam.
Since she works for the American Enterprise Institute, I doutb that she'll have much credibility with the Left, but given her left-of-center past, she should try and enlighten them as well - at least the Joe Liebermans, the Chuck Schumers, the Tom Lantos' of this country.
If Ayaan Hirsi Ali comes to America, and it appears that she will, I hope she remains an independent thinker and does not align herself with some of the nambi pambi feminist groups in the American culture. My hope is that she will stick firmly to her campaign against the backwards, and denigrative treatment of women in fundamental Islam throughout the world.
arjun.sevak-
My thoughts as well about the calculated desensitizing of Muslims when they celebrate happy ocassions by using the slaughter of a helpless sheep as they 'fireworks', a living creature whose head you slice off at the doorstep of your house. A cultural method for reducing any compassion toward the suffering of "lowely animals", done in order to remain numb to the same "bestial" acts when transferred to and carried out on "captured animal" infidels.
Insisting on the humane killing of animals for food, etc., is a basic tool for civilizing the beast in humanity at the same time.
Without it, the spiritual life is corrupted by cruelty.
We decide what is "unclean", not a rite or a knife or tradition.
Creating suffering is "unclean" in my book.
And the Koran can turn to dust before its ritual orders to cause unnecessary pain are worth obeying.
I hope Muslims let this bloody tradition dissolve away.
"Her own view, however, is that 'following this man [Muhammad] can lead to only one thing, fascism....'
-- from the article above
Not "Islamofascism." Islam. Islam is naturally totalitairian -- a total belief-system. If, here and there, in the centuries without technological advances, and thus without the ability to spread the full doctrines of Islam throughout both Dar al-islam and Dar al-Harb, Muslims were able to live as Muslims without necessarily being fully aware of, much less always following, at every step, the doctrines of Islam, today is different. It is different because of three things:
1) the trillions in OPEC oil revenues.
2) the millions of Muslims permitted to settle behiind what Islam itself teaches are enemy lines.
3) the technological advances of the Infidel world, including audiocassettes, videocassettes, satelllite television, and the Internet, that make the spread of Muslim propaganda, and of the full undiluted message of Islam, now constantly available to those who might once have been ignorant or unobservant Muslims, reminding them that the full teachings of Qur'an and Hadith are a mere click away, and making the same undiluted message available to Infdiels suffering from various degrees of disaffection with the modern world, the West, Kapitalism, The System, Amerika, call it what you will, and who, instead of engaging in intelligent criticism of that undeniably disturbing Western world, and becoming intellignet meliorists, instead throwing it all over for the mental security of those who prefer to have a Total Regulation of Life, a Complete Explanation of the Universe, and the model of a seventh-century Arab, who may or may not have existed (that doesn't matter, for Muslims believe he existed), as uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil. For the mentally lazy, for the psychically marginal, for those yearning to suppress their own individuality in either a Nuremberg Crowd or the umma al-islamiyaa, well --Islam's the thing. It's the perfect thing, if mental submission, and being Part of a Group, is what appeals to you. Individualists, and all those who like to think and to question rather than to have all the answers handed down from on high, where Allan Knows Best, need not apply.
It's the perfect belief system for all those who are disaffected and whose only idea of a way out is yearning to be free by becoming part of a Collective. And the habit of submission, and of mental submission, is not the only characteristic of Fascism that Islam exhibits.
For more on this, google "Ibn Warraq" and "Fascism" and "Islam" and read of how closely Islam meets the criteria, as once offered by Umberto Eco, that define Fascism.
Hugh-
A theocratic totalitarianism, by any other name, is ALWAYS 'the theory and practice of hell' - to borrow a parallel book's title.
Human minds, when given godly power, tend to fly off cliffs. En masse, it becomes cataclysmic.
Islam's threat is this mad urge to rule the universe. Based on an [illiterate] human being's idea of what the voice of "God" wants.
If it weren't violent, who would care?
Only their terror forces us to take them at all seriously. The fatal flaw in Absolutist dogma. It can be refuted by the word "Or?".
And, to this mindset, that deserves not a laugh in reply- whether of pity or scorn- but a sentence of death.
With this their "holy" philosophy, I am forced to fight them to the death in response, if they insist.
I hope they understand what they have unleashed in the West by their jihad.
They think the 7th century sounds wonderful.
They may be sent there if they keep up their alien body/infiltration-level of 'inhabiting'/penetration into the free world.
Instead of using the discovery of the advantages of human liberty in the West, as a chance to help tame the dogmatic extremists back in their own homelands with their influence, they seem more cowed and inert and pointlessly defensive.
Time for Muslims to revolt against their lemming leadership.
Or?
"why not a clean kill, why do you expressly eat meat from sawed-off animals ?"
Good practice for the next step -- beheading humans (or semi-humans: i.e., Infidels).
Hirsi Ali and Wafa Sultan are very brave women that put their lives in danger in calling islam what it truely is violent, evil, ......
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If you haven't followed this link for Wafa Sultan, do so for your enlightment. Here is her Feb 21 debate on Al Jazeera
http://switch5.castup.net/frames/20041020_MemriTV_Popup/video_480x360.asp?ai=214&ar=1050wmv&ak=null
Posted by: kurtz at June 4, 2006 01:21 AM
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If our politicans were even a tenth this brave.
I can't think of a better newspaper for this article to appear in.
I visited Philadelphia last summer and stayed at a very nice downtown hotel. I was alarmed at the number of black muslims all over the city. At the airport, I remember seeing a screener wearing a too-tight, button-busting uniform and a hijab.
It had been 20 years since I had last visited my aunt there. I mentioned that there seemed to be a lot of muslims around and she simply said "They're everywhere."
Black muslims do need to have Hirsi Ali wake them up with the truth of the status of blacks in islam.
It says a lot about arabic when you consider that the arabic word "abeed" is used for "black, "slave" and "the n word" (it's all in the tone of voice).
profitsbeard,
This tradition of inflicting suffering, of rejoicing while sawing off the head of any unfortunat creature, is one of the core beliefs of islam. In a line, it will not dissolve away. I have seen several animals being sawed off in a mosque. I got in an empty flat in a highrise that looked over the compound of a mosque, and looked with binoculars. They all surround the animal, one man saws while some hold the feet of the creature, and yet others stand around, smiling. I saw it a lot of times, and each time I was shook up. I have seen hunters killing with a single shot, and that did not leave me feeling, well, terrorized. This did.