“Muslim writer and feminist Irshad Manji, Amel Boubekeur, leader of the Islam and Europe programme, Robert Spencer, director of jihadwatch.org and Abed Ayoub, legal advisor for American-Arab Anti-discrimination Committee, joined FRANCE 24″s Andrea Sanke to debate Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Islam and its taboos.” — from this article
Irshad Manji has certainly created her own private Islam. She is the child of Asian refugees from Uganda. She has never lived in a Muslim society. She has always enjoyed the freedoms of the West. But she feels, out of filial piety, and perhaps for other reasons, that she will do best if she continues to identify as a Muslim and if, furthermore, she keeps claiming that Islam itself is or can be made into something perfectly acceptable to people such as herself. She’s wrong. And any apostate, who had been born into and grown up in a society suffused with Islam, would be able to set her right.
There are those who, recognizing this about her, nonetheless find her useful. Here and there, as here, she well may be. But her representation of Islam, and her bland indifference to the texts of Islam, and the texture of lives in Muslim societies, where everything refers, everything relates, everything is connected, to Islam, continues to mislead. And for that reason, one must be vigilant, and careful not to be misled by her.
As for Abed Ayoub, he is a lawyer. Therefore he has received a law degree, and taken the bar exam, and he knows perfectly well what American Constitutional guarantees of individual liberties are all about. And he knows how they rank in the first place, and that above all of them, freedom of speech ranks highest. He is obligated, as a member of the Bar, to support that freedom of speech as part of the Constitution. Does he, one wonders, understand that? And does the A.B.A. think it should make clear that the right to practice law can be stripped from those who do not support, fervently, the “freedom of speech” — not as an absolute, of course, but with the modifications that have been accepted and, over time, refined?
When Abed Ayoub keeps harping on the use of “taxpayers’ money” to protect those who, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have received repeated and completely credible threats of death (for she was the co-author, with the murdered Theo van Gogh, of the movie “Submission”), and who continue bravely to speak out about the nature of Islam and the ways in which it flatly contradicts the principles of advanced Western post-Enlightenment democracies, one must ask him if he thinks that the enforcement of constitutionally-protected rights should be a duty of private parties, and not of the government itself. And if the enforcement of constitutionally-protected rights should be a duty of private parties, would that not quickly become a situation in which those who are well-connected to the well-heeled will receive such protection, while those who lack such connections will not — a selective enforcement of the right to freedom of speech that would be, that is, intolerable?
Since Abed Ayoub expresses such solicitude for hard-pressed taxpayers in the Infidel nation-states (such as France, where Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s supporters have demanded such protection for her from the French state), one would like to ask him if he has any estimate of the cost, to those same taxpayers, of monitoring, in every Western country, the Muslim populations, so many of whose members pose a threat — not a theoretical but in some cases a direct physical threat, and in other cases a threat through their financial and moral and intellectual support of those bent on conducting violent Jihad.
What does he think the Infidel taxpayers should be expected to endure, and to endure in amounts certain to increase if the size of the Muslim population increases? Or can he think of ways that those Infidel taxpayers, about whose well-being he is so concerned, could limit the amounts they have to spend on monitoring those Muslims who have settled deep behind what the Muslims themselves have been taught to regard as the borders or confines of Dar al-Harb, the Domain of War, that is, the places that still, for now, are to be considered not under Islam and rule by Muslims, for they are still outside — for now — the Dar al-Islam?