[VIDEO] Ayaan Hirsi Ali on ‘Uncommon Knowledge’: Islam, The West & Dawa
Posted: August 8, 2017 Filed under: Diplomacy, Foreign Policy, Reading Room, Religion, Think Tank, War Room | Tags: Amaney Jamal, Asra Nomani, Assata Shakur, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Carmen Perez, Democratic Party (United States), Islam, Islamism, Jihadism, The Challenge of Dawa: Political Islam as Ideology and Movement and How to Contain It, Uncommon Knowledge Leave a commentAyaan Hirsi Ali joins me to discuss her new book, The Challenge of Dawa: Political Islam as Ideology and Movement and How to Contain It and her views on the challenges facing Western civilization in regards to political Islam. She argues that Islam needs to be separated into two different parts, one part of religion and the other part, political philosophy. She concedes that many aspects of the religious part of Islam are peaceful but argues that the political side is much more concerning due to its focus on Dawa, which means “to plead or to call non-Muslims to Islam.” This call to convert people to Islam is what she argues was a driving force behind the spread of Islam throughout history.
Earlier this year Ayaan Hirsi Ali was called before Congress to testify on her book. She discusses her testimony and that although she was invited by a Democrat senator to speak “about the ideology of radical Islam,” the Democrats present didn’t ask her a single question because they were likely uncomfortable with what she had to say about Islam. She argues … (read more)
Source: National Review
Censorship: New York Times Unwilling to Say ‘Female Genital Mutilation’
Posted: April 23, 2017 Filed under: Censorship, Crime & Corruption, Health and Social Issues, Mediasphere, Religion | Tags: 457 visa, Ann Coulter, Australia, Australian Aboriginal Flag, Australian citizenship test, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Detroit, Female genital mutilation, Islam, Jihadism, Michigan, Muslim, Sex organ, Sub-Saharan Africa 1 Comment
NYT Tiptoes Around Feelings Of People Who Mutilate Little Girls.
Amber Randall reports: Worried the term “female genital mutilation” might sharpen the divide between those who oppose brutally cutting away a little girl’s genitalia to deprive her of sexual pleasure and those who practice the “rite,” one New York Times editor instead refers to the ritual as “genital cutting.”
“There’s a gulf between the Western (and some African) advocates who campaign against the practice and the people who follow the rite, and I felt the language used widened that chasm,” NYT science and health editor Celia Dugger explained Friday. She also said the widely used term (FGM) is “culturally loaded” in the explanation, which came as a result of inquiries from The Daily Caller News Foundation regarding a reporter’s decision to use the term “cutting” in a recent story about a doctor in Michigan.
YAAN – FEB28 – Author Ayaan Hirsi Ali talks about her autobiography. tb (Photo by Tony Bock/Toronto Star via Getty Images) By: Tony Bock. Collection: Toronto Star
The doctor was allegedly caught mutilating innocent little girls as young as six and charged with a felony. Performed in American culture and subject to American laws, female genital mutilation carries a sentence of up to five years.
Dugger said she made the decision to ditch “mutilation” for “cutting” after traveling to sub-Saharan Africa for an immigration story in 1996. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Is Islam a Religion of Peace?
Posted: March 24, 2017 Filed under: Global, Mediasphere, Religion, Terrorism, War Room | Tags: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Islam, Islamism, Jihadism, Muslim, Reformation, Somali Leave a comment
“There are millions of peaceful Muslims, but Islam is not a religion of peace.”
-Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Is Islam a religion of peace? Is it compatible with Western liberalism? Or does Islam need a reformation, just as Christianity had the Protestant Reformation? Somali-born author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains.
[VIDEO] Activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali Exposes Women’s March Organizer Linda Sarsour as Sharia Law-Supporting ‘Fake Feminist’
Posted: February 2, 2017 Filed under: Health and Social Issues, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics, Religion, Think Tank | Tags: Abu Sayyaf, Abuja, Al Sumaria, Al-Nassr FC, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Feminism, Fox News, Genital Mutilation, Islam, Islamism, Jihadism, Linda Sarsour, media, Muslim, news, Saudi Arabia, Sharia, Sharia Law, The First 100 Days, United States, video 1 Comment
Ayaan Hirsi Ali says on ‘The First 100 Days’ that Linda Sarsour is a supporter of Sharia law.
How Liberals Killed the Freedom of Movement
Posted: January 27, 2017 Filed under: Diplomacy, Global, History, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Alternative for Germany, Angela Merkel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke, Donald Trump, EUROPE, European Union, François Fillon, Geert Wilders, Islam, Islamism, Jihadism, Marine Le Pen, The Wall Street Journal Leave a comment
By suppressing debate about Islam, nationalism and terror, the left set the stage for today’s backlash, says Sohrab Ahmari in The Wall Street Journal.
Sohrab Ahmari writes: Donald Trump’s double-layer fence along America’s southern border, and his plan to suspend all immigration from terror-producing countries, are dramatic and consequential pieces of public policy. But they’re also palliative symbols. The message they send to the president’s supporters is: “Your days of anxiety are behind you. We will be a coherent nation once more.”
Politicians across the West are beginning to tell their voters the same thing in what is shaping up to be the widest rollback of the freedom of movement in decades.
It’s not just right-wing nationalists like Marine Le Pen in France or Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Centrists get it, too. Some, like Angela Merkel, are still-reluctant restrictionists. Others, like Theresa May, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and French presidential aspirant François Fillon, are more forthright. All have wised up to the popular demand for drastically lower immigration rates.
The paradox here is that freedom of movement is unraveling now because liberals won central debates—about Islamism, social cohesion and nationalism. Rather than give ground on any of these fronts, they accused opponents of being phobic and reactionary. Now liberals are reaping the rewards of those underhanded victories.
Liberals “won” the debate about the link between Islamist ideology and terrorism.
For eight years under President Obama, the U.S. government eschewed even the term “Islamism.” The preferred nomenclature created the ludicrous effect that U.S. service members were sent to war against people passionate about “violent extremism.” But voters could read and hear about jihadists offering up their actions to Allah before opening automatic fire on shoppers and blasphemous cartoonists. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Geert Wilders’ Reaction to Conviction
Posted: December 11, 2016 Filed under: Censorship, Global, Health and Social Issues, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, EUROPE, Freedom of speech, Geert Wilders, Islam, Islamism, Jihadism, Moroccan-Dutch, Moroccans, Netherlands, Party for Freedom Leave a comment
Editorial from National Review:
…Wilders was convicted of inciting discrimination and giving group offense, two “crimes” that are observed in much of Europe but that are not properly the stuff of criminal offenses in a country with free speech. While it is worth keeping in mind that Wilders isn’t a consistent defender of the free-speech rights he complains are being here violated — he has advocated banning both the Koran and the building of new mosques in the Netherlands — the laws he has been convicted of violating are absurd and have no place in a civilized, liberal society such as the Netherlands. They are an example of what happens when what we call political correctness is allowed to harden into an unchallengeable orthodoxy and given the power of law. And we ought to keep in mind that our own so-called liberals are eager to enact such “hate speech” laws, and to use them to suppress political ideas they find unpalatable.
[Read the full text here, at NRO]
The Netherlands has a large and poorly assimilated minority population of Muslim immigrants. They are mostly Sunni, mostly in the cities, and come from a variety of backgrounds: Turkey and Morocco, former Dutch East Indies colonies, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq. They make up about 5 percent of the population, and their numbers include many high-profile figures such as the current mayor of Rotterdam.
[ALSO SEE – Wilders rises in polls after conviction]
And they have proved to be a source of social friction: In 2006, the Dutch justice minister inspired a public panic when he suggested that the country might incorporate sharia law if a growing Muslim population supported doing so; the assassination of anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn by a Dutch leftist angered at his “scapegoating” of Muslims intensified tensions, as did the jihadist murder of Theo van Gogh for criticizing Islam, and the subsequent controversy surrounding the immigration of Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali many years earlier. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] ‘Can We Take a Joke?’ Official Trailer HD, Featuring Adam Carolla, Lisa Lampanelli, Gilbert Gottfried, Penn Jillette
Posted: June 7, 2016 Filed under: Art & Culture, Censorship, Humor, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Accidentally on Purpose (TV series), Adam Carolla, Ann Coulter, Ari Fleischer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bernie Sanders, documentary, Donald Trump, Film, Free speech, Penn Jillette, Politically Correct, Stand-up comedy Leave a comment
In the age of social media, nearly every day brings a new eruption of outrage. While people have always found something to be offended by, their ability to organize a groundswell of opposition to—and public censure of—their offender has never been more powerful. Today we’re all one clumsy joke away from public ruin. Can We Take A Joke? offers a thought-provoking and wry exploration of outrage culture through the lens of stand-up comedy, with notables like Gilbert Gottfried, Penn Jillette, Lisa Lampanelli, and Adam Carolla detailing its stifling impact on comedy and the exchange of ideas. What will future will be like if we can’t learn how to take a joke?
Why College Kids Can’t Take a Joke
Posted: June 11, 2015 Filed under: Censorship, Comics, Entertainment, Humor | Tags: American Enterprise Institute, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christina Hoff Sommers, comedy, Feminism, Kirsten Powers, Progressivism, Purdue University, Racism, Safe Space, Sexism, Trauma trigger, Trigger Warning, University of Chicago Leave a comment
Kyle Smith writes: What’s the deal with young people today? “They just want to use these words: ‘That’s racist,’ ‘That’s sexist,’ ‘That’s prejudice,’” Jerry Seinfeld told ESPN’s Colin Cowherd this week. “They don’t know what the f—k they’re talking about.”
“I stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because they’re way too conservative.”
— Chris Rock
Comics are afraid to work on college campuses, Seinfeld said. To give an idea of how young people think, he cited a bizarre response his 14-year-old daughter made when his wife noted that the girl might want to go to New York City from the suburbs more often “So you can see boys.” The girl replied that the remark was “sexist,” her father said.
“There is a word…That word is illiberal; there is nothing ‘conservative’ about it.”
— Kyle Smith
The determination of the identity-politics obsessed to shut down speech on campus inspired a couple of hilarious one-liners in the past year. One was from The Onion: “College Encourages Lively Exchange of Idea: Students, Faculty Invited to Freely Express Single Viewpoint.” The other, though unintentionally funny, was equally amusing, and came from Chris Rock: “I stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because they’re way too conservative.”
There is a word for the move to ban a screening of 2014’s most popular movie, American Sniper (and replace it with Paddington), to hound a major university into rescinding its honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to punish someone with a Title IX investigation for the crime of questioning the wisdom of certain Title IX investigations, and designating a “safe space” to which to flee after failing to prevent a speech by Christina Hoff Sommers from taking place. Read the rest of this entry »
Daniel Greenfield: How Islam in America Became a Privileged Religion
Posted: June 4, 2015 Filed under: Law & Justice, Politics, Religion, Think Tank | Tags: Apostasy in Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bill Maher, Islam, Islamic fundamentalism, Jihadism, Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, Liberalism, Mediaite, Muslim, Muslim world, propaganda Leave a comment
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
Daniel Greenfield writes: What is Islam? The obvious dictionary definition answer is that it’s a religion, but legally speaking it actually enjoys all of the advantages of race, religion and culture with none of the disadvantages.
“Islamist organizations have figured out how lock in every advantage of race, religion and culture, while expeditiously shifting from one to the other to avoid any of the disadvantages.”
Islam is a religion when mandating that employers accommodate the hijab, but when it comes time to bring it into the schools, places that are legally hostile to religion, American students are taught about Islam, visit mosques and even wear burkas and recite Islamic prayers to learn about another culture. Criticism of Islam is denounced as racist even though the one thing that Islam clearly isn’t is a race.
Islamist organizations have figured out how lock in every advantage of race, religion and culture, while expeditiously shifting from one to the other to avoid any of the disadvantages.
“Islam is a theocracy. When it leaves the territories conquered by Islam, it seeks to replicate that theocracy through violence and by adapting the legal codes of the host society to suit its purposes.”
The biggest form of Muslim privilege has been to racialize Islam. The racialization of Islam has locked in all the advantages of racial status for a group that has no common race, only a common ideology.
Islam is the only religion that cannot be criticized. No other religion has a term in wide use that treats criticism of it as bigotry. Islamophobia is a unique term because it equates dislike of a religion with racism. Its usage makes it impossible to criticize that religion without being accused of bigotry.
By equating religion with race, Islam is treated not as a particular set of beliefs expressed in behaviors both good and bad, but as an innate trait that like race cannot be criticized without attacking the existence of an entire people. The idea that Islamic violence stems from its beliefs is denounced as racist.
“By equating religion with race, Islam is treated not as a particular set of beliefs expressed in behaviors both good and bad, but as an innate trait that like race cannot be criticized without attacking the existence of an entire people. The idea that Islamic violence stems from its beliefs is denounced as racist.”
Muslims are treated as a racial collective rather than a group that shares a set of views about the world.
[Read the full text here, at FrontPageMag.com]
That has made it impossible for the left to deal with ex-Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or non-Muslims from Muslim families like Salman Rushdie. If Islam is more like skin color than an ideology, then ex-Muslims, like ex-Blacks, cannot and should not exist. Under such conditions, atheism is not a debate, but a hate crime. Challenging Islam does not question a creed; it attacks the existence of an entire people.
YAAN – FEB28 – Author Ayaan Hirsi Ali talks about her autobiography. tb (Photo by Tony Bock/Toronto Star via Getty Images) By: Tony Bock, Collection: Toronto Star
Muslim atheists, unlike all other atheists, are treated as race traitors both by Muslims and leftists. The left has accepted the Brotherhood’s premise that the only authentic Middle Easterner is a Muslim (not a Christian or a Jew) and that the only authentic Muslim is a Salafist (even if they don’t know the word).
The racialization of Islam has turned blasphemy prosecutions into an act of tolerance while making a cartoon of a religious figure racist even when it is drawn by ex-Muslims like Bosch Fawstin. The New York Times will run photos of Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” covered in dung and pornography, but refuses to run Mohammed cartoons because it deems one anti-religious and the other racist. Read the rest of this entry »
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Un-Feminist Un-Hero
Posted: March 28, 2015 Filed under: Health and Social Issues, Religion, Think Tank | Tags: AHA Foundation, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Brandeis University, Conversion to Judaism, Criticism of Islam, Islam, Islamism, Muslim, Qur'an, The New York Times, Theo van Gogh (film director), Women in Islam Leave a comment
She is defying the jihadi censors, the misbegotten hate-speech laws and the polite conventions of Western debate that all limit what can be said about the relationship of Islam to modernity. So what’s Feminism’s problem?
Rich Lowry writes: Ayaan Hirsi Ali should be the perfect feminist hero.
In theory, she fits the role on multiple levels: She’s an escapee from an abusive patriarchy.
[Read the full text here, at the New York Post]
She’s an African immigrant who made her own way in a Western country, the Netherlands. She’s a fierce advocate for women’s rights.
Author Ayaan Hirsi Ali talks about her autobiography. Photo by Tony Bock/Toronto Star via Getty Images.
“Raised a Muslim in Somalia, subjected to genital mutilation and married off to a distant cousin, she is famously a critic of Islam.”
She’s a target for deadly violence by angry men who want to shut her up. She left her religion and became a scourge of its repressive practices.
Except for the blemish on her record: Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a dissident from the wrong religion.
“Ayaan Hirsi Ali has more confidence in Western civilization and its values than people who have never had to live outside it, or face down the enemies who want to destroy it.”
Raised a Muslim in Somalia, subjected to genital mutilation and married off to a distant cousin, she is famously a critic of Islam.
She has excoriated it at extraordinary risk to her own safety, and makes the case again in her latest book, “Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now.”
When she collaborated on a film in the Netherlands in 2004 cataloging abuses against Muslim women, her fellow filmmaker Theo van Gogh was assassinated by an Islamist who left a note threatening her pinned to van Gogh’s chest — with a knife.
“In the fashionable neologism designed to be a conversation-stopper, she is “an Islamophobe’.”
But Hirsi Ali wouldn’t be silenced. She is truly a hero of our time. She is defying the jihadi censors, the misbegotten 
hate-speech laws and the polite conventions of Western debate that all limit what can be said about the relationship of Islam to modernity.
[Order Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s new book “Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now” from Amazon.com]
Our society, and especially the left, tends to reflexively celebrate dissenters. But some heretics are more welcome than others. Read the rest of this entry »
Why Islam Needs a Reformation
Posted: March 21, 2015 Filed under: Politics, Religion, Think Tank | Tags: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Conversion to Judaism, Criticism of Islam, Cumberland, Federal Bureau of Prisons, Islam, Maryland, Muslim, Pennsylvania, Somali people, United States Department of Justice 3 Comments
To defeat the extremists for good, Muslims must reject those aspects of their tradition that prompt some believers to resort to oppression and holy war
Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes: “Islam’s borders are bloody,” wrote the late political scientist Samuel Huntington in 1996, “and so are its innards.” Nearly 20 years later, Huntington looks more right than ever before. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, at least 70% of all the fatalities in armed conflicts around the world last year were in wars involving Muslims. In 2013, there were nearly 12,000 terrorist attacks world-wide.
[Order Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s new book “Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now” from Amazon.com]
The lion’s share were in Muslim-majority countries, and many of the others were carried out by Muslims. By far the most numerous victims of Muslim violence—including executions and lynchings not captured in these statistics—are Muslims themselves.
“Let me make two things clear. I do not seek to inspire another war on terror or extremism—violence in the name of Islam cannot be ended by military means alone. Nor am I any sort of ‘Islamophobe.’ At various times, I myself have been all three kinds of Muslim: a fundamentalist, a cocooned believer and a dissident. My journey has gone from Mecca to Medina to Manhattan.”
Not all of this violence is explicitly motivated by religion, but a great deal of it is. I believe that it is foolish to insist, as Western leaders habitually do, that the violent acts committed in the name of Islam can somehow be divorced from the religion itself. For more than a decade, my 
message has been simple: Islam is not a religion of peace.
“For me, there seemed no way to reconcile my faith with the freedoms I came to the West to embrace. I left the faith, despite the threat of the death penalty prescribed by Shariah for apostates. Future generations of Muslims deserve better, safer options. Muslims should be able to welcome modernity, not be forced to wall themselves off, or live in a state of cognitive dissonance, or lash out in violent rejection.”
When I assert this, I do not mean that Islamic belief makes all Muslims violent. This is manifestly not the case: There are many millions of peaceful Muslims in the world. What I do say is that the call to violence and the justification for it are explicitly stated in the sacred texts of Islam. Moreover, this theologically sanctioned violence is there to be activated by any number of offenses, including but not limited to apostasy, adultery, blasphemy and even something as vague as threats to family honor or to the honor of Islam itself.
Islamic State militants marching through Raqqa, Syria, a stronghold of the Sunni extremist group, in an undated file image posted on a militant website on Jan. 14, 2014. Photo: Associated Press
It is not just al Qaeda and Islamic State that show the violent face of Islamic faith and practice. It is Pakistan, where any statement critical of the Prophet or Islam is labeled as blasphemy and punishable by death. It is Saudi Arabia, where churches and synagogues are outlawed and 
where beheadings are a legitimate form of punishment. It is Iran, where stoning is an acceptable punishment and homosexuals are hanged for their “crime.”
“But it is not only Muslims who would benefit from a reformation of Islam. We in the West have an enormous stake in how the struggle over Islam plays out.”
As I see it, the fundamental problem is that the majority of otherwise peaceful and law-abiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrant for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts.
[Read the full text of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s essay here, at Wall Street Journal]
It simply will not do for Muslims to claim that their religion has been “hijacked” by extremists. The killers of Islamic State and Nigeria’s Boko Haram cite the same religious texts that every other Muslim in the world considers sacrosanct.
Muslim children carry torches during a parade before Eid al-Fitr, at the end of the holy month of Ramadan, on July 27, 2014, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.Photo: Getty Images
Instead of letting Islam off the hook with bland clichés about the religion of peace, we in the West need to challenge and debate the very substance of Islamic thought and practice. We need to hold Islam accountable for the acts of its most violent adherents and to demand that it reform or disavow the key beliefs that are used to justify those acts.
As it turns out, the West has some experience with this sort of reformist project. Read the rest of this entry »
REPEAL THEM NOW: Hate-Speech Codes Won’t Protect Europe From Violence
Posted: January 11, 2015 Filed under: Censorship, Think Tank, War Room | Tags: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charlie Hebdo, EUROPE, Islam, Joe Biden, Muhammad, Muslim, Muslim world, Salman Rushdie, United States 3 Comments
Nina Shea writes: What lesson will Europe draw from the Charlie Hebdo massacre? Will it get serious about ending Muslim extremism within its borders, or will it try even harder to curb offensive political cartoons and speech about Islam? Up to this point, Europe has responded to Islamist violence in retaliation against ridicule, and even against sober critique of Islam, by taking the latter course.
In 2008, the EU mandated religious hate-speech laws, with European officials indignantly declaring that there is “no right to religious insult.” More revealingly, one official European commission delicately explained that this measure was taken to “preserve social peace and public order” in light of the “increasing sensitivities” of “certain individuals” who “have reacted violently to criticism of their religion.”
“Today, the Charlie Hebdo staff is being mourned as ‘courageous chroniclers’ by President Hollande. But yesterday, it was the French state, not extremists, who sought to ‘avenge the prophet,’ through hate-speech charges against the magazine and its editor for other irreverent Mohammad cartoons.”
Europe was frightened and wanted to cool down its angry Muslim populations and appease the censorship lobby that claims to represent them in the 56-member-state Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Since 2004, it had seen the assassination of Theo van Gogh in an Amsterdam street for his and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s film on abuses against Muslim women; worldwide Muslim riots and economic boycotts over an obscure Danish newspaper’s caricatures of the Islamic prophet Mohammed; and yet more rioting and murders after Pope Benedict presented a paper to an academic audience at Regensburg University that questioned Islam’s position on reason. Read the rest of this entry »
How to Answer the Paris Terror Attack
Posted: January 8, 2015 Filed under: Health and Social Issues, Mediasphere, Religion, War Room | Tags: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charlie Hebdo, Farag Foda, Innocence of Muslims, Islam, Islamism, Joe Biden, Mohammed Taha Mohammed Ahmed, Muhammad, Muslim, Qur'an, Ruhollah Khomeini, Salman Rushdie, Theo van Gogh (film director) 1 Comment
The West must stand up for freedom—and acknowledge the link between Islamists’ political ideology and their religious beliefs
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
writes: After the horrific massacre Wednesday at the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, perhaps the West will finally put away its legion of useless tropes trying to deny the relationship between violence and radical Islam.
“How we respond to this attack is of great consequence. If we take the position that we are dealing with a handful of murderous thugs with no connection to what they so vocally claim, then we are not answering them.”
10
This was not an attack by a mentally deranged, lone-wolf gunman. This was not an “un-Islamic” attack by a bunch of thugs—the perpetrators could be heard shouting that they were avenging the Prophet Muhammad. Nor was it spontaneous.
[Order Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book “Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations” from Amazon]
It was planned to inflict maximum damage, during a staff meeting, with automatic weapons and a getaway plan. It was designed to sow terror, and in that it has worked.
“We have to acknowledge that today’s Islamists are driven by a political ideology, an ideology embedded in the foundational texts of Islam. We can no longer pretend that it is possible to divorce actions from the ideals that inspire them.”
The West is duly terrified. But it should not be surprised.
If there is a lesson to be drawn from such a grisly episode, it is that what webelieve about Islam truly doesn’t matter. This type of violence, jihad, is what they, the Islamists, believe.
[Order Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book “Infidel
There are numerous calls to violent jihad in the Quran. But the Quran is hardly alone. In too much of Islam, jihad is a thoroughly modern concept. The 20th-century jihad “bible,” and an animating work for many Islamist groups today, is “The Quranic Concept of War,” a book written in the mid-1970s by Pakistani Gen. S.K. Malik. He argues that because God, Allah, himself authored every word of the Quran, the rules of war contained in the Quran are of a higher caliber than the rules developed by mere mortals.
“Islam, with 1,400 years of history and some 1.6 billion adherents, should be able to withstand a few cartoons by a French satirical magazine. But of course deadly responses to cartoons depicting Muhammad are nothing new in the age of jihad.”
In Malik’s analysis of Quranic strategy, the human soul—and not any physical battlefield—is the center of conflict. The key to victory, taught by Allah through the military campaigns of the Prophet Muhammad, is to strike at the soul of your enemy. And the best way to strike at your enemy’s soul is through terror. Terror, Malik writes, is “the point where the means and the end meet.” Terror, he adds, “is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose.”
“The more we oblige, the more we self-censor, the more we appease, the bolder the enemy gets.”
Those responsible for the slaughter in Paris, just like the man who killed the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, are seeking to impose terror. And every time we give in to their vision of justified religious violence, we are giving them exactly what they want. Read the rest of this entry »
WSJ: ‘Jihadists Target Western Principles of Free Speech and Religious Pluralism’
Posted: January 8, 2015 Filed under: Censorship, Global, Religion, War Room | Tags: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charlie Hebdo, Extremism, Farag Foda, Fundamentalism, Islamism, Jihadism, Muhammad, Paris, Ruhollah Khomeini, Salman Rushdie, satire, The Satanic Verses 4 Comments
Heavily armed gunmen on Wednesday infiltrated the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper in Paris, murdering at least 12 people, including its editor, before fleeing. The deadliest terror attack on French soil in more than a decade is a fresh reminder that the war on Islamist terror is far from won, and that jihadists are bent on eradicating the heritage of Western freedom.
Charlie Hebdo was founded in 1970, and the left-wing weekly has always been an equal-opportunity offender. Its politics and taste aren’t ours, but from Jesus to Michael Jackson and from 9/11 to the Pope, nothing has been off-limits.
“Wednesday’s attack also demonstrates again that violent Islam isn’t a reaction to poverty or Western policies in the Middle East. It is an ideological challenge to Western civilization and principles, including a free press and religious pluralism.”
That mocking spirit extended to Islam, and the paper drew the ire of Muslim fanatics for poking fun at the Prophet Muhammad. The newspaper in 2006 reprinted the Muhammad cartoons first published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. In response, the grand mosque of Paris and other French Muslim organizations unsuccessfully sued Charlie Hebdo for “racism.”
“The murder of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists is merely the latest evil expression of a modern arc of Islamist violence against Western free speech that stretches back to Ayatollah Khomeini ’s 1989 fatwa calling for the killing of novelist Salman Rushdie.”
In 2011 terrorists firebombed Charlie’s offices after the announcement of a “Shariah Hebdo.” (See the cover nearby: “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing.”) A subsequent cover depicted a cartoonist passionately kissing a Muslim man with the headline: “Love Is Stronger Than Hate.” Charlie Hebdo moved to a new office, but police protection failed to stop the terrorists who on Wednesday were heard shouting “we have avenged the prophet!”
Lux et Veritas at Yale: Free Speech?
Posted: September 11, 2014 Filed under: Censorship, Education, History, Think Tank | Tags: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Brandeis University, Hirsi ALi, Ivy League, Muslim Students Association, William F. Buckley, Yale, Yale University Leave a comment
From NR, The Editors: When, this spring, Brandeis University reneged on its commencement invitation to human-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it revealed the cravenness that characterizes many of America’s leading institutions of higher education. The decision of Yale’s William F. Buckley Jr. Program to invite Hirsi Ali to New Haven as part of its speaker series has exposed the same quality in 
many of that school’s students.
“Even the most enthusiastic Ivy League shill should know that spending $55K a year to have one’s presuppositions obsequiously endorsed is a waste.”
In an open letter sent to Buckley Program student leaders, members of 35 campus groups say they feel “highly disrespected” by the September 15 lecture “Clash of Civilizations: Islam and the West.” The letter, drafted by the Muslim Students Association, lays out their complaints.
“But in our age of studious political correctness, where the inmates write the asylum’s curriculum, these students are happy to insulate themselves against any opinions from beyond the Old Campus Quad.”
They are concerned that “Ms. Hirsi Ali is being invited to speak as an authority on Islam despite the fact that she does not hold the credentials to do so.” They accuse Hirsi Ali of “hate speech” and express outrage that she should “have such a platform in our home.” “We cannot overlook,” they write, “how marginalizing her presence will be to the Muslim community and how uncomfortable it will be for the community’s allies.”
Their remedy, of course, is censorship. Read the rest of this entry »
Kirsten Powers: Welcome to the New Dark Age
Posted: May 15, 2014 Filed under: Censorship, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Brandeis University, Brendan Eich, Christianity, Christine Lagarde, Inquisition, Kirsten Powers, Smith College, University of California Santa Barbara 3 Comments
A public burning of heretics sentenced by the Inquisition is portrayed in this 18th-century print.
Each week seems to bring another incident. Who will the thought police come for next?
For USAToday, Kirsten Powers writes: Welcome to the Dark Ages, Part II. We have slipped into an age of un-enlightenment where you fall in line behind the mob or face the consequences.
How ironic that the persecutors this time around are the so-called intellectuals. They claim to be liberal while behaving as anything but. The touchstone of liberalism is tolerance of differing ideas. Yet this mob exists to enforce conformity of thought and to delegitimize any dissent from its sanctioned worldview. Intolerance is its calling card.
Each week seems to bring another incident. Last week it was David and Jason Benham, whose pending HGTV show was canceled after the mob unearthed old remarks the brothers made about their Christian beliefs on homosexuality. People can’t have a house-flipping show unless they believe and say the “right” things in their life off the set? In this world, the conservative Tom Selleck never would have been Magnum, P.I.
This week, a trail-blazing woman was felled in the new tradition of commencement shaming. International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagardewithdrew from delivering the commencement speech at Smith College following protests from students and faculty who hate the IMF. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, this trend is growing. In the 21 years leading up to 2009, there were 21 incidents of an invited guest not speaking because of protests. Yet, in the past five-and-a-half years, there have been 39 cancellations.
I.M.F. Chief Christine Lagarde Not Approved by Smith College’s Left-Wing Thought Enforcers, Withdraws as Commencement Speaker
Posted: May 13, 2014 Filed under: Education, Politics | Tags: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christine Lagarde, Condoleezza Rice, Greg Lukianoff, International Monetary Fund, Kathleen McCartney, Ruth Simmons, Smith College 2 CommentsFor THE NEW YORK TIMES, RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA reports:A week before she was to speak at the Smith College commencement, Christine Lagarde, chief of the International Monetary Fund, has withdrawn from the event, citing protests against her and the fund, the college said Monday.
Her withdrawal comes after Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state,withdrew from speaking at the Rutgers University commencement in the face of protests against her role in Bush administration foreign policy, and weeks after Brandeis University rescinded its invitation to the rights advocate Ayaan Hirsi Ali to receive an honorary degree at its commencement, after protests over her anti-Islam statements.
Such reversals have become more common in recent years, said Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, referring to this time of year as “disinvitation season.” What has changed is not so much the protests themselves, but the willingness of colleges and speakers to give in, adding that many apparently voluntary withdrawals are made at the college’s urging. Read the rest of this entry »
The Closing of the Collegiate Mind: Ideological Conformity Marches on
Posted: May 12, 2014 Filed under: Censorship, Education | Tags: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Azusa Pacific University, Brandeis University, Brown University, New York City Police Commissioner, Presidency of George W. Bush, Ruth Wisse, Wall Street Journal 3 Comments
For the Wall Street Journal, Ruth Wisse writes: There was a time when people looking for intellectual debate turned away from politics to the university. Political backrooms bred slogans and bagmen; universities fostered educated discussion. But when students in the 1960s began occupying university property like the thugs of regimes America was fighting abroad, the venues gradually reversed. Open debate is now protected only in the polity: In universities, muggers prevail.
Assaults on intellectual and political freedom have been making headlines. Pressure from faculty 
egged on by Muslim groups induced Brandeis University last month not to grant Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the proponent of women’s rights under Islam, an intended honorary degree at its convocation.
Ruth Wisse‘s book: “No Joke: Making Jewish Humor” (Library of Jewish Ideas) is available at Amazon.com
This was a replay of 1994, when Brandeis faculty demanded that trustees rescind their decision to award an honorary degree to Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In each case, a faculty cabal joined by (let us charitably say) ignorant students promoted the value of repression over the values of America’s liberal democracy.
Opponents of free speech have lately chalked up many such victories: New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly prevented from speaking at Brown University in November; a lecture by Charles Murray canceled by Azusa Pacific University in April; Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state and national-security adviser under the George W. Bush administration, harassed earlier this month into declining the invitation by Rutgers University to address this year’s convocation. Read the rest of this entry »
Policing Thought Crime
Posted: May 6, 2014 Filed under: Education, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Azusa Pacific University, Brandeis University, Jonah Goldberg, Star-Spangled Banner, Vladimir Lenin, Woodrow Wilson 2 Comments
Diverse opinions have a place in our country. Don’t punish those who hold them.
For USAToday, Jonah Goldberg writes: In 1920, a bond salesman walked into Joseph Yenowsky’s Waterbury, Conn., clothing store. Yenowsky was a tough sell. During their lengthy conversation, Yenowsky told the salesman he thought Vladimir Lenin, the Russian Bolshevik leader, was “the brainiest man” in the world. The bond salesmen turned Yenowsky in to the police for sedition. Yenowsky got six months in jail under a Connecticut statute.
This was hardly an isolated incident during the so-called “Red Scare” of the World War I era. In Syracuse, three activists were arrested for circulating fliers protesting the conditions of America’s political prisoners. The subversive flier quoted the First Amendment. They got 18 months in prison. In Washington, D.C., a man refused to stand for the The Star-Spangled Banner. A furious sailor shot the “disloyal” man three times in the back. When the man fell, the Washington Post reported, “the crowd burst into cheering and handclapping.” An Indiana jury deliberated for two minutes before it acquitted a man of murdering an immigrant who’d said “To Hell with the United States.”
A number of conditions were necessary for this totalitarian fever that gripped America. The law — state, federal and local — was arrayed against any free speech deemed “un-American.” But so were the people. There was a broad consensus that there was a real threat posed to the U.S. from abroad – and from within – in the form of Bolsheviks, anarchists and disloyal immigrants or “hyphenated Americans” (e.g. German-Americans or Irish-Americans). Woodrow Wilson’s administration fueled this climate. Wilson himself proclaimed that “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”
It’s valuable to remember all of this for several reasons. First, it’s good to know such things can happen here (“even” under the leadership of liberals and progressives). Also, it’s good to understand that things have been worse than they are today. There’s a tendency to think our government has only become more intrusive and censorial than ever. That’s simply untrue. Last, we should be wary of thought-crime panics. Read the rest of this entry »
The Slow Death of Free Speech
Posted: April 16, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: America Alone, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Brandeis University, Downton Abbey, Germaine Greer, Islam, Mark Steyn, National University of Ireland, Nigel Lawson, Somalia, Spectator, Swarthmore College 3 Comments
“Once you get a taste for shutting people up, it’s hard to stop. Why bother winning the debate when it’s easier to close it down?”
The delightfully dyspeptic Mark Steyn writes: These days, pretty much every story is really the same story:
- In Galway, at the National University of Ireland, a speaker who attempts to argue against the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) programme against Israel is shouted down with cries of ‘Fucking Zionist, fucking pricks… Get the fuck off our campus.’
- In California, Mozilla’s chief executive is forced to resign because he once made a political donation in support of the pre-revisionist definition of marriage.
- At Westminster, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee declares that the BBC should seek ‘special clearance’ before it interviews climate sceptics, such as fringe wacko extremists like former Chancellor Nigel Lawson.
- In Massachusetts, Brandeis University withdraws its offer of an honorary degree to a black feminist atheist human rights campaigner from Somalia.
- In London, a multitude of liberal journalists and artists responsible for everything from Monty Python to Downton Abbey sign an open letter in favour of the first state restraints on the British press in three and a quarter centuries.
- And in Canberra the government is planning to repeal Section 18C — whoa, don’t worry, not all of it, just three or four adjectives; or maybe only two, or whatever it’s down to by now, after what Gay Alcorn in the Age described as the ongoing debate about ‘where to strike the balance between free speech in a democracy and protection against racial abuse in a multicultural society’.
I heard a lot of that kind of talk during my battles with the Canadian ‘human rights’ commissions a few years ago: of course, we all believe in free speech, but it’s a question of how you ‘strike the balance’, where you ‘draw the line’… which all sounds terribly reasonable and Canadian, and apparently Australian, too. But in reality the point of free speech is for the stuff that’s over the line, and strikingly unbalanced. If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn’t free at all. So screw that.
The Roots of CAIR’s Intimidation Campaign
Posted: April 14, 2014 Filed under: Politics, Think Tank, U.S. News | Tags: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Brandeis University, Council on American–Islamic Relations, Hamas, Israel, Palestine Liberation Organization, United States, Yasser Arafat 1 Comment
Brandeis sides with a spawn of Hamas over a champion of women’s rights.
Author’s Note: This week, capitulating to Islamic-supremacist agitation led by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Brandeis University reneged on its announced plan to present an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the heroic human-rights activist. In my 2010 book, The Grand Jihad, I devoted a chapter to the origins and purposes of CAIR, its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas-support network, and its aim to silence critics of Islamic supremacism. In light of the continuing success of this campaign — despite a federal terrorism-financing prosecution that exposed CAIR’s unsavory background — it is worth revisiting that history. What follows is an adapted excerpt from that chapter.
Andrew C. McCarthy writes: In January 1993, a new, left-leaning U.S. administration, inclined to be more sympathetic to the Islamist clause, came to power. But before he could bat an eye, President Bill Clinton was confronted by the murder and depraved mutilation of American soldiers in Somalia. A few weeks later, on February 26, jihadists bombed the World Trade 
Center. The public was angry and appeasing Islamists would have to wait.
Yasser Arafat, however, sensed opportunity. The terrorist intifada launched at the end of 1987 had been a successful gambit for the Palestine Liberation Organization chief. Within a year, even as the body count mounted, the weak-kneed “international community” was granting the PLO the right to participate (though not to vote) in U.N. General Assembly sessions. And when Arafat made the usual show of “renouncing” terrorism — even as he was orchestrating terrorist attacks in conjunction with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other Islamist factions — the United States recognized him as the Palestinians’ legitimate leader, just as the Europeans had done. Arafat blundered in 1991, throwing in his lot with Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, and that seemed to bury him with the Bush 41 administration. But Clinton’s election was a new lease on life. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Kelly File: Ayaan Hirsi Ali Interview
Posted: April 10, 2014 Filed under: Censorship, Education, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: AHA Foundation, Ali, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Brandeis University, Hirsi ALi, Honorary degree, Islam, United States Leave a commentAyaan Hirsi Ali joined Megyn Kelly Wednesday night to react to Brandeis University rescinding the honorary degree they said they were giving her. Hirsi ALi blasted the “very feeble excuse” Brandeis gave and the way any critic of Islam is threatened with “violent repercussion” just for speaking out.
Hirsi Ali said, “For the last 12 years I have systematically been condemned by Muslim individuals… any time that I bring up the treatment of women in Islam.” She said that the people who protested the Brandeis honor cherry-picked from various interviews she’s done over the years “to fit their own narrative.” She also found it striking that Brandeis didn’t think to Google her ahead of time to learn what she’s actually said and only rescinded the honorary degree after the uproar.
Hirsi Ali pointed out that in the United States, if you insult Jews, Christians, Mormons, or what have you, the worst you get are angry letters. But, she continued, there is a “fear” of “violent repercussion” if you dare criticize Islam in any way.
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