Tribute to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Courage

[From article]
Rare is the occasion when an honored speaker delivering a keynote address chastises the audience. But if anyone deserves the right to do so on any issue, it is Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the matter of America’s ignorance about Islamic-supremacist ideology—ignorance on display again this week, in the aftermath of the Orlando massacre, when American liberals have argued for gun control rather than jihad control. The moment occurred during the New Criterion’s Edmund Burke Award Gala honoring Ali for her “conspicuous contributions to the defense of civilization.”
Ali, an outspoken critic of Islam, asked the audience if it knew what Sharia was. Many hands rose. Ali then asked if the audience knew what jihad was. Practically every hand shot up. Finally, she asked how many knew what dawawas. Only a few hands went up. Ali responded:
And there you get a smattering of hands. You see, this is it. Almost—what?—15 years from 9/11 . . . a decade-and-a-half, and most Americans and most Europeans know what jihad is, but they don’t know what dawa is. And if you don’t know what dawa is—the process of Islamization, the strategy of Islamization, what leads to jihad—then you will never be able to understand jihad. You do not understand the threat of the day if you do not know whatdawa is.
And here we are—I’m in a setting . . . in the companionship of friends, conservatives, people who care about the idea of America—and you do not understand, you do not know what dawa is. You don’t know what the competing idea is. You are honoring me and I am thankful, but I almost want to say to all of you who do not know what dawa is, “Shame on you.”
. . .



Do you know why I want to say shame on you? Because if you look back in history when our fathers and grandfathers and our ancestors were confronted with bad ideas, and we read those history books and . . . we sit there and we think: “How did they not see it? How could they not know it? How didn’t you know what Hitler was up to? Well, you may not have known it in the 1930s, but then in the early 1940s you should have known it!” And here we are in the information age, and we don’t know it.
If you don’t know your enemy, you can’t hope to defeat him. Our enlightened Washington theologians tell us that non-Muslims have no right to speculate as to the nature of Islam—but they simultaneously declare Islam a religion of peace that has been hijacked and perverted by nihilists.
[. . .]
[Ayaan Hirsi Ali] spent her formative years living under Sharia in Africa and the Middle East, where she joined the Muslim Brotherhood. As is the custom in many such locales, she was subjected to female genital mutilation. Rather than submit to an arranged marriage in Canada, Ali escaped to the Netherlands, where she applied for political asylum. She won a seat in the Dutch parliament. In effect, she reasoned her way out of the Islamic-supremacist ideology once she arrived in the West by comparing the teachings of the core Islamic texts to those of the Western canon, which she found far superior.
[. . .]



For her unwillingness to accept a Western progressive’s distorted vision of Islam, she is censured and oftencensored. It must baffle Ali that, even as she speaks in defense of Western civilization, her fellow Westerners often seem to reject the principle of free speech.
[. . .]
She was troubled by the West’s lack of confidence in its own ideas. Free expression, she said, is the great deterrent to the global jihad.
In her devotion to classical liberal ideals and her willingness to die in defense of them, Ali is in many ways more American than those who were born here. She sought to become an American citizen because she studied intently and embraced wholeheartedly the American Idea. America is more than a landmass; it is an exceptional belief system that enables human flourishing. Islamic supremacism is not only incompatible with America but also seeks its destruction.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s life is a testament to the notion that ideas matter, and great ideas are worth defending. If America is to remain the last, best hope on Earth, we must heed her words.

http://city-journal.org/html/bold-brave-and-right-14579.html

Bold, Brave, and Right
Ayaan Hirsi Ali defends—and embodies—the American Idea.
Benjamin Weingarten
June 17, 2016
The Social Order

Published on Jun 1, 2016
For The New Criterion, Ben Weingarten, commentator and Founder & CEO of ChangeUp Media sits down with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, ardent defender of Western civilization and individual liberty against Islamic supremacism, New York Times bestselling author of ‘The Caged Virgin,’ ‘Infidel’ and ‘Nomad’ and ‘Heretic,’ former Dutch MP, fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, founder of the AHA Foundation Ayaan Hirsi Ali and recipient of The New Criterion’s fourth annual Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture & Society for an in-depth interview. During their discussion, Weingarten and Ali discuss America’s inability under both Presidents Obama and Bush to recognize and defend against Islamic supremacism as the totalitarian existential threat of our time, the clash of civilizations between Islam and the West and the ideology of the global jihadist movement, the Islamization of Europe, how the West can defend its freedoms from a subversive global jihadist movement seeking to use those freedoms against us, the war on free speech in the West being waged by Islamic supremacists with the help wittingly or unwittingly of many on the Left and more.

https://youtu.be/rqXVdiT7pdY

Ayaan Hirsi Ali To Give Keynote Speech At Act For America National Conference

Join us at our 2015 Gala as we Honor Keynote Speaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I am thrilled to announce that our keynote speaker for the 2015 National Conference will be Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the leading voices speaking out for the rights of Muslim women and against radical Islamic extremism. Her story is one of a truly extraordinary journey and fantastic courage. It is a privilege to honor her bravery during our annual conference! I hope you will be there with me the evening of Sept. 9to do so. Subjected to Female Genital Mutilation at an early age, she escaped a forced marriage in 1992, and fled to the Netherlands where she was granted asylum.  She quickly learned Dutch and was able to earn a Master's Degree in Political Science. Working as a translator for Somali immigrants, she saw firsthand the inconsistencies between Western society and tribal, Muslim cultures. A member of the Dutch Parliament from 2003 through 2006, she focused on furthering the integration of non-Western immigrants into Dutch society and on defending the rights of Muslim women. Her work earned her the hatred of many radical Islamists. When filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in 2004, a death threat for Ayaan was left pinned to his body. A proud U.S. Citizen since 2013, she continues to work to defend the rights of women against harmful traditional practices.  Ayaan's story is one of freedom overcoming tragedy and unconquerable courage in the face of danger. I am absolutely ecstatic that she will be our keynote speaker at our 2015 Gala and that we will have the opportunity that evening to thank her and honor her. Join me as we honor Ayaan Hirsi Ali this September! Click here to register today!

Substantial Threats to First Amendment

Top George Will, left, andCondoleeza Rice
Bottom Ayaan Hirsi Ali, left, and Bill Maher

[From article]
Speaking at the event was George Will, the Washington Post columnist whose invitation to speak to California’s Scripps College was rescinded last year. Will said that the First Amendment has never been in more danger.
“Free speech has never been, in the history of our Republic, more comprehensively, aggressively, and dangerously threatened than it is now,” said Will in the event’s keynote address.
Will said that the current assault on free speech is more dangerous than incidents in the past such as the Alien and Sedition Acts that were rooted in local conditions that were bound to disappear.
“Today’s attack is different, Its an attack on the theory of freedom of speech,” said Will. “[There is a] belief that the First Amendment is a mistake and that the real right people have regarding speech is the right to avoid speech…It is an attack on the desirability of free speech.”
Will also warned that there has never been more “intellectual ingenuity devoted towards rationalizing the disappearance of the First Amendment.”
On many campuses, free speech can only occur in “free speech zones”—at Texas Tech that zone happens to be limited to just a 20 foot wide “free speech gazebo.”
At the University of California, Irvine, students recently voted to no longer hang the American flag because it “conflicted with their mission to promote student safety.”
This decision is part of what Will calls the “infantilization of American young people,” and the belief by administrations that they are responsible for maintaining campuses where students are free from any “disturbances to their serenity.”
At Brown University, for example, the response to a critic of the “rape culture” term speaking on its campus was not to disinvite the speaker but rather to “prepare for the terror,” said Will. A “safe space”—equipped with cookies, pillows, blankets, coloring books, calming music, and videos of frolicking puppies—was established for students who needed to “recuperate.”

http://freebeacon.com/culture/celebrating-the-disinvited/

George Will: Free speech never more ‘dangerously threatened than it is now’
BY: Brent Scher Follow @brentscher
April 17, 2015 11:20 am

Book Review: Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Effort To Reform Islam

Ayaan Hirsi Ali
PHOTO BY ELISABETTA VILLA/GETTY IMAGES

[From review]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, which, among other theses, points out the intellectual bankruptcy of a political/religious ideology that preaches a return to seventh-century law and disorder while utilizing the tools of twenty-first century Western progress.

[. . .]

Heretic, as its subtitle suggests, is not a third bio but rather Ali’s most academic and aspirational book to date. It clearly and cleverly offers five “amendments” to Islamic orthodoxy in order to alleviate its violent and oppressive tendencies.
[. . .]
Heretic carefully separates Muslims into three categories. “Medina Muslims,” as Ali calls them, are the jihadists and their supporters, who intertwine the faith with seventh-century political and martial order, as Muhammad did during his time in that city. A low-ball estimate puts this population at 48 million, a tiny fraction of the world’s Muslims—but, considering that it took only 19 men armed with box cutters and the “Medina” ideology to bring us 9/11, it’s a number to be concerned about. In the second group are the apostates and heretics, like Ali herself, who have left the faith altogether or are so critical of it that they can no longer be considered “true” Muslims. This population is tiny but growing. Finally, what Ali terms the “Mecca Muslims” comprise the majority of Islam’s adherents. These are the hearts and minds to whom she preaches reform: devout Muslims who desire access to Western thought, education, technology, and civil law, but who find that “pure” Islamic scripture and discipline (or their government’s adoption of sharia law) renders accommodation all but impossible. Torn by this conflict, many of these Muslims find themselves ripe for jihadist plucking: better to side with the devil you kinda know (Medina Islam) than the one you don’t (hell-bound apostasy).
[. . .]

She dedicates whole chapters to diagnosing the five root problems in Islam that manifest themselves via violence and oppression: 1) The Qur’an’s status as the immutable word of God and the infallibility of Muhammad as the last divine messenger; 2) an emphasis on the afterlife over the here and now; 3) sharia’s claims to be a comprehensive system of law governing the spiritual and temporal realms; 4) the obligation of ordinary Muslims to command right and forbid wrong; and 5) the concept of jihad, or holy war.
[. . .]
The intended audience might do better to read Ali’s earlier books first.Page after page is filled with disconcerting statistics.
The second quibble is with Ali’s case for optimism.
[. . .]

Voltaire, Locke, Luther, Spinoza . . . it’s tempting to call Ali the modern incarnation of one or another of these. Yet just being the Ayaan Hirsi Ali of our own time is more than enough: she’s the heretic who risks her life with rich intellectual treatises and memoirs to hasten an ideological reformation that could liberate millions. We ignore her quill to our shame and peril.

http://www.city-journal.org/2015/bc0427ke.html

KATHERINE ERNST
The Heretic We Need
Once again, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s pen is mightier than any barbarian’s sword.
April 27, 2015

Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali 

Harper Collins, 288 pp., $27.99

Vice Presdient Lectures Human Rights Activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali About Islam

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Human Rights Activist

[From article]
In a recent interview with the Washington Examiner, human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali discussed the “real war on women” being conducted by adherents to radical Islam and the need for the American left to acknowledge that reality. During the conversation, Hirsi Ali recalled a particularly telling encounter she had with Vice President Joe Biden in which he attempted to correct her on “one or two things about Islam."
Hirsi Ali explained to the Examiner that in the left’s attempts to protect anyone they perceive as “victims of the white man,” they have failed to look honestly at the true war on women waged by radical Muslims.
“They feel all religions are the same, and they’re not,” she said. “I think if I adopt the position in good faith to multiculturalists and leftists, I would say [they take the position they do] because they see them [Muslims] as victims. They see them as victims of the white man and so they think: ‘Let’s protect them from the white man. Let’s protect them from capitalism.’… That is misguided at best and malicious at worst.”
[. . .]
“Wherever [Islamists] gain power, you see exactly what they do: The first thing they do is they chase women out of the public space, force them to cover up, beat them up, rape them, sell them into slavery,” said Hirsi Ali.
[. . .]
At a dinner in Washington, Biden attempted to correct her perspective on relationship between the Islamic State and Islam, saying, “ISIS had nothing to do with Islam.” When she pushed back, Biden said, “Let me tell you one or two things about Islam…”
“I politely left the conversation at that,” Hirsi Ali said. “I wasn’t used to arguing with vice presidents.”
As the Examiner outlines, Hirsi Ali’s knowledge of the realities of Islam is rooted in her own traumatic experiences. At age 5 in her home country Somalia, she was subjected to female genital mutilation while her father, who objected to the practice, was in prison. After her father escaped, he moved the family to Saudi Arabia, then Ethiopia, then finally Kenya when she was 11. Though Hirsi Ali was raised a practicing Muslim, when her family attempted to force her into an arranged marriage, she fled to the Netherlands.
Even in Europe, however, she found that she was not safe. After earning a seat in parliament, her outspoken criticism of Islam eventually resulted in the murder of a filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, with whom she produced a short film on the abuse of women under Islam. A letter including death threats against Hirsi Ali was pinned to van Gogh’s dead body with a knife. The human rights activist must now travel under the constant protection of a security detail.

http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/biden-lectured-ayaan-hirsi-ali-islam#.VImql2OhQzU.twitter

Biden Lectured Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Islam
"I wasn’t used to arguing with vice presidents.”
12.10.2014
News Bradford Thomas

Yale University Academics Protest Women's Rights Speaker

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

[From article]
Raised Muslim, but now an opponent of organized religion, Hirsi Ali is a tireless advocate for the rights of women and girls in the Muslim world. For years, she has fought against the practices of female genital mutilation, forced marriage, child marriage, and honor killings — all of which occur routinely in the Middle East and parts of Africa. Hirsi Ali has harsh words for those who commit such acts in the name of Islam and for those who deny women and girls the right to education and personal autonomy on cultural grounds.
You would think that advocacy on behalf of basic human freedoms would be uncontroversial. But in this brave new world where “Islamophobia” is a sin greater than actual violence, you would be wrong. After all, who are we to judge the cultural practices of others?
[. . .]



the Yale Muslim Student Association, which demanded (without success) that the Buckley Program rescind the invitation (a la Brandeis) or, at the very least, that it provide a counter-speaker to refute Hirsi Ali’s points.
Why? Because her presence at Yale threatened to make “Muslims on campus feel unwelcome and uncomfortable.”



(Apparently, it is now the responsibility of universities to protect students from ideas that may offend or put them ill-at-ease.)

http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/opinion/op_ed/2014/09/braceras_yale_hit_for_hosting_rights_activist

Braceras: Yale hit for hosting rights activist
Muslims, lefties target ‘hate’ instead of violence
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
By: Jennifer C. Braceras
Boston Herald

* * *

[From article]

This student, the Muslim Students Association, and a little over thirty other organizations signed an open letter — with its fair share of cherry-picked quotes and mischaracterizations — that was sent yesterday in a school-wide email. But these students fail to understand the purpose of the university and the meaning and necessity of free speech within it.

http://spectator.org/articles/60427/we-invited-ayaan-hirsi-ali-yale—and-outrage-ensued

WE INVITED AYAAN HIRSI ALI TO YALE—AND OUTRAGE ENSUED
Critics fail to understand university free speech.
By Rich Lizardo

9.16.14

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Natanyahu Deserves Nobel Peace Prize

Ayaan Hirsi Ali 

[From article]
Author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for his resolve during Israel’s latest conflict with the terrorist group Hamas.
“I really admire Benjamin Netanyahu,” Ali told the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom.
“[H]e is under so much pressure, from so many sources, and yet he does what is best for the people of Israel, he does his duty,” she continued. “I really think he should get the Nobel Peace Prize. In a fair world he would get it.
[. . .]
“Everyone was upset with Netanyahu when he said that he would not negotiate before the other side said that they recognize the existence of the State of Israel,” she said. “That is a basic demand. Without that it is pointless to go to the negotiations table. It is Negotiations 101.”
Hamas’ charter, written in 1988, calls not only for the destruction of Israel, but for a worldwide genocide of Jews.
[. . .]
“Shariah law has to be established, ideally, all over the world,” she continued, explaining Hamas’ worldview. “You can never trust a Jew, you can never trust a Christian. That is the utopia.

http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/04/ayaan-hirsi-ali-netanyahu-should-get-the-nobel-peace-prize/

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Netanyahu ‘Should Get The Nobel Peace Prize’
11:31 AM 08/04/2014
Jamie Weinstein
Senior Editor

Ayaan Hirsi Ali in America

[From article]
"The murder of Van Gogh and the fatwa on Hirsi Ali so terrified the nation’s leaders that they expelled her rather than defend a heroine they had helped create."

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=ax9KbjZursrE

Genital Mutilation Isn’t a Tradition to Preserve:

Amity Shlaes