As Close To Oriana Fallaci As We've Got Now

[Annie]

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009771

Free Radical
Ayaan Hirsi Ali infuriates Muslims and discomfits liberals.

BY JOSEPH RAGO
Saturday, March 10, 2007 12:01 a.m.

NEW YORK--Ayaan Hirsi Ali is untrammeled and unrepentant: "I am supposed to apologize for saying the prophet is a pervert and a tyrant," she declares. "But that is apologizing for the truth."

Statements such as these have brought Ms. Hirsi Ali to world-wide attention. Though she recently left her adopted country, Holland--where her friend and intellectual collaborator Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim extremist in 2004--she is still accompanied by armed guards wherever she travels.

Ms. Hirsi Ali was born in 1969 in Mogadishu--into, as she puts it, "the Islamic civilization, as far as you can call it a civilization." In 1992, at age 22, her family gave her hand to a distant relative; had the marriage ensued, she says, it would have been "an arranged rape." But as she was shipped to the appointment via Europe, she fled, obtaining asylum in Holland. There, "through observation, through experience, through reading," she acquainted herself with a different world. "The culture that I came to and I live in now is not perfect," Ms. Hirsi Ali says. "But this culture, the West, the product of the Enlightenment, is the best humanity has ever achieved."...

...The shock was palpable. Holland--which has the second largest per capita population of Muslims in the EU, after France--had always prided itself on its pluralism, in which all groups would be tolerated but not integrated. The killing made clear just how apart its groups were. "Immediately after the murder," Ms. Hirsi Ali says, "we learned Theo's killer had access to education, he had learned the language, he had taken welfare. He made it very clear he knew what democracy meant, he knew what liberalism was, and he consciously rejected it. . . . He said, 'I have an alternative framework. It's Islam. It's the Quran.' "

At his sentencing, Mohammed Buyeri said he would have killed his own brother, had he made "Submission" or otherwise insulted the One True Faith. "And why?" Ms. Hirsi Ali asks. "Because he said his god ordered him to do it. . . . We need to see," she continues, "that this isn't something that's caused by special offense, the right, Jews, poverty. It's religion."...

...Many liberals loathe her for disrupting an imagined "diversity" consensus: It is absurd, she argues, to pretend that cultures are all equal, or all equally desirable. But conservatives, and others, might be reasonably unnerved by her dim view of religion. She does not believe that Islam has been "hijacked" by fanatics, but that fanaticism is intrinsic in Islam itself: "Islam, even Islam in its nonviolent form, is dangerous."

The Muslim faith has many variations, but Ms. Hirsi Ali contends that the unities are of greater significance. "Islam has a very consistent doctrine," she says, "and I define Islam as I was taught to define it: submission to the will of Allah. His will is written in the Quran, and in the hadith and Sunna. What we are all taught is that when you want to make a distinction between right and wrong, you follow the prophet. Muhammad is the model guide for every Muslim through time, throughout history."

...

 

[Annie]

Links at site:

http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/weblog/view_coloured/

Thursday, May 31, 2007
VIEW COLOURED

The New Republic’s Paul Berman on hostility towards Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Something like a campaign against Hirsi Ali could never have taken place a few years ago. A sustained attack on an authentic liberal dissident crying out against injustices in remote parts of the world and even in the back streets of western Europe, a sustained attack that appears nearly to have erased the mention of women’s oppression and the struggle for women’s rights from discussion - no, this could not have happened yesterday, except on the extreme Right.​

This is a new event. This is a reactionary turn in the intellectual world.
​

And it’s coming from the likes of lefty feminist Kim, who writes about a woman mutilated as a child, in accordance with tribal Muslim custom:

Her view on Islam is too much coloured by her own experience …
​

Not much you can really say about that, is there?
Posted by Tim B. on 05/31/2007 at 04:53 AM

 

[Bullypulpit]

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009771

I don't know if you saw the piece "60 Minutes" did on this remarkable woman, but that is what she is. She pulls no punches and tells it like it is about Islam as it is practiced in the backwaters of human society. Those habits...genital mutilation, forced marriage, honor killings, etc... must not be permitted to take root elsewhere and must, ultimately, be stamped out for Islam to have any credibility.

<b>NO</b> religion or religious view which tolerates or sanctions the abuse, mutilation or murder of another can claim any legitimacy in the realm of human discourse. It must be cast aside for the filth that it is.

 

[CSM]

I don't know if you saw the piece "60 Minutes" did on this remarkable woman, but that is what she is. She pulls no punches and tells it like it is about Islam as it is practiced in the backwaters of human society. Those habits...genital mutilation, forced marriage, honor killings, etc... must not be permitted to take root elsewhere and must, ultimately, be stamped out for Islam to have any credibility.

<b>NO</b> religion or religious view which tolerates or sanctions the abuse, mutilation or murder of another can claim any legitimacy in the realm of human discourse. It must be cast aside for the filth that it is.

Doggone it Bully, you screw up my whole day when you make sense. You could have at least thrown in "....and it's all Bush's fault!"

 

[Bullypulpit]

Doggone it Bully, you screw up my whole day when you make sense. You could have at least thrown in "....and it's all Bush's fault!"

I'll try harder...Honest!

 

[Truthmatters]

Do the Muslims in the US practice this form of the religion?

How do you stop people from believing in somethings?

Not with Guns and bombs.

You do it with proving an alternative belief is better.

 

[Annie]

I don't know if you saw the piece "60 Minutes" did on this remarkable woman, but that is what she is. She pulls no punches and tells it like it is about Islam as it is practiced in the backwaters of human society. Those habits...genital mutilation, forced marriage, honor killings, etc... must not be permitted to take root elsewhere and must, ultimately, be stamped out for Islam to have any credibility.

<b>NO</b> religion or religious view which tolerates or sanctions the abuse, mutilation or murder of another can claim any legitimacy in the realm of human discourse. It must be cast aside for the filth that it is.

I missed that, I wish I had caught it. I've read quite a bit about her, she truly is Oriana like. The need for such voices is profound.