For all her blabbering about liberty and liberalism, Ayaan Hirsi Ali sure has some illiberal ideas when it comes to Muslims. From an interview in the latest issue of the libertarian Reason magazine:
Reason: Don’t you mean defeating radical Islam?
Hirsi Ali: No. Islam, period. Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in peace.
Reason: We have to crush the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims under our boot? In concrete terms, what does that mean, “defeat Islam”?
Hirsi Ali: I think that we are at war with Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars. Islam can be defeated in many ways. For starters, you stop the spread of the ideology itself; at present, there are native Westerners converting to Islam, and they’re the most fanatical sometimes. There is infiltration of Islam in the schools and universities of the West. You stop that. You stop the symbol burning and the effigy burning, and you look them in the eye and flex your muscles and you say, “This is a warning. We won’t accept this anymore.” There comes a moment when you crush your enemy.
Reason: Militarily?
Hirsi Ali: In all forms, and if you don’t do that, then you have to live with the consequence of being crushed.
So there you have it. Not only is Hirsi Ali a shill for military rule but she also believes Islamic schools, people who convert to Islam and people who burn “symbols” and effigies (of political leaders and other figures) must be “crushed”.
Reason: Explain to me what you mean when you say we have to stop the burning of our flags and effigies in Muslim countries. Why should we care?
Hirsi Ali: We can make fun of George Bush. He’s our president. We elected him. And the queen of England, they can make fun of her within Britain and so on. But on an international level, this has gone too far. You know, the Russians, they don’t burn American flags. The Chinese don’t burn American flags. Have you noticed that? They don’t defile the symbols of other civilizations. The Japanese don’t do it. That never happens.
Reason: Isn’t that a double standard? You want us to be able to say about Islam whatever we want—and I certainly agree with that. But then you add that people in Muslim countries should under all circumstances respect our symbols, or else.
Hirsi Ali: No, no, no.
In short, send in the military to stop people in other countries saying disrespectful things about President Bush or burning paper mache effigies of Western leaders.
And her next book?
A book called Shortcuts to Enlightenment. It’s [about] waking up the prophet Muhammad in the New York Public Library and having him have a conversation with Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek, and John Stuart Mill. It’s a philosophical novel.
Oh, the irony.
13 comments ↓
I have the sneaking suspicion that we are all being had by this woman. She can’t possibly believe as she does!
How can one survive the cognitive dissonance caused by having a military worshipping Fascist attitude, and in the very next minute, tell us that you plan to pen a conversation involving none other than Friedrich Hayek, and his Liberal ideas.
She must sit there, when no one is around, shaking her head in amazement at how easily her peculiar brand of sophistry (if it can be called that) is accepted without any scrutiny.
Exactly.
Unsurprisingly, there are some inconsistencies in her story:
and
How would you answer the claim (which Islamophobes could make) that liberalism will lead the West into a “better dhimmi than génocidaire” trap?
Euda,
I don’t believe she does, After reading parts of her book and listening to her a public lectures, it is immediatly clear that she is not the author of words attributed to her, rather she is a empty vessel.
Her public utterences are pedestrian, she has difficulty with english idioms, her grammer is bad and her ideas are childlike.
The author of caged virgin does a better job, it has obviously been ghost written.
Hirsi Ali, is what Islamic scholars describe as someone who has been educated beyond the limits of their intellect, and she hasn’t been particularly well educated.
She will use whatever instrument that is available against Muslims, whether it is liberty, or fascism or even military dictatorship.
I would like to see someone debate her and interrogate her ideas.
What Ali does not understand is that liberty allows one to express ones deeply cherished ideas, but she does not appear to have any to express (or more correctly she has a mish-mash of other peoples ideas which she has been told to express).
The irony for Ali is that she believes that she has escaped “islamic intellectual servitude” only to become an empty vessel in the service of another set of (contradictory) beliefs that she clearly does not fully understand.
And to think that so many people believe her. Sadly, I’m quickly losing trust in the masses’ intelligence
When you put it that way, Baybers, I almost pity her.
What does she mean by saying “we elected Bush”, when did Hershy start voting in US elections? I thought she was living in the Netherlands not long ago?
The woman is an admitted liar and is now employed bye the AEI. For those who have been living under a rock The AEI (American Enterprise Institute) is a NeoCon think tank that helped the PNAC crowd with it’s intellectual heavy lifting. AEI also were the proud papas of the Surge in Iraq.
As Ayaan Hirsi Ali is Somali AEI still has no native Arab speakers that I know of. But she does help add color and femininity to a very pasty white male grouping. Her shrill anti-Islamic ranting do help her fit in with rest of her right wing brethren so it is all good Ms Ali.
Hayek is spinning in his grave.
Hirsi Ali and her ilk (the habitual drunkard Christopher Hitchens comes to mind) are through-and-through authoritarians who hide behind rhetoric about the Enlightenment and the “War on Terror” to push their dark and apocalyptic ideology of a total war against Islam and Muslims. On one hand she speaks about the virtues of Western liberty, all the while she serves as a willing enabler of a vicious foreign policy that has launched unprovoked invasions and occupations of poor, defenseless nations that has left hundreds of thousands of innocent people dead.
Honestly, we are entering into some sort of Orwellian universe when dealing with people like Ms. Ali: the only way to defeat alleged tyranny is to embrace it; the only way to stop alleged violent reactionary fundamentalism is to become even more violent, reactionary, and fundamentalist. Such logic (or illogic) is horrifying and we all know the ultimate end of such thinking.
The sad thing is that this woman has been given a wide platform in the West to spout her deluded malarkey without the slightest challenge. All one has to do is read her attack on Erdogan of Turkey as being the second coming of Khomeini to see how intellectually shallow this woman is, yet those looking for any angle to attack Islam and Muslims have given her a platform and she is perceived as credible because of her status as an “ex-Muslim.”
I think it was the late Norman Mailer, a wise old man, who observed that the logic end for democracies is authoritarianism and totalitarianism. With Hirsi Ali we can see the garb of democracy being used to take us in that direction.
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