fly on the wall
09-21-2006, 08:17 PM
'A Dissident Of Islam'
By George F. WillThursday, September 21, 2006; Page A25
While her security contingent waits outside the Georgetown restaurant, Ayaan Hirsi Ali orders what the menu calls "raw steak tartare." Amused by the redundancy, she speculates that it is intended to immunize the restaurant against lawyers, should a customer be discommoded by that entree. She has been in America only two weeks. She is a quick study.
And an exile and an immigrant. Born 36 years ago in Somalia, Hirsi Ali has lived in Ethiopia, Kenya, Saudi Arabia She quickly became a Dutch citizen, a member of parliament and an astringent critic, from personal experience, of the condition of women under Islam. She wrote the script, and filmmaker Theo van Gogh directed, "Submission," an 11-minute movie featuring pertinent passages from the Koran (such as when it is a husband's duty to beat his wife) projected on the bodies of naked women.
It was shown twice before Nov. 2, 2004, when van Gogh, bicycling through central Amsterdam in the morning, was shot by an Islamic extremist who then slit his throat with a machete. Next, the murderer (in whose room was found a disc containing videos of "enemies of Allah" being murdered, including a man having his head slowly sawed off) used another knife to pin a long letter to van Gogh's chest. The letter was to Hirsi Ali, calling her a "soldier of evil" who would "smash herself to pieces on Islam."
The remainder of her life in Holland was lived under guard. Neighbors in her apartment building complained that they felt endangered with her there and got a court to order her evicted. She decided to come to America.
Holland evidently tolerates everything except skepticism about the sacramental nature of multiculturalism. One million of the country's 16 million residents are Muslims, and the political left has appropriated the European right's traditional celebration of identity grounded in racial and ethnic traditions and culture. But the recoil of many Dutch people from Hirsi Ali suggests that the tolerance about which Holland preens is a compound of intellectual sloth and moral timidity. She was more trouble than the Dutch evidently think free speech is worth.
Her story is told in a riveting new book, "Murder in Amsterdam," by Ian Buruma, who is not alone in finding her -- this "Enlightenment fundamentalist" -- somewhat unnerving and off-putting. Having experienced life circumscribed by tribal and religious communities (as a girl she suffered the genital mutilation called female circumcision), she is a fierce partisan of individualism against collectivism.
She reminds Buruma of Margaret Thatcher's sometimes abrasive intelligence and her fascination with America. He is dismissive of the idea that she is a Voltaire against Islam: Voltaire, he says, offended the powerful Catholic Church, whereas she offends "only a minority that was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe."
She, however, replies that this is hardly a normal minority. It is connected to Islam's worldwide adherents. Living sullenly in European "dish cities" -- enclaves connected by satellite television and the Internet to the tribal societies they have not really left behind -- many members of this minority are uninterested in assimilation into open societies.
She calls herself "a dissident of Islam" because, given what Allah supposedly enjoins and what she knows is right, "the cognitive dissonance is, for me, too much." She says she is not "a militant atheist," but the emphasis is on the adjective.
Slender, elegant, stylish and articulate (in English, Dutch and Swahili), she has found an intellectual home here at the American Enterprise Institute, where she is writing a book that imagines Muhammad meeting, in the New York Public Library, three thinkers -- John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper, each a hero of the unending struggle between (to take the title of Popper's 1945 masterpiece) "The Open Society and Its Enemies." Islamic extremists -- the sort who were unhinged by some Danish cartoons -- will be enraged. She is unperturbed.
Neither is she pessimistic about the West. It has, she says, "the drive to innovate." But Europe, she thinks, is invertebrate. After two generations without war, Europeans "have no idea what an enemy is." And they think, she says, that leadership is an antiquated notion because they believe that caring governments can socialize everyone to behave well, thereby erasing personal accountability and responsibility. "I can't even tell it without laughing," she says, laughing softly. Clearly she is where she belongs, at last.
**********end of article
Interesting article. My favorite part was when the lady's nieghbors in the condo felt threatened by her being there since the Islamics might come and blow them up trying to get to her. So the courts threw her out. This is the state of protection of Free Speech in Europe. You get thrown out of your apartment if your free speech has made you a target. Note that the neighbors are acknowledging that they think about Muslims in assuming the apartment building will be blown up.
It reminds me of the "Piss Christ" exhibit in America where a crucifix was sealed into a plexiglass box full of urine. A horrible slap in the face of Christians but nobody got their throat slit. And there was the demolition of the giant Budha statues in Afganistan. No reprisals, again. When American scholars decided the Elephant God in Hindu religion contained a phallic symbol and his father symbolically castrated him the Hindus did complain, but they didn't kill anyone.
Islamic people are alright as long as you don't criticize the Prophet, and of course since the Prophet wrote the Koran, you can't criticize the Koran either. So to make them happy you really aren't allowed to make comments about their religion at all. Presumably we could still criticize they way they dress; the thing is they dress pretty cool.
The other thing that is odd is whenever anyone criticizes them it makes international news. The same can not be said about criticisms of other religions, which no one much cares about. Rightly so.
Meanwhile moslems can say what they want about other religions and no one gets too bent of shape.
Perhaps they are perfect and theirs is the one true religion and that's why it's a bad thing to criticize perfection. Time will tell.
I have no beef against their religion, the Prophet or the Koran. I've heard the Koran is a thing of poetry and beauty. I've heard that Islam gives peace and meaning to lives by encouraging submission to the will of God. Sounds like most religions. Why fight God? You can't win.
But the beheadings and slit throats bother me, though. We can kiss free speech good bye if this kind of thing keeps up. Remember how easily the other people in that apartment building folded on free speech once they thought they might get blown up. And the courts went along with them.
Doesn't everyone need to be criticized?
By George F. WillThursday, September 21, 2006; Page A25
While her security contingent waits outside the Georgetown restaurant, Ayaan Hirsi Ali orders what the menu calls "raw steak tartare." Amused by the redundancy, she speculates that it is intended to immunize the restaurant against lawyers, should a customer be discommoded by that entree. She has been in America only two weeks. She is a quick study.
And an exile and an immigrant. Born 36 years ago in Somalia, Hirsi Ali has lived in Ethiopia, Kenya, Saudi Arabia She quickly became a Dutch citizen, a member of parliament and an astringent critic, from personal experience, of the condition of women under Islam. She wrote the script, and filmmaker Theo van Gogh directed, "Submission," an 11-minute movie featuring pertinent passages from the Koran (such as when it is a husband's duty to beat his wife) projected on the bodies of naked women.
It was shown twice before Nov. 2, 2004, when van Gogh, bicycling through central Amsterdam in the morning, was shot by an Islamic extremist who then slit his throat with a machete. Next, the murderer (in whose room was found a disc containing videos of "enemies of Allah" being murdered, including a man having his head slowly sawed off) used another knife to pin a long letter to van Gogh's chest. The letter was to Hirsi Ali, calling her a "soldier of evil" who would "smash herself to pieces on Islam."
The remainder of her life in Holland was lived under guard. Neighbors in her apartment building complained that they felt endangered with her there and got a court to order her evicted. She decided to come to America.
Holland evidently tolerates everything except skepticism about the sacramental nature of multiculturalism. One million of the country's 16 million residents are Muslims, and the political left has appropriated the European right's traditional celebration of identity grounded in racial and ethnic traditions and culture. But the recoil of many Dutch people from Hirsi Ali suggests that the tolerance about which Holland preens is a compound of intellectual sloth and moral timidity. She was more trouble than the Dutch evidently think free speech is worth.
Her story is told in a riveting new book, "Murder in Amsterdam," by Ian Buruma, who is not alone in finding her -- this "Enlightenment fundamentalist" -- somewhat unnerving and off-putting. Having experienced life circumscribed by tribal and religious communities (as a girl she suffered the genital mutilation called female circumcision), she is a fierce partisan of individualism against collectivism.
She reminds Buruma of Margaret Thatcher's sometimes abrasive intelligence and her fascination with America. He is dismissive of the idea that she is a Voltaire against Islam: Voltaire, he says, offended the powerful Catholic Church, whereas she offends "only a minority that was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe."
She, however, replies that this is hardly a normal minority. It is connected to Islam's worldwide adherents. Living sullenly in European "dish cities" -- enclaves connected by satellite television and the Internet to the tribal societies they have not really left behind -- many members of this minority are uninterested in assimilation into open societies.
She calls herself "a dissident of Islam" because, given what Allah supposedly enjoins and what she knows is right, "the cognitive dissonance is, for me, too much." She says she is not "a militant atheist," but the emphasis is on the adjective.
Slender, elegant, stylish and articulate (in English, Dutch and Swahili), she has found an intellectual home here at the American Enterprise Institute, where she is writing a book that imagines Muhammad meeting, in the New York Public Library, three thinkers -- John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper, each a hero of the unending struggle between (to take the title of Popper's 1945 masterpiece) "The Open Society and Its Enemies." Islamic extremists -- the sort who were unhinged by some Danish cartoons -- will be enraged. She is unperturbed.
Neither is she pessimistic about the West. It has, she says, "the drive to innovate." But Europe, she thinks, is invertebrate. After two generations without war, Europeans "have no idea what an enemy is." And they think, she says, that leadership is an antiquated notion because they believe that caring governments can socialize everyone to behave well, thereby erasing personal accountability and responsibility. "I can't even tell it without laughing," she says, laughing softly. Clearly she is where she belongs, at last.
**********end of article
Interesting article. My favorite part was when the lady's nieghbors in the condo felt threatened by her being there since the Islamics might come and blow them up trying to get to her. So the courts threw her out. This is the state of protection of Free Speech in Europe. You get thrown out of your apartment if your free speech has made you a target. Note that the neighbors are acknowledging that they think about Muslims in assuming the apartment building will be blown up.
It reminds me of the "Piss Christ" exhibit in America where a crucifix was sealed into a plexiglass box full of urine. A horrible slap in the face of Christians but nobody got their throat slit. And there was the demolition of the giant Budha statues in Afganistan. No reprisals, again. When American scholars decided the Elephant God in Hindu religion contained a phallic symbol and his father symbolically castrated him the Hindus did complain, but they didn't kill anyone.
Islamic people are alright as long as you don't criticize the Prophet, and of course since the Prophet wrote the Koran, you can't criticize the Koran either. So to make them happy you really aren't allowed to make comments about their religion at all. Presumably we could still criticize they way they dress; the thing is they dress pretty cool.
The other thing that is odd is whenever anyone criticizes them it makes international news. The same can not be said about criticisms of other religions, which no one much cares about. Rightly so.
Meanwhile moslems can say what they want about other religions and no one gets too bent of shape.
Perhaps they are perfect and theirs is the one true religion and that's why it's a bad thing to criticize perfection. Time will tell.
I have no beef against their religion, the Prophet or the Koran. I've heard the Koran is a thing of poetry and beauty. I've heard that Islam gives peace and meaning to lives by encouraging submission to the will of God. Sounds like most religions. Why fight God? You can't win.
But the beheadings and slit throats bother me, though. We can kiss free speech good bye if this kind of thing keeps up. Remember how easily the other people in that apartment building folded on free speech once they thought they might get blown up. And the courts went along with them.
Doesn't everyone need to be criticized?