Ayan Hirsi on "terrorist ideology..."

[LayZie G.]

Human rights activist, Harvard Kennedy School Fellow and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali is on Al Qaeda's hitlist for producing a film in 2004 about life for women under Shariah Law. The director of that film, called Submission, was shot in the street and his Jihadist killers pinned a note to his chest with a knife naming Hirsi Ali as "next."

 

Regardless of the fatwa put on her head by Islamists, Hirsi Ali still boldly speaks out and recently made an appearance on The Kelly File to discuss the horrific murders of Charlie Hebdo editors last week.

 

"It could have been me, it could have been you, it could have been all of us," Hirsi Ali said. "I understand it and they [islamists] make it very clear what motivates them. We know that this is an ideology, a political ideology, that is embedded unfortunately in the religion of Islam, a religion that is practiced by multitudes of people who are not violent themselves. We know this. What we fail to do over and over again is to make this connection and we are fighting an asymmetric war where we fight with military means and counter terrorism means but we are not fighting back with ideas...there is a vacuum of morality. If western society doesn't instill, again I'm using the world inculcate the values that have made the west so peaceful and prosperous through schools, through the media, through academia, through every possible peaceful channel of educating minds. What happens is you have a vacuum and vacuums like this one are usually filled by evil terrorist ideologists. What we are seeing is an Islamist, evil terrorist ideology."

 

Hirsi Ali also offered a message of hope during the interview, saying that radical jihad can be defeated on the "battlefield of ideas" and with the love of life.

 

"I love life more than I love death, they love death, that message is so much stronger than anything they put out there," Hirsi Ali said. "The only chance we have of fighting these barbarians is by talking about it...I still believe the pen is far more powerful, far more powerful, than all of their guns."

 

Hirsi Ali also wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about the Charlie Hebdo attack that's well-worth reading.

 

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.

 

 

Source: townhall

[LayZie G.]

 

OPINION

How to Answer the Paris Terror Attack

The West must stand up for freedom—and acknowledge the link between Islamists’ political ideology and their religious beliefs.

By AYAAN HIRSI ALI

Jan. 7, 2015 6:08 p.m. ET

301 COMMENTS

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.

 

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. 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.

 

The West is duly terrified. But it should not be surprised.

 

ENLARGE

GETTY IMAGES

If there is a lesson to be drawn from such a grisly episode, it is that what we believe about Islam truly doesn’t matter. This type of violence, jihad, is what they, the Islamists, believe.

 

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.

 

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.”

 

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.

 

In Islam, it is a grave sin to visually depict or in any way slander the Prophet Muhammad. Muslims are free to believe this, but why should such a prohibition be forced on nonbelievers? In the U.S., Mormons didn’t seek to impose the death penalty on those who wrote and produced “The Book of Mormon,” a satirical Broadway sendup of their faith. 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.

 

Moreover, despite what the Quran may teach, not all sins can be considered equal. The West must insist that Muslims, particularly members of the Muslim diaspora, answer this question: What is more offensive to a believer—the murder, torture, enslavement and acts of war and terrorism being committed today in the name of Muhammad, or the production of drawings and films and books designed to mock the extremists and their vision of what Muhammad represents?

 

To answer the late Gen. Malik, our soul in the West lies in our belief in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression. The freedom to express our concerns, the freedom to worship who we want, or not to worship at all—such freedoms are the soul of our civilization. And that is precisely where the Islamists have attacked us. Again.

 

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. 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.

 

This would be a departure for the West, which too often has responded to jihadist violence with appeasement. We appease the Muslim heads of government who lobby us to censor our press, our universities, our history books, our school curricula. They appeal and we oblige. We appease leaders of Muslim organizations in our societies. They ask us not to link acts of violence to the religion of Islam because they tell us that theirs is a religion of peace, and we oblige.

 

What do we get in return? Kalashnikovs in the heart of Paris. The more we oblige, the more we self-censor, the more we appease, the bolder the enemy gets.

 

There can only be one answer to this hideous act of jihad against the staff of Charlie Hebdo. It is the obligation of the Western media and Western leaders, religious and lay, to protect the most basic rights of freedom of expression, whether in satire on any other form. The West must not appease, it must not be silenced. We must send a united message to the terrorists: Your violence cannot destroy our soul.

 

Ms. Hirsi Ali, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, is the author of “Infidel” (2007). Her latest book, “Heretic: The Case for a Muslim Reformation,” will be published in April by HarperCollins.

 

 

 

Source: Wall Street journal

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[LayZie G.]

[Safferz]

This seems tame for her.

[Mooge]

Ayan hersi has a low self esteem niyoow. she is always seeking acceptance from white people. she was never proud of her heritage. niyoow i have never seen her talk about race inequality, poverty and other issues. she only knows one topic which is to bash Islam.

 

what a pathetic woman.

[DoctorKenney]

<cite>

@Mooge

said:</cite>

Ayan hersi has a low self esteem niyoow. she is always seeking acceptance from white people. she was never proud of her heritage. niyoow i have never seen her talk about race inequality, poverty and other issues. she only knows one topic which is to bash Islam.

 

what a pathetic woman.

 

Saaxib, it's because she has nothing else. She's their token Somali woman who says what they pay her to say. She's not very intelligent, her arguments aren't very sound, and her arguments are full of holes.

 

But she plays that "poor little victim" from Somalia, who was "oppressed" by Islam and ran to the West for safety. And now she's writing books trying to "empower" the woman and telling them that Islam is evil and needs to be stopped.

 

It's all a game saaxib.

 

I remember she claimed once in an interview, that she "lived under the Islamic System" when she was growing up in Somalia Does she expect us to believe such a thing, especially since Siyaad Barre was in charge at the time and Somalia at that time was far from an Islamic State

 

It's just blatant and utter lies over and over again

 

But her audience is ignorant enough to believe this. They don't research what she says and they go along with it.