Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a modern-day prophet

Webmaster: To be famous in USA, you either attack Islam or call yourself "terrorist expert"

When the history of our time is written, Ayaan Hirsi Ali will be remembered as a prophet – but one without honor in her adopted land.

That Europe is ashamed of the brave woman who should be its glory tells us more about the moral collapse of Europe than it does about the character of Ms. Hirsi Ali, the apostate Muslim who fled to the West from her native Somalia.

As she told a Dallas audience yesterday, she ran toward Europe for the West's fundamental values. Among them: Freedom to reject religion and to criticize the tenets of faith. Freedom to determine one's own path in life and not have it dictated by tribe, family or custom. Freedom to live as an independent woman. These are freedoms the West won for itself in blood and suffering, freedoms that have made Western civilization and its accomplishments the envy of the world.Ms. Hirsi Ali went to Holland with nothing. Through hard work, study and force of will, she rose to serve in the Dutch parliament and testifies by her words and example to the superiority of Western values. Having suffered physically and emotionally from the culture of Islam, she warns Europe, with its large and unassimilated Islamic populations, to wake up to the subversive threat it harbors in its immigrant ghettoes.

For this, the bien-pensants hate her. Like Whittaker Chambers a half-century ago, in another great clash of civilizations, she is a witness to the reality of an ideological evil that crushes the individual. And like the great anti-communist witness, establishment types despise her for making them look at what they would rather ignore. She calls them on their hypocrisy. They praise liberal values but appease the Islamic fundamentalists within their societies who wish to destroy those values.

"The Western mindset – that if we respect them, they're going to respect us; that if we indulge and appease and condone and so on, the problem will go away – is delusional," she told Reason magazine. "The problem is not going to go away. Confront it, or it's only going to get bigger."

Far too many Europeans are scared rabbits who believe the problem will abate if they, in the poet Philip Larkin's words, "could only keep quite still and wait." Disturbers of the peace like Ms. Hirsi Ali, who lives under constant threat of death, must therefore be marginalized as "right-wing" or "Enlightenment fundamentalists."

This is how Europe finds itself in the disgraceful position of an African-born feminist atheist proving a more courageous defender of Western civilization than the Archbishop of Canterbury, who opined recently that Shariah is "unavoidable," so England should lie back and enjoy it. Days later, Ms. Hirsi Ali begged the European Parliament for protection from her would-be assassins, pleading, "I don't want to die."

No one who cherishes freedom – left or right, religious or secular – should fail to defend Ms. Hirsi Ali, yet she is a tragic heroine because the people whose liberties she defends have no use for her. And doubly tragic, because the Enlightenment tradition she finds so liberating has proven at long last to be literally and figuratively sterile.

Native Europeans aren't having enough children to replace themselves. And the freedoms she risks her life to defend are taken by many Europeans as no more than license for hedonism. Ms. Hirsi Ali has compared Catholicism to Nazism and communism, heedless of the historical fact that whatever its excesses, Christianity built Europe. True, the Enlightenment was a reaction against religious excess, but its defense of individual rights and human dignity derive directly from foundational Christian principles.

Ms. Hirsi Ali, like another outspoken atheist feminist, the late Orianna Fallaci, should fear that decadent European secularism might not have the moral or spiritual resources to save itself in the face of confident Islam. You can't fight something with nothing.

Besides, there are Muslims – I have met them – who don't want to live under Islamist tyranny but who worry about raising their children in a Europe where decent respect for religion and traditional values is mocked.

As Pope Benedict XVI has written, "The Muslims ... do not feel threatened by our Christian moral foundations, but by the cynicism of a secularized culture that denies its own foundations."

Nevertheless, Ms. Hirsi Ali is on the side of the angels, even if she disbelieves in them. She warns against see-no-evil complacency and a politically correct cowardice that refuses to name and confront the enemy.

"This is the beginning of a challenge with no possible compromise," she said yesterday. "There is no bargain that can be struck when the question at hand is one of basic human rights."

Rod Dreher is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist. His e-mail address is rdreher@dallasnews.com.

Next week, one of the bravest people on the planet is going to make an appearance in Dallas. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch politician who left Islam and has become a fierce feminist critic of her former religion, will speak at an event sponsored by the World Affairs Council. She lives more or less in hiding, under death threats from Islamic extremists. Today she appealed to the European Parliament to pay for her security:

"I don't want to die, I want to live and I love life," said Hirsi Ali, who faces death threats over her criticism of Islam. "I find myself in a very desperate position."

I hope she gets the money, but given that she's now living in exile in the United States, I don't know how she can rightfully expect the Europeans to pay for her protection. But she has petitioned the French government for French citizenship. Bernard-Henri Levy, the prominent French philosopher, has called on the government to give it to her, saying Hirsi Ali cannot be allowed to be driven out of Europe by Islamist barbarians:

"Isn't it the soul of Europe, its profound identity, its heritage that is in the balance when she pleads ... for a society where the theological-political link that modern Europe was built against is finally broken? It's hard to find anyone more European today than Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And it is difficult, even more difficult, to do this with the idea of a great European disowned definitively by her spiritual homeland. Look at this European who intends to pursue the fight for the fundamental values of Europe, forced to leave the continent and permanently exile herself in the United States. This will be more than paradoxical, it will be absurd -- and more than absurd, a bad omen."

Comments

Posted by raymills @ 9:16 AM Fri, Feb 15, 2008

Bill's comment is the lefts answer to Islamic terrorists, they don't exist. Nothing to be worried about, just a scare tactic used by the right to stay in power. So what if a Dutch filmmaker who worked Ayaan Hirsi Ali was murdered because of the subject of their film. That death threat over her head, just a little joke.

To be famous in USA Media, you either attack Islam or call yourself "terrorist expert". This whole article is a silly joke. I think Bill is right !!!!