Lorraine Ali's Travesty in Newsweek

Dennis Prager, who is a hero of mine, has a nice response to the now infamous review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book “Infidel”. Prager gets some of the details wrong (see comments)but he nails the historical comparison just right..

I’d like to add my say in the form of an address to Lorraine Ali. This is based on a comment I left on Prager’s article.

Dear Lorraine Ali,

Toward the end of your review of Infidel, you unconsciously betray the fatal flaw in your rhetorical stance when you write:

“Hirsi Ali is more a hero among Islamophobes than Islamic women. That's problematic considering she describes herself in "Infidel" as a woman who "fights for the rights of Muslim women, the enlightenment of Islam and the security of the West." How can you change the lives of your former sisters, and work toward reform, when you've forged a career upon renouncing the religion and insulting its followers? Hirsi Ali says overhauling Islam is not her responsibility: she just lays out "the facts" and leaves it to others to go about fixing this supposedly broken faith.”

You have missed the point completely. Here is the point Lorraine, pay attention this time: Hirsi Ali is NOT A MUSLIM ANYMORE. She left because her experience with Islam was worse than the death she has been threatened with for leaving. Yes, even after her friend, Theo Van Gogh who was director and producer of her ground-breaking film, Submission was brutally murdered on a public street by a Muslim man, she had the courage to speak out in public and fight for what she believed to be the truth. She believes that Islam at its core is dangerous and repressive. She is telling the world what she thinks and why she thinks it. She has no interest in reforming Islam. The responsibility se feels toward her former sisters is to urge them to leave too. Hirsi Ali’s experience tells her that she cannot, as you do blithely dismiss the connection between Islam and the “patriarchal society” and “messed-up people” YOU blame for her life experience.

Lorraine Ali, you, who have grown up in America, sheltered by the finest example of free society the world has yet seen, have no idea what it is to be Hirsi Ali. You have no right to imply that she should work from the inside and fight for reform. How do you have the presumption? Women across the Islamic world are hanged, raped, beaten, stoned, stabbed and shot to death every day just for being women- let alone speaking up about inequality.

The final giveaway is that last phrase "leaves it to others to go about fixing this supposedly broken faith." Oh, Lorraine, don't look now but outside of the posh Mosques you might have been raised in here, most mosques in the world are seedbeds of hatred, repression and vile prejudice. Not a day goes by that they don't call for death to America, The Jews, the Bahais, the Dutch etc... According to many if not most Islamic clerics the majority of the people in the worlds are no more than pigs, dogs and monkeys. In Islamic countries the women and children are systematically terrorized (see my last two posts). This does not strike you as broken?

Just as Catholicism was during the Inquisition, Islam IS a faith that has become seduced by power and convinced that it has God’s blessing to convert, kill or subjugate every human being on earth. The Catholics grappled with their demons and are now a civilized sect. I would rather not have to wait several centuries for Islam to follow suit.

It is true that we have nothing to fear from you while you live here under our laws but what if your Islamic Mullahs had their way and there was a world-wide caliphate… Think about it. You’d no longer be allowed to peddle your silly, self important “criticisms” of western music to Newsweek, Rolling Stone and GQ. There’d be no glossy magazines and music store would be fire bombed by the world-wide Taliban.

Also, I’m not sure you know this but the Mullahs say you can’t quit if you want to. According to a preponderance of religious authority in the Islamic world, if you are born a Muslim and decide you no longer want to be, you are automatically a heretic and under death sentence.

And you? You’d be allowed (provided you kept your westernized trap shut) to hide yourself under 30 pounds of burkha and hope that your husband/father/brother/uncle is in a good mood.

If that is not broken, what is?