Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Islam must come out of the 7th century

PART 1

PART 2

Ayaan Hirsi Ali video from Big Think.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali presents her views on the situation we now have between Islam and the West. Very interesting and informative. Follow the link HERE to view the video.

Urgent Appeal: Please Help Protect Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Help if you can. Hirsi Ali is more than an individual, she is the symbol of freedom from Islam.
FROM JIHADWATCH.ORG:
November 18, 2007
Urgent Appeal: Please Help Protect Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Sam Harris has begun a noble new initiative:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the most prominent advocate of free speech and women's rights in the Muslim world, and for this she must live under perpetual armed guard, even in the West. Unfortunately, on October 1st of this year, the Dutch government officially rescinded its promise to protect her. Now, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's friends, colleagues and admirers must come to her aid.
I have created a page on my website that links directly to the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Security Trust. The money raised by this trust will pay Ayaan Hirsi Ali's security expenses. In the event that money remains after these costs have been met, it will be used to encourage and protect other dissidents in the Muslim world.
The ongoing protection of Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a moral obligation. It is also a strategic one: for here is a woman doing work that most of us cannot do--indeed, would be terrified to do if given the chance--and yet this work is essential for preserving the freedoms we take for granted in the West.
If every reader of this email simply pledged ten dollars a month to protect Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the costs of her security would be covered for as long as the threat to her life remains.
Thanks in advance for your support.
Sincerely,
Sam Harris

Ayaan Hirsi Ali
In 2005, TIME included Ayaan Hirsi Ali in its list of the World's 100 Most Influential People. If you would like to know more about her, please read Christopher Caldwell's fine profile in the New York Times Magazine.
You can also read the essay that Salman Rushdie and I recently published in the Los Angeles Times, or the one that Christopher Hitchens wrote for Slate.

'The Trouble Is the West'

This is probably the best interview I've seen with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Rogier van Bakel of Reason Magazine does an outstanding job of asking questions and allowing Hirsi Ali to answer in her own reasoned way.
Here's the money quote:
"But I don’t even think that the trouble is Islam. The trouble is the West, because in the West there’s this notion that we are invincible and that everyone will modernize anyway, and that what we are seeing now in Muslim countries is a craving for respect. Or it’s poverty, or it’s caused by colonization.
The Western mind-set—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. The problem is not going to go away. Confront it, or it’s only going to get bigger." FROM REASON.COM:
'The Trouble Is the West'
Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Islam, immigration, civil liberties, and the fate of the West.
Rogier van Bakel
November 2007 Print Edition
It was a heinous murder that made the best-selling memoirist Ayaan Hirsi Ali internationally famous, but she was neither the victim nor the perpetrator. The corpse was that of Theo van Gogh, a writer and filmmaker who in November 2004 was stabbed, slashed, and shot on an Amsterdam street by a Dutch-born Muslim extremist of Moroccan descent.
The assassin, driven to rage by Submission, a short film Van Gogh had made about the poor treatment of women under Islam, left no doubt about his motives. A letter he pinned to his victim’s chest with a knife was a call to jihad. It was also a death threat against Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a member of the Dutch parliament. She had persuaded Van Gogh to make Submission and had written the movie’s script.
READ IT ALL:

Denmark to Hirsi Ali's Rescue

Bravo for the Danes.
FROM ATLASSHRUGS:
Denmark to Hirsi Ali's Rescue
Once again it is Denmark that stands up to Nazlims, Islamists, leftards. Their courage goes as far back as the Nazis all those years ago. They have stepped up to the plate for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, offering to cover the expenses for the security to keep her alive while The Dutch contemplate their dhimmi navels. No balls, none. Billions in welfare for the tsunami of Islamic immigrants rendering their country uninhabitable but gotz for the warrior, the lone maverick fighting the great fight. Fighting for us all.
Those asshats in the Netherlands ought to be hanging their heads in shame.
PAYING FOR THE BODYGUARDS
Denmark Offers Hirsi Ali a Safe Haven
Now that the Netherlands has pulled financial support for Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali's protection in the United States, the Danish government has offered to pick up the tab for her bodyguards -- as long as she lives in Denmark.
The Danish government has offered Ayaan Hirsi Ali a safe haven. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the controversial author and former Dutch politician who exiled herself to America in 2006, has been invited to live under government protection in Denmark now that Amsterdam has quit paying for her bodyguards. However she has politely declined, saying Tuesday that her "work is in the United States." The Somali-born author and prominent critic of Islam left the Netherlands last year after a bureaucratic squabble over her citizenship. She went to work as a fellow for the American Enterprise Institute -- a neoconservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. -- but remained under Dutch protection. Two weeks ago, she returned to the Netherlands after the government quit paying for her bodyguards in America.
Who the hell would want to stay in the dying continent? America still has a shot. We need her here.
Hirsi Ali has been under Dutch police protection since late 2004, when an Islamic extremist stabbed her friend Theo van Gogh to death in an Amsterdam street for his short film against Islam, called "Submission." Hirsi Ali, who was a member of the Dutch parliament at the time, helped write the script. Her life was threatened in a note left on van Gogh's body.

Fitzgerald: The Hirsi Ali case: Amazement. Fury. Contempt.

An outstanding essay on the ongoing debacle surrounding Hirsi Ali. As Hugh Fitzgerald so rightly points out Hirsi Ali is a treasure in the fight against radical Islam.
FROM JIHADWATCH.ORG:
Fitzgerald: The Hirsi Ali case: Amazement. Fury. Contempt.
It may well be that the Dutch government has a point in its decision to cease paying for Dutch security personnel to live in the United States, and to guard Hirsi Ali -- especially if she is now making money giving lectures, in which case it may have been felt that she can pay for some of this herself.
But Hirsi Ali is also a weapon in the counter-Jihad. And if the Dutch understood that she in awakening the most powerful member of the West to the threat of Jihad (and not merely that "war on terror" that Bush thinks has Iraq as its "central front" and that can be won, or partly won, by "bringing democracy" to "ordinary moms and dads" in the Middle East), they would probably reinstate that protection. Hirsi Ali is of great, possibly unrivalled value, given her mediagenic appearance and her own history.

But in any case, what has the American government been doing? Has it offered to pay for her protection? For that matter, has the American government thought about establishing a permanent security force that can be called on whenever speakers on Islam feel the need for such protection? Otherwise, the situation will become like that in Europe, and in the Netherlands itself -- where many will simply fall silent, and a large part of what constitutes free speech will have been silenced.
READ IT ALL:

Hirsi Ali: "The problem is not going to go away. Confront it, or it's only going to get bigger."

Here's Robert Spencer's take on a interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. We should all heed what Ayaan has to say.
FROM JIHADWATCH.ORG:
Hirsi Ali: "The problem is not going to go away. Confront it, or it's only going to get bigger."
Reason magazine, the dhimmi publication that has attacked Jihad Watch several times, has published in its current print issue an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I haven't seen it, and was not planning on commenting on it until it appeared online -- which is always a few weeks after it appears in print. However, so many people have been sending me this discussion of some elements of the interview by Rod Dreher, and since Ayaan Hirsi Ali is in the news, I thought I'd post this now.
The new issue of Reason contains a lengthy interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the brave apostate Muslim who fled the Netherlands and now lives in the US. Alas, it's not yet online, but it's definitely in a Baweresque vein. She pulls absolutely no punches. Like Bawer, she too blames the West for its craven passivity in the face of a violent threat. And she won't have any of the false equivalence among Abrahamic religions.
Though she is now an atheist and wishes everyone would be, she said that if people have to accept God, she would rather that they become Jewish or Catholic because both religions have a much more humane concept of God than "the fire-breathing Allah who inspires jihadism and totalitarianism."
READ IT ALL:

Hirsi Ali: How much is her life worth?

This is a crime. the Dutch government should provide Ayaan Hirsi Ali whatever protection she needs wherever she is.
FROM ATLASSHRUGS:
Hirsi Ali: How much is her life worth?
'We Are Making Fools of Ourselves in the Eyes of the World'
Speigel Online hat tip JammieWearing Fool
Fear of fanatical Islamists prompted Ayaan Hirsi Ali to leave the Netherlands, her adopted home, and now she has been forced to return. Paying for her bodyguards in the United States is too expensive for the Dutch government -- what a disgrace.
Amsterdam - There are exactly five people that the Dutch government has to protect against death threats from radical Islamists.
This sort of protection is expensive. Society bears the costs because freedom of opinion, a cornerstone of our culture, is on the line. The extremists, for their part, are prepared to risk their own lives to kill those under government protection.
The costs of protection are completely disproportionate to the outcome: the continued existence of our values and norms.
READ IT ALL:

AYAAN HIRSI ALI "MY VIEW OF ISLAM"

This is a very good overview of Islam. I'll only post the first few paragraphs, but do go to the full article.
My View of Islam
FROM NEWSWEEK . WASHINGTONPOST

On holy war, apostasy and the rights of women in Islam.
The undisputed definition of Islam by all her adherents is “submission to the will of Allah.” This divine will is outlined in the Koran and in the teachings and deeds of Muhammad, as recorded in the Hadith or Sunna.
While the Koran is considered to be the true, undiluted word of God revealed to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel, the Sunna carry less weight and have always been a cause for disagreement amongst Muslim scholars. Theologians of Islam have, however, reached consensus on the authority of a set of six volumes from the Sunna called the Sahih Sita, or authentic six.

On the issues of holy war (jihad), apostasy and the treatment of women, the Koran and Sunna are clear. It is the obligation of every Muslim to spread Islam to unbelievers first through dawa, or proselytizing, then through jihad, if the unbelievers refuse to convert. It is the obligation of the unbelievers to accept Islam. Exempted from this edict of conversion are the people of the book: Christians and Jews. Both peoples have a choice. They may adopt Islam and enjoy the same rights as other Muslims, or they may stick to their book and lead the life of a dhimmi (lower citizen). Legally, the rights of the dhimmi are not equal to those of a Muslim. For instance, a Muslim man may take a Jewish or Christian wife, but Jews and Christians are not allowed to marry Muslim women. If a Christian or a Jew kills a Muslim man, they should be killed immediately. In contrast, the blood of a Muslim should never be shed in recompense for the blood of Christians or Jews.

It is also the obligation of every Muslim to command virtue and forbid vice. Apostasy, the worst possible vice a Muslim can commit, should be punished by death. The punishment need not be carried out by a state, but can easily be enforced by civilians. When it is a question of Islamic law, justice is in the hands of every Muslim.
As for the treatment of women, in the Koran and more elaborately in the Sunna, Islam assigns to girls a position in the family that requires them to be docile, makes them dependent on their male relatives for money and gives dominion over their bodies to these same male kin.

In Islam there is a strict hierarchy of subservience. First and foremost, all humans are required to be the slaves of Allah. In Muslim societies, all children must obey their parents. Beyond this, women and girls must obey and serve without question their male guardians and especially their husbands. This decree of marital obedience is not in any way reciprocal.
READ IT ALL: