Posted on 02/13/2007 6:20:52 PM PST by Posting
No Rest for a Feminist Fighting Radical Islam
("INFIDEL" by Hirsi Ali)
A Somali by birth, recently elected member of Dutch Parliament, Ms. Hirsi Ali waged a personal crusade to improve the lot of Muslim women. Her warnings about dangers posed to the Netherlands by unassimilated Muslims made her Public Enemy No. 1 for Muslim extremists, a feminist counterpart to Salman Rushdie.
The circuitous, violence-filled path that led Ms. Hirsi Ali from Somalia to the Netherlands is the subject of “Infidel,” her brave, inspiring and beautifully written memoir.... from Mogadishu to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya, and her desperate flight to the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage.
... a journey “from the world of faith to the world of reason,” a long, bitter struggle to come to terms with her religion... that of millions of Muslims all over.
.. required that young girls undergo genital mutilation, which Ms. Hirsi Ali, victim of the practice, describes in horrific detail.
Somalia’s troubled politics provided Ms. Hirsi Ali with an eventful childhood. father... spent years in prison. family... Hirsi Ali recoiled at the local interpretation of Islam...
... She eventually became a woman very like one of George Eliot’s heroines — earnest, high-minded, ardent, forever chafing at the limits imposed by her religion and her society.
Rebellion came slowly... the attractions of fundamentalism, growing appeal of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in disintegrating societies like Somalia’s. But nagging questions disturbed her faith, especially as she encountered inflexible doctrines on the role of women, and their need to submit to men.
“Life on earth is a test, and I was failing it, even though I was trying as hard as I knew how to,” she writes of her anguished, questioning adolescence. “I was failing as a Muslim.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Woah! Don't even tell me that the NYT has a semi brain!
Must have been embryonic stem cell research that caused them to even publish Ali Hirsi's story!
Which means that she was succeeding as a human being. Good for her.
More than I can say about so called feminists in the USA.
Whoops.. got the last names mixed up... must use "preview"
That would be 'Hirsi Ali'
My apologies!
She was on Glenn Beck one day last week and flat out said that it's NOT radical Islam but rather Islam itself that is the problem, that she disavowed Islam when she realized that the things Osama bin Laden preached were right there in her Koran too.
it's in the "book" section of the "art" section
no joke
Page 2
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/14/books/14grim.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2
Fluent in English, and determined to learn Dutch, the highly adaptable Ms. Hirsi Ali makes her way, first as a translator for various social services, then as a political researcher for the Labor Party, and eventually as a political candidate with uncomfortable views on Islam, immigration and assimilation.
INFIDEL
By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Q.& A. Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Enter the Dutch ‘Infidel,’ Faithful to Herself (February 4, 2007)
Readers’ Opinions
Forum: Book News and Reviews
Ms. Hirsi Ali, disturbed at the economic and social plight of Muslims, warned the Dutch that their liberal policy of helping immigrants create separate cultural and religious institutions was counterproductive. She deplored the crimes of violence against Muslim women committed daily in the Netherlands, to which the authorities turned a blind eye in the name of cultural understanding. After the 9/11 attacks, she was vocal in insisting that, despite well-meaning assurances to the contrary, there really was a meaningful link between the Muslim faith and terrorism.
“Holland was trying to be tolerant for the sake of consensus, but the consensus was empty,” she writes. “The immigrants’ culture was being preserved at the expense of their women and children and to the detriment of the immigrants’ integration into Holland.”
Ms. Hirsi Ali’s provocative comments on Islam and on the need for Muslim women to reject their traditionally submissive role (the subject of a short film she made with Mr. van Gogh) channeled mounting Muslim anger directly at her.
Death threats have since driven Ms. Hirsi Ali to the United States, where she has accepted a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group.
This is a pity. As a politician, she focused Dutch minds on a subject they steadfastly ignored. In her brief career, she forced the government to keep statistics on honor killings, in which enraged family members murder sisters or daughters believed to have brought shame on the family or clan. Much to the surprise of the Dutch, it turned out that there were a lot of them. Unfortunately, Ms. Hirsi Ali is no longer in the Netherlands to point out these things.
She deplored the crimes of violence against Muslim women
committed daily in the Netherlands, to which the
authorities turned a blind eye in the name of cultural understanding.
In her brief career,
she forced the government to keep statistics on honor killings, in which
enraged family members murder sisters or
daughters believed to have brought shame on
the family or clan.
I'd hope she gets a chance to talk to our Somali immigrants.
Wow. She's brilliant and brave and beautiful too.
European countries are going to have to insist that immigrants live by the laws of the country they have entered. If they want to mutilate and dehumanize women, they should not immigrate to a Western nation.
Admit it. For a brief second you almost believed it.
I was surprised to see it in the NYTimes, Is there something happening in LIBS. ranks?
BUMP!!!
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