Free Republic

Way back in 2005, when I was an MP in the Netherlands, my party was strategising about the upcoming local elections. I belonged to the centre-right VVD, and we were particularly concerned about appealing to the nation’s growing migrant community. After much discussion, the leaders settled on Laetitia Griffith to represent us in Amsterdam. She was black and had roots in Suriname, a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean. She could pull in the city’s Creole vote. More importantly, the VVD’s strategists thought she could win over some of the city’s Muslim population. In the hope of making this task...

Atheism can't equip us for civilisational war... In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I am Not a Christian”. It did not cross my mind, as I read it, that one day, nearly a century after he delivered it to the South London branch of the National Secular Society, I would be compelled to write an essay with precisely the opposite title. The year before, I had publicly condemned the terrorist attacks of the 19 men who had hijacked passenger jets and crashed them into the twin towers in New York. They had done it...

All across the West, there is no shortage of people blaming the horrors in Israel on Israel itself — and openly supporting the perpetrators. The head of policy at the Community Security Trust, which monitors hate crimes committed against British Jews, has said: 'Anti-Semites are getting excited by the sight of dead Jews . . . Hamas murdering Israeli civilians has exhilarated them . . . We've had reports of people driving past synagogues shouting 'Kill the Jews'.' Anti-Semitic incidents in Britain are currently three times higher than they were this time last year, the charity adds.

There is an organized and growing effort to push back against the cancel culture on college campuses. Thousands of conservative and libertarian scholars and academics are standing up and issuing a ringing endorsement of academic freedom. It’s called “The Philadelphia Statement on Civil Discourse and the Strengthening of Liberal Democracy” and has been signed by such luminaries as Robert George, Christina Hoff Sommers, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and more. The statement embodies concepts that all can embrace — at least, those whose minds haven’t been poisoned by the radical left. Tragically, we are losing these defining features of our democracy. Common...

- I was born in Somalia and grew up amid pervasive Muslim anti-Semitism. Hate is hard to unlearn without coming to terms with how you learned it. - I once opened a speech by confessing to a crowd of Jews that I used to hate them. It was 2006 and I was a young native of Somalia who’d been elected to the Dutch Parliament. The American Jewish Committee was giving me its Moral Courage Award. I felt honored and humbled, but a little dishonest if I didn’t own up to my anti-Semitic past. So I told them how I’d learned...

On Wednesday, June 19, the Pennsylvania Senate passed House Bill 315, which would classify Female Genital Mutilation as a first-degree felony in the Keystone State. The Pennsylvania House passed the legislation on April 9, and the bill’s primary sponsor, Rep. Thomas P. Murt, told CNSNews.com he is “very confident” that Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf will sign the legislation into law. ... Rep. Murt wrote, “This is a major victory for the women of Pennsylvania. I want to thank my colleagues in both the House and Senate for taking this strong and unified stand for the right to be safe from...

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was schedule to present a paper on radical Islamic terror at the National Security Counsel before being blocked by H.R. McMaster and his recently appointed Senior Director of Counter-Terrorism, Mustafa Javed Ali. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was in town to present her work to the Senate, was also prohibited from visiting the President during her White House visit, where she was allowed to meet with select members of the NSC in an informal setting. ... McMaster has refused to call out radical Islamic terrorism in the past, and tried to stop President Donald Trump from visiting the...

Ronald Reagan's major achievement in his long war against the Soviet Union: presenting communism as a joke -- exposing the lies of the Soviet regime, exposing the misery under which its people were living, and explaining why Western values were preferable to Communist ones. This is exactly what the West, Hirsi Ali explains, should be doing with radical Islam. Western civilization is a humanist vision in which Christianity integrated Jewish wisdom, Greek philosophy and Roman law, thereby giving Western culture its distinctive character: freedom of speech and of the press, equal justice under law, the primacy of the individual, separation...

New York was recently the scene of a heated debate on the status of Muslim women under Islamic law. In it, one of the bravest women in the world, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, faced off against three other Muslim women and a hostile moderator, Barkha Dutt. Dutt, known for her soft spot for Muslims in her own country of India, ... Hirsi Ali immediately recognized she was being set up to run a gauntlet of criticism and so chose to go for the jugular. “I reject Islamic law because it’s totalitarian ... because it’s bigoted and especially bigoted against women… Where...

Once again the double standard is blatant. Critics of Islam are treated as bigots. A heroine like Ayaan Hirsi Ali who faced death threats for criticizing Islam won't be getting an award, but Rebecca Newberger Goldstein will. Ali is denounced as a bigot, booted off campuses and smeared in the press. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein receives the uncritical acclaim reserved for those who promote the unthinking prejudices of the left. Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes about Islam, which may not be criticized. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein writes about Orthodox Judaism, which like the more religious forms of Christianity, is an optimal target. Obviously...

Islam "has begotten a bloodthirsty ideology that is determined to destroy the principles of liberty and humanity and basic decency," ex-Muslim and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali said June 3 at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Hirsi Ali knows what she's talking about. Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, she was raised Muslim. She spent her childhood and young adulthood in Africa and Saudi Arabia. She fled as a refugee to the Netherlands in 1992, where she earned a political science degree and was elected to the Dutch House of Representatives. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Hirsi...

Bill Maher spoke with Ayaan Hirsi Ali tonight about a recurring topic of his, radical Islam, and spent quite a lot talking about liberal reactions to it. Maher brought up how liberals have targeted Hirsi Ali and may have also had the Muhammad cartoon contest on the brain when he asked why so many liberals, who normally “hate blaming the victim,” do so when it comes to radical Islam. Hirsi Ali said she’s not sure why liberals do that

Less than a year after I moved to the United States in 2006, I was asked to speak at the University of Pittsburgh. Among those who objected to my appearance was a local imam, Fouad El Bayly, of the Johnstown Islamic Center. "when you decide to defame it deliberately, the sentence is death.” After a local newspaper reported Mr. Bayly’s comments, he was forced to resign from the Islamic Center. That was the last I would hear of him—or so I thought. Imagine my surprise when I learned recently that the man who threatened me with death for apostasy is...

Ayaan Hirsi Ali should be the perfect feminist hero. In theory, she fits the role on multiple levels: She’s an escapee from an abusive patriarchy. She’s an African immigrant who made her own way in a Western country, the Netherlands. She’s a fierce advocate for women’s rights. She’s a target for deadly violence by angry men who want to shut her up. She left her religion and became a scourge of its repressive practices. Except for the blemish on her record: Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a dissident from the wrong religion. Raised a Muslim in Somalia, subjected to genital mutilation...

World-renowned author and staunch critic of Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali appeared on the The Daily Show this week, where host Jon Stewart attempted to challenge her assertion that Islam is different from the world’s three major Abrahamic religions–Judaism, Christianity, and Islam–as Hirsi Ali asserts in her latest book, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now.

To defeat the extremists for good, Muslims must reject those aspects of their tradition that prompt some believers to resort to oppression and holy war

Author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali said that calling people Islamophobic is “a way of shutting up debate” on Monday’s “Kelly File” on the Fox News Channel. Hirsi Ali argued that calling people Islamophobes is “a way of shutting up debate. And I want to give a shout out to a friend Asra Nomani, who did a fantastic piece on it in the Washington Post…she calls it the honor brigade. It is, and it’s been going on for at least over a decade, there are countries involved, there are movements involved, there’s a lot of money. Anybody who tries to...

An Egyptian-born imam who in 2007 said that Somali-born activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali should receive the death penalty for her criticism of Islam is now a Department of Justice contractor hired to teach classes to Muslims who are in federal prison. According to federal spending records, Fouad ElBayly, the imam at Islamic Center of Johnstown in Pennsylvania, was contracted by the DOJ’s Bureau of Prisons beginning last year to teach the classes to Muslim inmates at Cumberland Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Md. The records show that ElBayly has two contracts worth $12,900 to teach the classes and to provide...

NORFOLK Ayaan Hirsi Ali stood before a slide of the caged Jordanian pilot about to be set afire by Islamic State group extremists. That, she said at Chrysler Hall on Tuesday night, will be the norm if they are not defeated. "You are going to see people beheaded, their hands and legs cut off, the mass enslavement of women," warned Hirsi Ali, a sharp critic of Muslim leaders and radicals and an advocate of women's rights. "We have had over a long period of time... even before the Reagan administration, so many warning signs that we have ignored," Hirsi Ali...

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...