Islam is not just a belief; it is a way of life, a violent way of life. Islam is imbued with violence, and it encourages violence. Muslim children al… - Ayaan Hirsi Ali
" "Islam is not just a belief; it is a way of life, a violent way of life. Islam is imbued with violence, and it encourages violence.
Muslim children all over the world are taught the way I was: taught with violence, taught to perpetuate violence, taught to wish for violence against the infidel, the Jew, the American Satan.
I belong to a small group of lucky people who have escaped the permanent closure of my mind through education.
About Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born Ayaan Hirsi Magan on November 13, 1969) is a Somali-born American liberal politician and feminist. She was an MP for the Dutch liberal People's Party for Democracy between 2003 and 2006. She currently works for a conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute.
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Additional quotes by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
When I’m told to be careful not to impose Western values on people who don’t want them, I beg to differ. I was not born in the West and I did not grow up in the West. But the delight of being able once I came to the West to let my imagination run free, the pleasure of choosing whom I want to associate with, the joy of reading what I want, and the thrill of being in control of my life—in short, my freedom—is something I feel intensely as I manage to extricate myself from all the shackles and obstacles that my bloodline and my religion imposed.
I am not the only one who feels and thinks this.
All these were conflicts of principle. All of these struggles addressed the consequences of denying men and women their freedom. All these struggles were won essentially by revealing the immorality of the opposing arguments, whether they involved the Bible or long-held feudalistic traditions. (Those who wanted slavery, civil rights abuses, and misogyny to continue all used religious arguments.) These arguments were revealed, reviled, and ridiculed, and eventually the laws that institutionalized inequality were repealed.
Yet, paradoxically, because the struggles were all fought against white men they helped fix in the minds of most people the simplistic notion that blacks, women, and colonized peoples can be victims only of white male oppression. Having sided with other movements of social revolution, such as the movements for national independence in southeast Asia and minority rights of all kinds, particularly the fight against apartheid and for the Palestinians, feminists began to define white men as the ultimate and only oppressors. White men had engaged in the slave trade, apartheid, and colonialism as well as in the subjugation of women. Nonwhite men were, almost by definition, seen as members of the oppressed.
As a result, the plight of Muslim women—indeed all third-world women who are oppressed in the name of a moral framework of custom or creed created and maintained by men of color—has largely gone unchallenged. A few nonprofit organizations address it, to be sure; the World Bank, for one, has grown more self-confident in condemning the subjugation of Muslim women. But the massive public effort to reveal, ridicule, revile, and replace old views has not begun.
In fact a certain kind of feminism has worsened things for the female victims of misogyny perpetrated by men of color. My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Christina Hoff-Sommers, calls this “the feminism of resentment.” This is the position of “feminists who believe that our society [read, Western society] is best described as a ‘male hegemony,’ a ‘sex/gender system’ in which the dominant gender [read, white male] works to keep women cowering and submissive.” These feminists of resentment refuse to appreciate the progress Western women have made, from the right to vote to the punishment of those who try to harass women at work. They see only the iniquity of the white man and reduce such universal concepts as freedom of expression and the right to choose one’s own destiny to mere artifacts of Western culture. Thus they provide the men of color with an escape route. If the king of Saudi Arabia is questioned about the laws in his land pertaining to women, he merely demands respect for his faith, culture, and sovereignty, and apparently this argument suffices.
Because these Western feminists manifest an almost neurotic fear of offending a minority group’s culture, the situation of Muslim women create a huge philosophical problem for them.