Now we finally know for sure where Ali is really at

Yesterday I reported that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the “conservatives’” “anti-Muslim” “hero” (sorry for all the scare quotes, but they are needed to express the multiple false realities that have compassed us about), has said that she has no problem with Muslims seeking to institute sharia in the West, so long as they do it peacefully. (Here is the quotation and source on this.) This stunning news led me to realize that a Muslim could be against jihad, as Ali is, but still be in favor of sharia—so long as it is pursued by supposedly “non-jihadist” means. I therefore concluded that Ali should be barred from gaining permanent legal residence in the U.S., as ought to be (but isn’t) the case with any Muslim who supports sharia.

I had heard of her statement from a reliable source but did not yet have the actual quote. Here is the quote, from the transcript of Glenn Beck’s February 7 program on CNN.

To set this up, Ali and Beck talk for a while about how bad sharia is:

ALI: … Now a country like mine in Somalia is entirely in the hands of people who want to introduce Sharia or Islamic law, which was just unfathomable 20 years ago. So yes, it can start small but it can grow. And that’s what I’m trying to tell people.

BECK: Are you surprised—and this shocks me. Sharia law is horrifying, especially to women. What women go through is unbelievable. I mean, it’s slave territory. You’re not even—under Sharia law, correct me if I’m wrong. You’re not as valuable as I am. You—it takes two women or three people to equal me.

ALI: Not only that, Sharia law is horrible to the human individual. Sharia law divides the world into believers and unbelievers. Under Sharia law, when people steal, their hands are cut off. If you have sex before marriage, you’re flogged.

And yes, it always affects women. We are now confined to the houses and so on. And Sharia law, as it’s been propagated today, affects Jewish people, infidels, actually homosexuals, all of us, even if we disagree on lots and lots of matters. I would say anyone who is not a Muslim is a target of…

BECK: I was going to say, not even Muslims are safe. They’re targeting them now in London.

ALI: Exactly. So the propagators of radical Islam are saying unless and until you practice Islam as it is in its most pure form, you are not a Muslim. They’re declaring you a hypocrite, and they want—yes, they want to behead a soldier, a British soldier, who is a Muslim and who served in Iraq.

So sharia is horrible, it’s dehumanizing, it’s tyrannical. The interview continues:

GLENN BECK: A year ago I said that it is—that we have to watch Dearborn. The “New York Times” just had it Sunday that this is starting to creep in. And it’s—I mean, there’s an Islamic thinker society [sic] here in America, here just right down the street in New York City that wants Sharia law now.

ALI: I don’t have a problem with an Islamic Sharia or Islamic thinker society. What I have a problem is that is that Islamic thinker society depends—has a front face saying we want to debate and we want to go achieve our dream through a dialogue. And on the other side they are supporting terrorists and threatening people, calling everyone who wants to debate with them Islamophobes and racists. That’s what I have a problem with.

Having just told us how horrible and dehumanizing sharia is, Ali turns around and—as incredible as this is—tells us that she does not oppose an Islamic sharia society, whether in the sense of an organization promoting sharia, or in the sense of the whole of society that the sharia promoters seek to transform. She only opposes sharia when its promoters support terrorists and threaten people. If its promoters advance it through respectful dialog, debate, and popular elections, that’s fine with her. Her staunch opposition to sharia has vanished. Or, rather, she only opposes the “bad,” “oppressive” sharia, while she imagines a “good,” compassionate,” “democratic” sharia! But of course, even if sharia is instituted by peaceful measures, once it is instituted, it will be sharia. Ali doesn’t grasp this. She is as disconnected from reality as President Bush and the neocons, who imagine that if something comes about by means of democracy, it must be good. Similarly, Ali thinks that if something comes about by means of civil dialog, it must be good. For liberals, nice procedures must magically lead to nice substantive results.

Ali has been invited into America as a supposed fighter against radical Islam. But now we see that if Muslims are sly and advance their jihadist purposes through polite and lawful means, she will defend them and take their side, against those of us who would defend the West from sharia, just as she has advocated the banning of immigration restrictionist parties in Europe. Furthermore, as I pointed out yesterday, Ali calls Catholicism the moral equivalent of Nazism. So this conservative “hero” supports “good” sharia, while she condemns the founding religion of Western civilization as absolute evil. A Muslim who endorses sharia in any form should not be allowed to immigrate here, let alone be given a prominent position at a leading “conservative” think tank from which to influence our society. If Ali wants to build her chimera of a nice sharia, let her go back to the Muslim world and do it there, not stay here in the West giving aid and comfort to the enemies who are seeking to impose Islamic law upon us, even as she herself is being given aid and comfort by the “conservatives,” a group that henceforth should be known as the Partisans of Ali.

- end of initial entry -

Carl Simpson writes:

I think that this is a case of Ali’s clumsy usage. When she states: “I don’t have a problem with an Islamic Sharia or Islamic thinker society”, I think she is actually referring to a political society or an organization such as CAIR that advocates Sharia in the political sphere, as opposed to a society governed by Sharia law. After all, what does she think would happen to her in any such society? If she actually *does* think a sharia-based society would be OK as long as it was voted into power peacefully, it begs the question of whether she is actually a Muslim practicing “taqqiyah” on clueless Westerners like Beck.

I find this stance to be a typically leftist one on Ali’s part. Imagine that—a leftist acting like a leftist! She apparently has no problem with organizations such as CAIR operating freely but at the same time is willing to use state power to outlaw a Christian party from expressing any of its views in the political sphere. This supports my view of her as a nihilistic leftist who may have some fears about Islam but remains much more interested in destroying Christianity and whatever remains of Western tradition than she is in fighting Islam. Yes, indeed. This is really the type of person we need on our side if we’re going to take on the mujahedin! She should be laughed out of the country and sent packing to manage an Open Society Institute branch office in Mogadishu.

LA replies:

Carl, a few minutes after I initially posted it, I revised it and softened the language at the end a bit. I also clarified that that she seems to be using “society” in both senses, as an organization, and as society as a whole. Either way, though her language is clunky, it is clear that sharia is ok by her if it is not advanced through means of intimidation, terror, etc.

From one angle, she is a nihilistic leftist, as you put it; from another, she is a naive liberal, like Bush. Or like Daniel Pipes, who seeks “moderate” Islam. She is not against Islam, she is against “radical” Islam and for “moderate” Islam. And the “conservatives” support her because they see her as the representative of this “moderate” Islam. But, as I said two years ago in “The Search for Moderate Islam, Part II,” if we support and legitimize “moderate” Islam, we’re supporting and legitimizing Islam, with the result that Islam, including RADICAL Islam, will keep getting stronger among us.

A reader writes:

I was just discussing this with _____ _______ yesterday. While there are a few individual exceptions, I have come to believe that there is no place for any Muslim in the West.

The threat of the Wahabis, Salafis, Qutbists, Deobandis, Khomeni’ists are quite apparent. The threat posed by “traditional Islam” is no less dire. Traditional Muslims wish to see the world ruled by Islam. They only differ in tactics. They are the Mensheviks to the Bolshevik jihadists, except that their position is merely tactical. When the West is weak, they expand.

Moderate Muslims are the Titoists, the dream of the liberal intellectual, who pines for an equal in a totalitarian system. Moderate Muslims are a facade meant to placate the West, allowing individual and groups to gain power and influence for the good of the ummah.

Finally we have those who were born Muslims who rejected Islam. The vast majority are leftist and are still not our allies.

LA replies:

I agree. At least since 9/11 I’ve been saying: Muslims in significant numbers do not belong in any Western society, period. That doesn’t mean that I’m saying we should deport all Muslims from the West. It means that we need to start a process the ultimate end of which is the reduction of the Western Muslim population to insignificant numbers.

Jeff in England writes:

Good points but it still doesn’t mean Ali is not serving an important role in the mainstream arena in exposing the horrors of Islam in the West.

Simple as that. I see things relatively and in a Bigger Picture. That in no way means I don’t accept your insights abouts Ali and condemn those particular opinions of hers.

LA replies:

Agreed that Ali serves a function, but how important is that function? In particular, how important is that function relative to the deep harm and confusion that our embrace of her causes us? Would Charles Martel have felt he needed the help of “moderate” Muslims and Muslim apostates in order to defend the West? No. He defended the West. That’s what we need to do.

LA continues:

To carry the Charles Martel analogy further, suppose some Moslem apostates went over to Martel’s army and were giving him useful information about the Moslem army. Then suppose that one of these apostates began going around saying that he, the apostate, was the only person in Europe opposing the Moslem invasion. That’s what we have with Hirsi Ali. She claims to be the only person on the scene opposing radical Islam.

BECK: Have you met with anyone here in the United States that you thinks—that you think really gets it and is willing to stand up next to you? Is there—is there anybody here? Is there a woman`s organization? Is there a Moslem organization that says, we`re with you?

ALI: I`ve met several individuals, several organizations and all very concerned. To be honest, I think vigilance in the United States seems to me to be today better than the one in Europe.

What I haven`t seen in the United States is people who are aware of the problem here today in the U.S. Most Islam, as a foreign policy, jihad in this country. [Italics added.]

Wow. Ali has just cancelled out of existence her own Islam-critic champions, including, most notably, Robert Spencer, who has called her his hero and whose religion she equated the other day with Nazism. Oh, this woman is a prize. I predict (I think the same was said by some Dutch former friends of her a couple of years ago) that anyone who associates himself with her is going to end up regretting it.

Ali’s claim to be the only opponent of radical Islam was mentioned by Ilana Mercer in a blog entry which unfortunately and distractingly is filled with a string of extreme insults against Glenn Beck (“blithering idiot,” “hyperbolic moron,” etc.), unsupported by a single fact to back them up. Beck, whom I’ve only seen around three times, strikes me as a good guy with good instincts, if not very well informed. Just the other day, I saw him interview a psychologist named Gregory Wolfe about the crazy lady astronaut Nowak. The psychologist, a liberal Jewish secularist right out of central casting, was going on and on about how we couldn’t judge Nowak, because when “we” were young and in love, we all thought of doing things like she did, etc. In other words, he was completely relativizing and normalizing her pathological and criminal behavior. As he was saying this, Beck, in the studio, was humorously mugging, exasperatedly striking himself in the face, showing his complete rejection of Wolfe’s liberal nonsense. That was a very refreshing thing to see. It was not the action of a blithering idiot but of someone who understands something about liberalism and has an instinctive reaction against it.

(Mercer sent me the blog entry Monday morning and I wrote back to her objecting to all the fact-free name-calling against Beck. I see now (Tuesday morning) that she has revised the entry, slightly reducing the name-calling. For example, she has changed “hyperbolic moron” to “hyperbolic host.”)

Steven H. writes:

I called Glenn Beck to ask him about his “highjacked a great religion” spin. Click. The screen caller hung up on me immediately. A local radio talk show host did the same when I shifted the topic from Darwinism to Muslim immigration as an example of taboo topics. Click. I truly believe that it is fear that drives their political correctness. Please encourage all VFR readers to engage this medium to get our message out. We are growing in numbers rapidly; however, its still not fast enough. Reality about Islam must become common knowledge.

Paula K. writes:

When reinforcing your initial suppositions and suspicions about Hirsi Ali to colleagues and friends I was balled out—BIG TIME! But I never abandoned my reservations about the woman.

I discovered a pattern after speaking to a number of “moderate” (and well educated) Muslims: if you don’t challenge them and allow them to speak on and on you’d be amazed at the sheer mind-numbing conditioning these “supposed” moderates have undergone in the name of Allah – and how well they conceal the steadfast belief in their faith. In fact, after several initial encounters with “moderate” Muslims I walked away thunderstruck, learning that blatant denial, notably of Jihad and the deprave nature of Mohammed, is the order of the day. In the West we are inclined to debate fiercely and at the outset when incongruence arises during intellectual discourse, instead of allowing our enemies to “prattle on,” perchance to enlighten us. None other than Hirsi Ali gladly revealed herself in our very open American society. (Glen Beck might be a better investigative journalist than Mercer allows for; Beck has surely done us all a great service by encouraging the girl to chatter.)

I suppose that the search for moderate Muslims will grow more difficult (or more intense depending on to whom you speak) now that Hirsi Ali reveals to her American liberators that no process exists for the eradication of a core Muslim belief system. Ali is the archetype of what a moderate Muslim looks like—in the flesh.

It makes one wonder: if Theo Van Gogh had questioned Ali’s core beliefs on Islam, would he have wasted even an additional minute with her? Alas, it seems Van Gough died for nothing!

LA replies:

Thanks for this. Yes, the truth about Ms. Ali is coming out, thanks to her. SHE keeps telling us what she really believes, but WE (the “conservatives”) don’t want to hear it! Like all minorities, she is “protected” by Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations under Liberalism. The worse she is, the more we, the majority, deny the truth about her, and the more anyone who does speak the truth about her is penalized.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 12, 2007 09:03 PM | Send