October 16, 2007
Rogier van Bakel Interviews Hirsi Ali
While there are problems with the interview, van Bakel in the libertarian Reason magazine seems to be one of the few that's not letting Hirsi Ali so easily off the political hook (via Crooked Timber):
Reason: Explain to me what you mean when you say we have to stop the burning of our flags and effigies in Muslim countries. Why should we care?
Hirsi Ali: We can make fun of George Bush. He’s our president. We elected him. And the queen of England, they can make fun of her within Britain and so on. But on an international level, this has gone too far. You know, the Russians, they don’t burn American flags. The Chinese don’t burn American flags. Have you noticed that? They don’t defile the symbols of other civilizations. The Japanese don’t do it. That never happens.
Reason: Isn’t that a double standard? You want us to be able to say about Islam whatever we want—and I certainly agree with that. But then you add that people in Muslim countries should under all circumstances respect our symbols, or else.
Hirsi Ali: No, no, no.
Reason: We should be able to piss on a copy of the Koran or lampoon Muhammad, but they shouldn’t be able to burn the queen in effigy. That’s not a double standard?
Hirsi Ali: No, that’s not what I’m saying. In Iran a nongovernmental organization has collected money, up to 150,000 British pounds, to kill Salman Rushdie. That’s a criminal act, but we are silent about that.
Reason: We are?
Hirsi Ali: Yes. What happened? Have you seen any political response to it?
Reason: The fatwa against Rushdie has been the subject of repeated official anger and protests since 1989.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 11:17 AM | Permalink
Comments
The 100K for a dead or 150K for
a mutelated Sir Rushdie is new,
after his knighthood.
Makes one wonder what the butcher
of Theo van Gogh got for the almost copped off bungeling head.
Posted by: paul | Oct 16, 2007 11:39:17 AM
Wow. How sad for all of us. She doesn't understand western civilization, power, civil liberties, Christianity, Judaism, or even Islam.
She thinks that Islam is uniquely different from the other two religions -- apparently unaware that radical Islamism has its counterparts in both of the other two religions.
She thinks that force (even symbolic force, like flexing your muscles!) always dissipates resistance instead of increasing it.
She thinks that a fair description of western civilization is to say that it is a celebration of life, even the lives of its enemies.
And she thinks that the best way to defend civil liberties is to draw a line around the range of viewpoints that is permissable and then to repress (symbolically, materially, and brutally) any deviation from her definition of what's acceptable. It isn't clear what she will think when the Christianists (who she hasn't seem to have met yet) get around to burning her at the stake for her atheism.
So depressing.
Posted by: burple | Oct 16, 2007 1:35:50 PM
I second burple's comment, but I agreed when Hirsi Ali said:
"We have to revert to the original meaning of the term tolerance. It meant you agreed to disagree without violence. It meant critical self-reflection. It meant not tolerating the intolerant."
She's right -- it can't be synonymous with looking the other way while everybody does what they want, because eventually people will want to interfere with the lives of others.
Posted by: sixseeds | Oct 16, 2007 2:33:45 PM
sixseeds, what do you mean when you say we shouldn't be "looking the other way" in response to intolerance? Do you mean the intolerant should be legally prevented from expressing intolerant views, even if they do so in a nonviolent fashion? Or do you just mean speaking out against intolerance, without getting the legal system involved? The problem I have with Ali's comments is that many of them strongly suggest legal repression of certain types of speech, although she is not actually very clear on what she means by things like 'You stop the symbol burning and the effigy burning, and you look them in the eye and flex your muscles and you say, “This is a warning. We won’t accept this anymore.”' (for example, I wouldn't necessarily say that closing down Muslim schools that teach intolerance is a free speech issue--as an analogy, home-schooling parents are required to meet certain standards, they don't have unlimited power to fill their kids' heads with whatever they want--and that seems to be one of the things she means by such phrases, although her suggestion that we need to close all Muslim schools is ridiculous).
Posted by: Jesse M. | Oct 16, 2007 7:08:03 PM
Her language is similar in many ways to the language used by a lot of neo-cons - they talk toughly but vaguely about certain things being unacceptable or about taking action, flexing muscles, teaching people a lesson, we are at war, but they seldom actually come out and say what concrete steps they are advocating - and when they do, i.e. "shut down all the Islamic schools in America", it is evident how ridiculous they are.
Her shallowness of knowledge is consistent with her AEI colleagues'.
Posted by: Nizam Arain | Oct 16, 2007 8:44:37 PM
Maybe it's a little naive to expect anyone with Hirsi Ali's personal history to come to the West and not go through an Ayn Rand phase. She has run every risk there is for self-determination, and, though less is made of it this year than last, she is still very much a target. Perhaps she's painting with such a broad brush because she does not wish to be mistaken by her audience. I just hope she'll live long enough to be concerned with subtleties that are -- obviously -- not appealing to her now.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Oct 16, 2007 8:57:19 PM
Well said Elatia.
The one thing I would bear in mind though, before too heavily criticizing Hirsi Ali's seemingly simplistic solutions, is that more than just about anybody on here, she's BEEN THERE. She has a very real experience of how little it can mean in some spheres to be a Muslim woman and can contrast that meaningfully with what she has experienced when coming to the West. Few of us can make that comparison with any real acuity. We mouth words like "freedom of expression" and "equality" without any real experience of what it is to have them removed.
I am, in the main, a supporter of most of what she's saying, while acknowledging some of her solutions are a little naive. She is trying to tell us something (shouting it in fact) from deep in the heart of an opposition that would, given half a chance, render a lot of what we hold dear non-existant. She has street cred, it would pay to listen.
I would not be surprised if, behind closed doors, she also gives heart to a large number of other intimidated, subjugated individuals, any one (or more) of whom may one day succeed her in assisting with the neutralization of what is an ugly, oppressive, patriachal delusion. As she has said, if you have any doubt about this, you haven't read the Qu'ran.
Posted by: MattInOz | Oct 16, 2007 10:15:37 PM
Matt & others,
Even in this era of wholesale attacks on Islam, and mistrust of anyone who seems a little too faithful to it, I believe that Islam, like every religion, needs a credible critic -- someone who has suffered through and for and because of a specific faith, not just another atheist. Hirsi Ali may feel that her case cannot be overstated, and she may not yet see that according full civil liberties to people with whom one strongly disagrees is the finest flower of Western Civ. It's a philosophical position one has to be able to afford, however, and I hold it as one who has never been suppressed. I don't know if she sees the irony of coming out in favor of a kind of suppression not too terribly different from that which she endured, but she may be thinking more of fighting the forces of ignorance than of discriminating among types of suppression. It occurs to me, too, that some of her critics may just not like all that steel in a woman, may not know what to do about it but find ways in which she's wrong. That she is far too gung-ho about "flexing" does diminish her message, but it doesn't invalidate her perspective.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Oct 17, 2007 12:02:57 AM
Jesse, where did you get the idea that I oppose nonviolent expression? Intolerance for me implies violent action, which is why I agree with what Ali said, even if I wouldn't support her proposed methods of suppressing intolerance.
Posted by: sixseeds | Oct 18, 2007 12:14:11 PM
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