Ayaan Declares War

[olamina]

Interesting interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (former Dutch MP and now a resident scholar at the neocon American Enterprise Institute) from The Spectator. I'm really conflicted aabout her, but nonetheless it is definitely enlightening to hear her insight considering she is coming from a very informed point of view.

‘Yes, I am at war with Islam,’

Comments

[masculin]

she equates Kant's categorical imperative to the golden rule!

and thinks Christianity is at home in liberal democracy? If she bothered to read any Catholic political theology (before she started talking about Christianity) or Radical Orthodoxy, or liberation theology, etc., she might see how at odds it is with modern, Enlightenment philosophy and how it is at pains to dissociate itself with contemporary liberalism. she reduces all christianity as if it is all evangelical protestantism (yet she doesn't account for the fundamentalist aspects of it) and then reduces all Islam to a single reading because..."she was a muslim." but Ayaan Hirsi Ali, were you a theologian? or does your first year courses on Voltaire excuse you from having to engage in muslim theology? Here's another great line from Voltaire’s observation of liberal London: “The Jew, the Mohammedan, and the Christian deal with one another as if they were of the same religion, and give the name of infidel only to those who go bankrupt.” Capital gets to be the new religion.
From my reading, she's far more dangerous than the neo-cons. now the average white mom from the US doesn't just naively think her life-experience is the best of all experiences, now she has some 'authentic, foreign, straight-from-the-source' ex-muslim telling them that they were correct (b/c of "logic") in their presumptions. It reminds me of when P.I.G.s here in Canada, like the Taxpayers Association, round up middle-class First Nations people to speak publicly against the laziness and depravity of "most Native people" and how affirmative action is an insult, blah, blah, blah. And the white people at home pat themselves on the back, congratulating themselves for knowing it all along but not being able to say it because it would be deemed racist and now finally having someone from the "other side" admitting it. gross.

[olamina]

See this is precisely where I am conflicted because I hate to believe that at the end of the day she is just a puppet. I wish there was some way to know if she's the horrible Condoleeza Rice type villain or simply an unfortunate confused soul who needs a few years of psychotherapy.