At the start of the clip, Ayaan Hirsi-Ali asks
“What is it that motivates a man like Faisal Shahzad. A man who was living the American dream. Who found a visa to come to this country…”
Then the person interviewing Hirsi-Ali makes an assertion:
“Well I say if he still had a job he wouldn’t have done it. So when economic times become more difficult, young men are drawn more easily [towards radicalism]“
Economic hardship and social alienation are certainly contributory factors to the vacuous, pigshit-thick hooliganism of many of the EDL rank and file. That and good old alcohol-fuelled English exceptionalism.
Islamism, on the other hand, is a messianic ideology concerned with “social justice”, if only superficially, but it certainly isn’t a revolutionary struggle for emancipatory rights for the poor and the unemployed. After all, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underpants bomber, was a poor little rich boy who lived in a million pound flat in St John’s Wood, with servants cleaning up after him.
21 Comments
Hirsi Ali herself is a hate mongerer against Muslims as well as a total hypocrite- she got into Holland illegally then voted in parliament against measures to give amnesty to illegal immigrants.
She is also a proven liar
http://one-state.net/economist2.html
Ayaan Hirsi’s Dark Secrets
Feb 8th 2007 | The Economist
Ayaan Hirsi Ali blames Islam for the miseries of the Muslim world. Her new autobiography shows that life is too complex for that.
SAY what you will about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she fascinates. The Dutch-Somali politician, who has lived under armed guard ever since a fatwa was issued against her in 2004, is a chameleon of a woman. Just 11 years after she arrived in the Netherlands from Africa, she rode into parliament on a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, only to leave again last year, this time for America, after an uproar over lies she had told to obtain asylum.
Even the title of her new autobiography reflects her talent for reinvention. In the Netherlands, where Ms Hirsi Ali got her start campaigning against the oppression of Muslim women, the book has been published under the title “My Freedom”. But in Britain and in America, where she now has a fellowship at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, it is called “Infidel”. In it, she recounts how she and her family made the cultural odyssey from nomadic to urban life in Africa and how she eventually made the jump to Europe and international celebrity as the world’s most famous critic of Islam.
Read as a modern coming-of-age story set in Africa, the book has a certain charm. Read as a key to the thinking of a woman who aspires to be the Muslim Voltaire, it is more problematic. The facts as Ms Hirsi Ali tells them here do not fit well either with some of the stories she has told in the past or with her tendency in her political writing to ascribe most of the troubles of the Muslim world to Islam.
Ms Hirsi Ali’s father, Hirsi Magan Isse, was one of the first Somalis to study overseas in Italy and America. He met his future wife, Asha, when she signed up for a literacy class he taught during Somalia’s springtime of independence in the 1960s. The family’s troubles began in 1969, the year Ms Hirsi Ali was born. That was also the year that Mohammed Siad Barre, a Somali army commander, seized power in a military coup. Hirsi Magan was descended from the traditional rulers of the Darod, Somalia’s second biggest clan. Siad Barre, who hailed from a lesser Darod family, feared and resented Ms Hirsi Ali’s father’s family, she says. In 1972, Siad Barre had Hirsi Magan put in prison from which he escaped three years later and fled the country. Not until 1978 was the family reunited with him.
As a young woman, Ms Hirsi Ali’s mother, Asha, does not seem to have inhabited “the virgin’s cage” that the author claims imprisons Muslim women around the world. At the age of 15, she travelled by herself to Aden where she got a job cleaning house for a British woman. Despite her adventurous spirit, in Yemen and later in the Gulf she found herself drawn to the stern Wahhabi version of Islam that would later clash with the more relaxed interpretation of Islam favoured by Ms Hirsi Ali’s father and many other Somalis. She and Hirsi Magan fell out not long after the family moved to Kenya in 1980. Hirsi Magan left to join a group of Somali opposition politicians in exile in Ethiopia and did not return to his family for ten years.
Ms Hirsi Ali says her mother had no idea how to raise her children in a foreign city. She frequently beat Ayaan and her sister, Haweya. Although they and their brother, Mahad, attended some of Nairobi’s best schools, Haweya and Mahad dropped out early on. Ms Hirsi Ali herself meanwhile fell under the sway of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Some of the best passages in the book concern this part of her life. As a teenager, Ms Hirsi Ali chose to wear the all-encompassing black Arab veil, which was unusual in cosmopolitan Nairobi. “Weirdly, it made me feel like an individual. It sent out a message of superiority,” she writes. Even as she wore it, Ms Hirsi Ali was drawn in other directions. She read English novels and flirted with a boy. Young immigrants of any religion growing up with traditional parents in a modern society will recognise her confusion: “I was living on several levels in my brain. There was kissing Kennedy; there was clan honour; and there was Sister Aziza and God.”
Ms Hirsi Ali sounds less frank when she tells the convoluted story of how and why she came to seek asylum at the age of 22 in the Netherlands. She has admitted in the past to changing her name and her age, and to concocting a story for the Dutch authorities about running away from Somalia’s civil war. (In fact she left from Kenya, where she had had refugee status for ten years.) She has since justified those lies by saying that she feared another kind of persecution: the vengeance of her clan after she ran away from an arranged marriage.
However, last May a Dutch television documentary suggested that while Ms Hirsi Ali did run away from a marriage, her life was in no danger. The subsequent uproar nearly cost Ms Hirsi Ali her Dutch citizenship, which may be the reason why she is careful here to re-state how much she feared her family when she first arrived in the Netherlands. But the facts as she tells them about the many chances she passed up to get out of the marriage-how her father and his clan disapproved of violence against women; how relatives already in the Netherlands helped her to gain asylum; and how her ex-husband peaceably agreed to a divorce-hardly seem to bear her out.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not the first person to use false pretences to try to find a better life in the West, nor will she be the last. But the muddy account given in this book of her so-called forced marriage becomes more troubling when one considers that Ms Hirsi Ali has built a career out of portraying herself as the lifelong victim of fanatical Muslims.
Another, even more disturbing story concerns her sister Haweya’s sojourn in the Netherlands. In her earlier book, “The Caged Virgin”, which came out last year, Ms Hirsi Ali wrote that her sister came to the Netherlands to avoid being “married off”. In “Infidel”, however, she says Haweya came to recover from an illicit affair with a married man that ended in abortion. Ms Hirsi Ali helped Haweya make up another fabricated story that gained her refugee status, but the Netherlands offered her little respite. After another affair and a further abortion, Haweya was put into a psychiatric hospital. Back in Nairobi, she died from a miscarriage brought on by an episode of religious frenzy. “It was the worst news of my life,” Ms Hirsi Ali writes.
Mental illness, abortion, failed marriages, illicit affairs and differing interpretations of religion: much as she tries, the kind of problems that Ms Hirsi Ali describes in “Infidel” are all too human to be blamed entirely on Islam. Her book shows that her life, like those of other Muslims, is more complex than many people in the West may have realised. But the West’s tendency to seek simplistic explanations is a weakness that Ms Hirsi Ali also shows she has been happy to exploit.
I’m glad she has ditched her burkha, she’s very easy on the eyes.
I certainly don’t agree with everything Hirsi-Ali says, but on some issues, like this one for example, she’s spot on.
Faisal
“I’m glad she has ditched her burkha, she’s very easy on the eyes.”
Wow – what a disgusting, misogynistic comment !
Wow – what a disgusting, misogynistic comment !
Huh?
You mean this is better?
Wow – what a disgusting, misogynistic comment !
How so exactly? She’s the one who has chosen to discard the hijab of her own free will. If I had said, “The sister should be wearing a niqab”, that would have been very un-misogynistic to you, would it?
Oh and call me a misanthrope, but I also think she has more balls than most of her haters.
Oh and call me a misanthrope
Did you mean misandrist?
(Yeah, obscure word. And I agree with your comment.)
yeah, misandrist.
Misanthrope, misandrist; let’s call the whole thing off.
Yes, let’s.
sounded like a compliment, most humans enjoy hearing they’re easy on the eyes
If you are a hetero male complimenting a beautiful woman such is instinctual and perfectly natural, unless you are stuck in a halfwit gender studies class from the 90′s or some sex obsessed religious fanatic(let you guess the religion)
Ah, the madman is back…
Hirsi Ali also isnt a fan of Spitoon’s bananabrain
As for Israel’s problems, Hirsi Ali says, “From my superficial impression, the country also has a problem with fundamentalists. The ultra-Orthodox will cause a demographic problem because these fanatics have more children than the secular and the regular Orthodox.”
————————————————-
MIM:Hirsi Ali’s remarks prove that once an anti semite always an anti semite. “Her speech to the American Jewish Committee trying to show them that she is no longer an anti semite (by telling them for several minutes how muchs ‘used’ to hate Jews and why she blamed them for everything (presumable before she was the beneficiary of their money) showed the opposite. Her vile comments about the ultra othodox causing a demographic problem because they have more children then the ‘regular’ orthodox is both anti semitic and reveals her abject ignorance and contempt towards anything to do with Jews and Judaism”.
http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/2207
qidniz
“Huh?
You mean this is better?”
No but this book is
http://www.amazon.com/Hole-Sheet-Orthodox-Hasidic-Judaism/dp/081840437X
No but this book is
Sigh. No matter what the subject, with your lot it always comes back to the Jooos.
Had Marwan bothered to look at the amazon reviews, he would have noticed this review of the book to which he so approvingly links:
But then this review was written by a Rabbi – a person for which Marwan has, doubtless, nothing but proxi-Nazi contempt, of course.
unfortunately for you, marwan, it’s a little bit more complicated than that, which is why i agree 100% with hirsi ali’s comment as quoted, except that i’d replace “will cause” with “have already caused” – and that’s not the only reason there’s a problem. you might like to read this piece for some genuine observations on internal jewish politics in israel:
http://www.spittoon.org/archives/6472
with regard to the hole in the sheet, it is, i’m pleased to report, total bollocks. as far as the book itself is concerned, i think this particular information from further down the page is revealing:
the author, apparently, used to be a guardian reporter!
b’shalom
bananabrain
Abu Faris
“But then this review was written by a Rabbi – a person for which Marwan has, doubtless, nothing but proxi-Nazi contempt, of course.”
Right because being against the views of Rabbis or claiming they dont represent Judaism is “anti-semitic” and “Nazi” -while you hypocrites say exactly the same about Muslim ulema! Gruesome inconsistency.
Funny that Spittoon defends Ayan Hirsi Ali’s attacks on Islam but condemns Evelyn Kaye’s attacks on Judaism! pure bigotry and bias.
bananabrain
” i think this particular information from further down the page is revealing:
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought:
The Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins
The Synagogue of Satan by Andrew Carrington Hitchcock
Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World”
Ah yes bananabrain who condemns Muslims who call criticism of Islam “Islamophobic” responds to criticism of Judaism by labelling it “anti-semitic”! Hypocrite.
with regard to the hole in the sheet, it is, i’m pleased to report, total bollocks
Snopes.com concurs
Marwan the Mad Mullah writes:
I think it is disturbing and inappropriate that someone from an entirely different faith should be able to so easily identify as “false” what Jewish Rabbanim write about their area of expertise (Judaism) . I also think it is telling that a non-Jew should be able to excoriate the entire Rabbinate as not representing Judaism.
Yes – I think that sort of thing does amount to anti-Semitism, actually.
But, then, Marwan probably wears that as a badge of honour, if truth be told.
“But, then, Marwan probably wears that as a badge of honour, if truth be told.”
Well if the tone and content of his record of commentary on here is anything to go by, I’d say Marwan’s more than a little mentally disturbed. A “mad troll” in the true sense of the phrase.