Charlie Hebdo Atrocity

Are we back on the tracks again? Has the sensitivity rating been turned down?

This is well worth a read and gives a great insight into the other side. If this lady has formed that opinion after all her experiences and turning her back on Islam, then I think her advice must be pretty sound. Let's hope we get some brave governance one day that will take some steps to turn the ship from the direction it's heading.

‘We have been too tolerant of intolerance. We must wake up’ | The Times

 

Try this (though still incomplete)
When Ayaan Hirsi Ali heard the news about the attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, she had “a feeling of complete shock. I was stunned. It brought back terrible memories.” Just over ten years ago, Theo Van Gogh, the director she had collaborated with on a film that was critical of Islam, was murdered by a Dutch Muslim and she herself received death threats. “The murderer of Theo Van Gogh was not a sophisticated man, he had no military training. What is so chilling is the extent to which the attack in Paris was pre-planned. These three men were very professional.”
The killing of some of France’s best-known journalists and cartoonists was not in her view just a brutal act of murder but an attack on the very foundations of democracy. “Jihadist doctrine says you have to strike terror into the soul of your enemy,” she says. “If you understand freedom of speech as the soul of our society then you are going to see relentless attacks on our soul.”
This writer and campaigner, who speaks six languages, has become a symbol as well as a supporter of free speech. In 2005, she was named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Born in Somalia, she grew up as a Muslim and in 1989 supported the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. However, after fleeing to the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage, she lost her faith and turned into a vigorous critic of Islam.
She is married to the British historian Niall Ferguson and now lives in the US, where she runs a foundation for women’s rights.
As elegant as she is eloquent, Hirsi Ali fears that the west has lost confidence in its own values and is ceding ground to the extremists. “The worst mistake we keep making is that we give them exactly what they want,” she says. She cites the reaction to the Charlie Hebdo attack, which followed the magazine’s decision to publish a string of cartoons mocking Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.
“Those cartoons have not been republished in any of the mainstream media. The attackers knew that they would be confronted with the full force of the law, they knew they might be killed or put in prison, but their core message ‘Charlie Hebdo is dead, the Prophet is avenged’ has not been challenged. Charlie Hebdo was saying you ‘can’t conquer our soul’.
“It’s extremely important that we all republish the original cartoons and publish new ones as a commitment to our freedoms. If we say they are too offensive, that’s sending a dangerous message that some types of offence can be avenged with violence.”
There is too much moral relativism across the board from the champions of liberal democracy, she feels. “The jihadists are very consistent. They are very vocal about who they are, what their identity is and why they are doing what they do. It’s we who are vague about what we should be protecting. Once again this horrific act is confronting us with our own moral confusion.”
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Western leaders are, she believes, guilty of double standards. “When it comes to white supremacists, we don’t shy away from linking their violence to the ideas that inspire them, but when it comes to Islamists we refuse to recognise that this is an ideological battle that’s embedded in the religion of Muhammad and the Koran.”
Although the extremists share their religion with “masses of innocent people”, she argues that “Islam’s foundational documents are violent” and although the Prophet started out with a peaceful message “in Medina he was a warrior who made it very clear that anyone who insulted him should be killed”.
This is a war, she says — but it’s a battle of ideas as much as of military might. “We are not at war with them, they are at war with us. They are the men and women who define world society as having to live by their vision. Some, like the Muslim Brotherhood movement, try to use peaceful means to persuade people to adopt Sharia law and revive the caliphate, but some like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda think they can get to their goal by violent means. By turning to violence they have declared war, we are just responding to that.”
The grievances cited by the extremists — from colonialism to the war in Iraq — are a diversionary tactic, she insists. “Even if all these grievances were met they would still continue to be at war. They will not rest until the whole world is subjected to Islam . . . It’s not just a war on the west it’s a war on moderate Muslims and apostates like myself. It’s a war on any Muslim who develops a relationship of peace and co-existence with non-Muslims. They are waging it across the globe and we keep pretending that it isn’t there.”
Although it may be necessary to take up arms to confront the threat, military might is not in Hirsi Ali’s view enough. “In Paris we have everybody in uniform, sweeping surveillance measures but what about the schools, what about the religious teaching? These three young men were not born into an ideology, they did not have Kalashnikovs as babies. They have been indoctrinated with a message. We are not dealing with the indoctrination.”
Like Michael Gove, she believes that it’s not enough to shoot the extremist crocodiles as they come near the boat, you have to drain the swamp that allows them to thrive. “The theory of multiculturalism was a mistake. It led to the idea that it’s OK for people to live in parallel universes, that citizenship and loyalty to the nation state is not necessary, that the state is only instrumental — you use it to get a passport or welfare — but you have no deep commitment to the people with whom you share boundaries.”
In her view, the segregation that resulted from this approach fuelled extremism. “When the caliphs came in and started preaching in the mosques, then opening schools, it was very easy for them to prey on these vulnerable communities and offer them a sense of identity which they say is rooted in their own religion. We stood around watching decade after decade the number of followers of radical Islam started to grow. We thought time will take care of it — the longer they are around the more they will magically assimilate — but that’s not happened. The third generation is far more radical than the first.”
Now, she says it is time for the west to assert its liberal values and that means tackling the separation in education. “We have been too tolerant of intolerance. I don’t know how many incidents it’s going to take to wake us up. I would ban Muslim schools. It’s in these institutions where very young impressionable minds are indoctrinated with an ideology that turns them away from the society into which they are born and are going to grow up. Their heads are filled with this contamination.” There is no need to outlaw church schools as well. “Christians are not blowing people up in the name of the Bible, they are not shouting ‘Jesus is great’ and shooting others.” The west must be more confident about its values. Women should not be forced to cover their faces. “The burkha is a symbol of how they see women and girls — we need to be covered from head to toe . . . I would ban the face covering.”
A victim of genital mutilation as a child in Somalia, Hirsi Ali believes this is another issue that needs to be tackled head on. “We should put in place a detection system to protect the children and enforce the law and start a debate about why is it that women are sub-human?” In her view, it was no coincidence that the abuse of young girls in Rochdale and other places was perpetrated mainly by Pakistani men. “The idea that it’s OK to abuse women who are not covered, who refuse to meet the demands of Sharia, that is Islamic. We need to start an ideological confrontation with them. Our values of free speech and tolerance, of equality of human beings, men and women, gays and straight, we need to put that out there.”
In her next book, Hirsi Ali will explore the need for Islam to change from within. “Islam unreformed is tremendously hostile to women and homosexuals, tremendously intolerant of non-Muslims. The best way out for those who want to remain Muslim and become tolerant is for there to be a reformation of the faith. We should quit talking about whether something is Islamic or unIslamic. We should take this opportunity to talk to our fellow Muslim citizens about having a reformation of their values and a protection of ours. No more relativism.”
For Hirsi Ali this is not just political, it’s personal. A former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, who lived in Ethiopia, Saudia Arabia and Kenya as well as Somalia before fleeing to Europe, she has the zeal of the convert who went from devout believer to fearless opponent of blind faith. When the fatwa was imposed on Rushdie, she fully supported it because, she says: “Growing up I was told submit to what Allah says and that’s what I was doing.”
It was en route to an arranged marriage in Canada in 1992 that she decided to run away to the Netherlands. In an experience she compares to overcoming brainwashing, her views slowly began to change. “It was never a sudden opening of my eyes, it was very gradual, a process of questioning and being questioned and mixing with people of other cultures.”
As an “apostate”, who has renounced her faith, she could be punished by death under Islamist ideology. She has compounded this supposed offence by her outspoken criticisms. She has needed police protection following specific death threats, but she has no intention of keeping quiet or toning down her views. “I believe that you either submit to these threats and after every violent