Pat H
08-20-2010, 10:09 PM
Faced with Radical Islam, Europe Is in Danger of Decay By Ayaan Hirsi Ali | Le Figaro
Saturday, November 18, 2006
How will Europe react to its growing Muslim population?
Two years ago, movie director Theo van Gogh’s throat was cut on a street in Amsterdam in the name of radical Islam. I had partaken in his last work, Submission, where we represented, in the most accurate way possible, the condition of Muslim women: tyranny, humiliations, violence. In this film, we showed Muslim women who had finally rebelled, talking to God in a tone of defiance. It made Imam Fawaz of the Hague scream with hate during the delivery of a vengeful sermon. My friend Theo, the “criminal bastard”, was subsequently riddled with bullets and stabbed to death with a dagger.
Resident Fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali
At the beginning of this November, the trial of the members of a violent Islamic network in the Netherlands entered its final phase. And an entire society today asks itself questions about the integration of its immigrants. While I reside in the United States at present--I’m well-protected here--the invectives of the Imam still ring in my ear, calling for the punishment of Theo, and promising me a Divine curse in the form of blindness combined with cancer of the tongue and cancer of the brain.
Time has passed. After a bad quarrel regarding my Dutch naturalization and my resignation from the Dutch Parliament, I was rapidly rehabilitated. Here I am, once again a Dutch citizen, an émigrée in the United States. Whatever one may say of it, the United States remains in many regards the greatest champion of liberty. At the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, I have more time and more means to diffuse my ideas.
People ask me incessantly what it’s like to live with perpetual death threats. This question is most often asked by Westerners, with the naiveté of those who consider life to be naturally peaceful. Born in Somalia, the daughter of an opponent of Siyad Barré’s dictatorship, I grew up in my country, then in Saudi-Arabia and in Kenya in an environment in which death invited itself without end. A virus, a bacterium, a parasite, a drought, a famine, a civil war, soldiers, torturers: death could take all forms and hit anyone, anytime. When I had malaria, I got well again. When I was circumcised, my wound transformed into scar tissue, and I survived. When my Qur’an teacher fractured my skull, doctors saved me. A bandit put the blade of his knife against my throat: I’m still alive, and more of a rebel than ever before.
The rest of this outstanding article is here: http://www.aei.org/article/25217
Saturday, November 18, 2006
How will Europe react to its growing Muslim population?
Two years ago, movie director Theo van Gogh’s throat was cut on a street in Amsterdam in the name of radical Islam. I had partaken in his last work, Submission, where we represented, in the most accurate way possible, the condition of Muslim women: tyranny, humiliations, violence. In this film, we showed Muslim women who had finally rebelled, talking to God in a tone of defiance. It made Imam Fawaz of the Hague scream with hate during the delivery of a vengeful sermon. My friend Theo, the “criminal bastard”, was subsequently riddled with bullets and stabbed to death with a dagger.
Resident Fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali
At the beginning of this November, the trial of the members of a violent Islamic network in the Netherlands entered its final phase. And an entire society today asks itself questions about the integration of its immigrants. While I reside in the United States at present--I’m well-protected here--the invectives of the Imam still ring in my ear, calling for the punishment of Theo, and promising me a Divine curse in the form of blindness combined with cancer of the tongue and cancer of the brain.
Time has passed. After a bad quarrel regarding my Dutch naturalization and my resignation from the Dutch Parliament, I was rapidly rehabilitated. Here I am, once again a Dutch citizen, an émigrée in the United States. Whatever one may say of it, the United States remains in many regards the greatest champion of liberty. At the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, I have more time and more means to diffuse my ideas.
People ask me incessantly what it’s like to live with perpetual death threats. This question is most often asked by Westerners, with the naiveté of those who consider life to be naturally peaceful. Born in Somalia, the daughter of an opponent of Siyad Barré’s dictatorship, I grew up in my country, then in Saudi-Arabia and in Kenya in an environment in which death invited itself without end. A virus, a bacterium, a parasite, a drought, a famine, a civil war, soldiers, torturers: death could take all forms and hit anyone, anytime. When I had malaria, I got well again. When I was circumcised, my wound transformed into scar tissue, and I survived. When my Qur’an teacher fractured my skull, doctors saved me. A bandit put the blade of his knife against my throat: I’m still alive, and more of a rebel than ever before.
The rest of this outstanding article is here: http://www.aei.org/article/25217