Joe Hicks over at Pajamas Media highlights an interview with Hirsi Ali, who “fled a traditional Muslim life in Somalia, a life that included being the victim of female genital mutilation as a child, and eventually made her way to the Netherlands where she rejected Islam and literally underwent an intellectual awakening. She now lives in America.” Ali is under a death threat fatwa for her work with slain filmmaker Theo Van Gogh on Submission, which exposes Islam’s vile misogyny.
The interviewer was Tavis Smiley of PBS. You can watch the interview here.
It’s also important to know that Hirsi Ali lives under the constant watch of security guards, since her life continues to be threatened by Islamic extremists.
This was the woman who walked onto Tavis Smiley’s PBS show to promote her new book. Nomad calls on key institutions of the West — universities, feminists, and Christian churches — to wage a war of ideas against Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism.
However, Smiley was in no mood to hear Hirsi Ali’s arguments that placed Islam in a bad light. He wanted to assert the old leftist claim that Islam is always and everywhere “a religion of peace.”
Look at this jaw-dropping exchange between Smiley and Hirsi Ali:
Smiley: But Christians do that every single day in this country. …
Ali: Do they blow people up every single day?
Smiley: Yes, Christians. Every day, people walk into post offices, they walk into schools, that’s what Columbine — I mean I could do this all day long. There’s so many more examples of Christians — and I happen to be a Christian — that’s back to this notion of you idealizing Christianity to my read. There’s so many more examples, Ayaan, of Christians who do that than you could ever give me examples of Muslims who have done that inside this country where you live and work.
Beyond the irritating liberal arrogance is the complete ignorance of the facts involved here.
Let’s ignore momentarily the dozens of terror plots — all designed and organized by Muslim-Americans — that have been uncovered and thwarted by this nation’s security forces. I will instead direct Smiley’s attention to these attacks against Americans:
- 1993: The World Trade Center bombing in New York killed 6 people.
- 1996: The Khobar Towers bombing killed 20 and wounded 372.
- 1998: The bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania left 224 dead and 4,000 injured.
- 2001: On 9/11, 19 hijackers flew planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 perished.
- 2009: U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed 13 at Texas’ Fort Hood.
- 2010: Faisal Shahzad attempted to detonate a car bomb in Times Square.
Uh, where’s a similar listing of Christian-inspired acts of violence, Mr. Smiley? The sweeping ignorance, or political blindness, of Smiley’s claim that “Christians do that (commit acts of terror) every single day in this country” is nothing short of astounding.
Unlike Islam, Christian scripture does not guarantee paradise to those who kill in the name of their faith. But the Koran does offer the fruits of paradise to “those who kill for Allah.” Suicide bombers have been lured to their deaths with this promise and the offer that they will be free from the fires of hell if they kill an infidel and, in the process, die.
[My emphasis.]
That last, right there, is the key that makes Islam so toxic. Even turn-the-other-cheek, meek-inheriting-the-earth Christianity can be perverted to excuse violence in its name, but Mohammed actively encouraged it, and led Muslim armies against the infidels in his own time.
Nevertheless, let me for a moment be the devil’s advocate.
First, if you want the list of Christian terrorist acts here in America, look up abortion clinic bombings and murders. However, note that these acts are committed not to force the Christian faith on others, but because the anti-abortionists believe that a wholesale murder of innocents is taking place. I happen not to agree with that, although it’s a close call, but if I did, I hope that I too would be doing everything in my power to stop it. Not to terrorize, mind, but to directly disrupt a human slaughterhouse. I hope I’d do the same against guard barracks in Nazi concentration camps or Soviet gulags or, um, Save The Earth re-education camps, should they ever come to pass.
Outside of America, look at Northern Ireland. However, while that conflict has a religious cast to it, the underlying conflict is one for political independence. It’s ugly as hell, and the actions involved are totally unjustified, but it’s not a war of religious expansion.
I’ll also note that both clinic bombings and the Irish fight have died down considerably in recent years. The practitioners have either fallen to attrition, or realized they were not getting the kind of sympathy they hoped for.
Second, although I don’t have a list to hand, I think there have been many nut jobs who do commit horrible crimes in the name of Christianity. Thing is, they are nut jobs, acting in direct contravention of the scriptures they cite, and they do not remotely have the support of mainstream Christian clerics.
Finally, undoubtedly many Christians do commit ordinary crimes, but not in the name of Christ — the Roman Catholic Mafioso is a classic stereotype. However, the attraction of this stereotype in fiction is precisely the huge disconnect between the professed faith and the daily life.
“Uh, how about the Spanish Inquisition? Galileo, dude!” The Inquisition was indeed brutal, but it was only carried out against other Christians, not as a weapon of evangelism against other faiths. And even the Catholic Church eventually realized that the Inquisition was not only against scripture, but counterproductive in practice, actually turning people away from the faith. It forced Western Civilization to grow the hell up.
The Islamic Jihad is the only longstanding and still very much active, program of violence against non-coreligionists, is strongly rooted in scripture, and is endorsed, advocated, and managed by the highest ranks of the Muslim clergy. It spreads an oppressive creed of utter intolerance towards the highest ideals of classical liberal, and even neo-liberal, political ideology. (Except statism. Neo-liberals love them their statism.)
And it is vastly more promiscuously lethal than the anti-abortionists, or even the Irish Republican Army, ever dreamed of being.
Smiley here is covering for evil on the largest scale. He is not hiding Nazis in his attic, he’s openly shilling for them.
He calls himself a Christian, but in fact is calling for the eradication of the faith he claims to serve.
Shame.
