Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Gee, If Only Someone Had Been Talking About Islamism's Extreme Hostility to Women For the Last Few Years

I think Hirsi Ali's sin was taking her activism beyond the "Hashtag" stage.

Since the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria last month, the meaning of Boko Haram—the name used by the terrorist group that seized the girls—has become more widely known. The translation from the Hausa language is usually given in English-language media as "Western Education Is Forbidden," though "Non-Muslim Teaching Is Forbidden" might be more accurate.

But little attention has been paid to the group's formal Arabic name: Jam'at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-da'wa wal-Jihad. That roughly translates as "The Fellowship of the People of the Tradition for Preaching and Holy War." That's a lot less catchy than Boko Haram but significantly more revealing about the group and its mission. Far from being an aberration among Islamist terror groups, as some observers suggest, Boko Haram in its goals and methods is in fact all too representative.

The kidnapping of the schoolgirls throws into bold relief a central part of what the jihadists are about: the oppression of women. Boko Haram sincerely believes that girls are better off enslaved than educated. The terrorists' mission is no different from that of the Taliban assassin who shot and nearly killed 15-year-old Pakistani Malala Yousafzai—as she rode a school bus home in 2012—because she advocated girls' education. As I know from experience, nothing is more anathema to the jihadists than equal and educated women.

How to explain this phenomenon to baffled Westerners, who these days seem more eager to smear the critics of jihadism as "Islamophobes" than to stand up for women's most basic rights? Where are the Muslim college-student organizations denouncing Boko Haram? Where is the outrage during Friday prayers? These girls' lives deserve more than a Twitter hashtag protest.

...

It is... time for Western liberals to wake up. If they choose to regard Boko Haram as an aberration, they do so at their peril. The kidnapping of these schoolgirls is not an isolated tragedy; their fate reflects a new wave of jihadism that extends far beyond Nigeria and poses a mortal threat to the rights of women and girls. If my pointing this out offends some people more than the odious acts of Boko Haram, then so be it.

It's an interesting dynamic.

I think the problem can be summed up pretty simply: Progressives would like to believe that the war going on in the world is between Extremist Muslims and, get this, Extremist Christians. That it has nothing to do with Progressives, who are The Only Sane Men in the Room, standing back, laughing at the religious sillyheads as they war with each other.

No matter how many times Islamists vow that they hate "Progressives" more than the godly, if kaffir, Christians, and then match deed to vow, "Progressives" continue spinning themselves this childish fantasy. They'll rouse themselves to notice some awful massacre committed by the Islamist lunatics for a week, and, if really roused, will even retweet a Hashtag Uprising against it; and then the next week, they go back to "condemning both sides," and pretending to be a virtuous Switzerland.

In fact they're cowards and in their cowardice, accomplices to murderers.

Hashtag Activism

For moral preening without all the exertion and bother of moral action.

posted by Ace at 06:06 PM

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