Ayaan Hirsi Ali Is A Modern-Day Prophet

According to Rod Dreher, the Dallas Morning News editorial columnist and conservative Republican. He argues that the Somali-Dutch moderate-conservative atheist feminist and former Dutch parliamentarian, who gave a talk yesterday in Dallas, speaks from experience when she warns the West about the threat of Islamic fundamentalism: "When the history of our time is written, Ayaan Hirsi Ali will be remembered as a prophet – but one without honor in her adopted land. That Europe is ashamed of the brave woman who should be its glory tells us more about the moral collapse of Europe than it does about the character of Ms. Hirsi Ali, the apostate Muslim who fled to the West from her native Somalia. As she told a Dallas audience yesterday, she ran toward Europe for the West's fundamental values. Among them: Freedom to reject religion and to criticize the tenets of faith. Freedom to determine one's own path in life and not have it dictated by tribe, family or custom. Freedom to live as an independent woman. These are freedoms the West won for itself in blood and suffering, freedoms that have made Western civilization and its accomplishments the envy of the world. Ms. Hirsi Ali went to Holland with nothing. Through hard work, study and force of will, she rose to serve in the Dutch parliament and testifies by her words and example to the superiority of Western values. Having suffered physically and emotionally from the culture of Islam, she warns Europe, with its large and unassimilated Islamic populations, to wake up to the subversive threat it harbors in its immigrant ghettoes. For this, the bien-pensants hate her. Like Whittaker Chambers a half-century ago, in another great clash of civilizations, she is a witness to the reality of an ideological evil that crushes the individual. And like the great anti-communist witness, establishment types despise her for making them look at what they would rather ignore. She calls them on their hypocrisy. They praise liberal values but appease the Islamic fundamentalists within their societies who wish to destroy those values."

Mr. Dreher continues his commentary: "This is how Europe finds itself in the disgraceful position of an African-born feminist atheist proving a more courageous defender of Western civilization than the Archbishop of Canterbury, who opined recently that Shariah is 'unavoidable,' so England should lie back and enjoy it. Days later, Ms. Hirsi Ali begged the European Parliament for protection from her would-be assassins, pleading, 'I don't want to die.' No one who cherishes freedom – left or right, religious or secular – should fail to defend Ms. Hirsi Ali, yet she is a tragic heroine because the people whose liberties she defends have no use for her. And doubly tragic, because the Enlightenment tradition she finds so liberating has proven at long last to be literally and figuratively sterile. Native Europeans aren't having enough children to replace themselves. And the freedoms she risks her life to defend are taken by many Europeans as no more than license for hedonism."

More from Mr. Dreher: "Ms. Hirsi Ali has compared Catholicism to Nazism and communism, heedless of the historical fact that whatever its excesses, Christianity built Europe. True, the Enlightenment was a reaction against religious excess, but its defense of individual rights and human dignity derive directly from foundational Christian principles. Ms. Hirsi Ali, like another outspoken atheist feminist, the late Orianna Fallaci, should fear that decadent European secularism might not have the moral or spiritual resources to save itself in the face of confident Islam. You can't fight something with nothing. Besides, there are Muslims – I have met them – who don't want to live under Islamist tyranny but who worry about raising their children in a Europe where decent respect for religion and traditional values is mocked....Nevertheless, Ms. Hirsi Ali is on the side of the angels, even if she disbelieves in them. She warns against see-no-evil complacency and a politically correct cowardice that refuses to name and confront the enemy."

My response: I just finished reading Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture And Its Return To Roots, by Rod Dreher. The book talks about conservatives who count themselves as part of the Right but whose traditionalist, "small is beautiful" style of politics often puts them at odds with Republican orthodoxy.