Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia, raised a Muslim and spent her childhood in Africa and Saudi Arabia. In 1992, she went to the Netherlands as a refugee to escape a forced marriage to a cousin she never met. She eventually became educated and an outspoken voice on the international stage against the horrors of radical Islam. She denounced Islam after the 9/11 attacks and became an atheist. Her first book, “Infidel” was a best seller in Europe and around the world, and she was named as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2005. She has won many other awards too numerous for this blog.
I’ve written often about the mask of radical Islam and the sanitized approach to the Islamic menace that some deceivers will use to sway the most naive of people into believing there is no threat to the free world from Islam. I wrote a book in 2006, “Militant Islam In America” and have read over thirty books on the subject, many written by Muslims and apostates who have lived the life under Islam and escaped. The threat not only exists, it is infecting the western world as we live and breathe. Many, like Ali, live under constant threats against her life and must secure protection. She is considereed an expert and scholar.
Her newest book, “Nomad” was published in 2010. I thought it would be of interest to cite some of her quotations from that book, and encourage people to read her writings.
Chapter 14:
“The Muslim mind needs to be opened. Above all, the uncritical Muslim attitude toward the Quran urgently needs to change, for it is a direct threat to world peace. Although they certainly have 1.57 billion different minds, they share a dominant culture trend: The Muslim mind today seems to be in the grip of Jihad. A nebula of movements with al Qaeda-like approaches to Islamic precepts has enmeshed itself in small and large ways into many parts of Muslim community life, including in the west. They spread a creed of violence, mobilizing people on the basis that their identity, which rests in Islam, is under attack.”
“I strongly believe that the Muslim mind can be opened. Yet, when I have criticized the teachings of the Quran, as Enlightenment thinkers once challenged the revealed truths of the Bible, I have been accused of blasphemy. Muhammad says my husband can beat me and I am worth half as much as a man. Is it I who am being disrespectful to Muhammad in criticizing his legacy, or is it he who is disrespectful to me?”
“Hard line Islam offers an ideal of martyrdom and a lifestyle of self-denial that is difficult to maintain. Many people, especially girls, feel trapped in the web of rules and strictures that extreme Islam demands. It is difficult to pray five times a day, to marry a man you have not chosen, and to live a life of continual self-denial. Over the long term, it becomes unbearable.”
“Novels, musicals, comedies, short stories, comics, cartoons and movies that are critical of Islamic dogma can be made. But hardly any are made, because of the fear of sparking violence. Since the Danish cartoon (of Muhammad) was published in 2005, artist Kurt Westergaard has survived two attempts on his life. Salman Rushdie has lived under a sentence of death by fatwa for twenty years. Taslima Nasreen, who was brave enough to say that Islam doesn’t permit democracy and violates human rights, now lives in hiding without even an apartment to call her own. Irshad Manji in Canada, and Wafa Sultan in the United States, women who have dared to criticize Islam in public, now require protection, as I do, and an intellectual like Ibn Warraq, author of “Why I Am Not A Muslim,” must publish under pseudonyms.”
Thus, slowly, and not so slowly, people begin to get used to not saying certain things, or they say them but certainly won’t write them. The thin fingers of self-censorship begin to tighten around individual minds, then groups of people, then around ideas themselves and their expression. When free speech crumbles in this way, when Westerners refrain from criticizing or questioning certain practices, certain aspects of Islam, they abandon those Muslims who seek to question them too. They also abandon their own values. Once they have done that, their society is lost.”
If you want to learn about all sides of Islam, read books written by people who have walked the walk, and are brave enough to risk the perils of warning the unsuspecting, and by speaking truth.
Marshall Frank
Thirty years of law enforcement in Miami, Florida, including sixteen years working homicide, gives Marshall Frank a huge reservoir from which to draw insights into the problems facing America today. After retiring from the Miami-Dade P.D. in 1990, Frank went on to become a writer, now with eight published books, five fiction and three non-fiction. His book “Militant Islam In America” was published after an exhaustive research study about the inroads that radicals are making within the borders of the U.S. He is currently working on a non-fiction book about the abominable criminal justice system. Book listings, prices and availability can be accessed at his web site:http://www.marshallfrank.com.