Heidegger

Cologne 21-Sep-2006

ME: I heard Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the radio — an articulate woman indeed. She
recommended that the imams start reading a bit of enlightened Western
literature, such as John Locke, to overcome their deep ignorance of the West. I
can only endorse that. This conflict between the Islamic world and the West
strikes me as the seventh century clashing with the seventeenth century.

The European seventeenth century, momentous by any measure, saw the birth of
both the liberal individual and the mathematico-scientific casting of the world,
the very same century that saw the rise of the austere, puritanical,
fundamentalist Wahhabism on the Arabian peninsula that nourishes Al Qaeda.

_-_-_-_-_-_-_- artefact text and translation _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_- made by art _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ http://www.webcom.com/artefact/ _-_-_-_- artefact at t-online.de _-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Dr Michael Eldred -_-_-
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Anthony Crifasi schrieb Thu, 21 Sep 2006 02:03:46 -0500:

> ‘A Dissident of Islam’
> By George Will
> http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/will09…
>
> While her security contingent waits outside the Georgetown restaurant, Ayaan
> Hirsi Ali orders what the menu calls “raw steak tartare.” Amused by the
> redundancy, she speculates that it is intended to immunize the restaurant
> against lawyers, should a customer be discommoded by that entree. She has
> been in America only two weeks. She is a quick study.
>
> And an exile and an immigrant. Born 36 years ago in Somalia, Hirsi Ali has
> lived in Ethiopia, Kenya, Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands, where she
> settled in 1992 after she deplaned in Frankfurt, supposedly en route to
> Canada for a marriage, arranged by her father, to a cousin. She makes her
> own arrangements.
>
> She quickly became a Dutch citizen, a member of parliament and an astringent
> critic, from personal experience, of the condition of women under Islam. She
> wrote the script, and filmmaker Theo van Gogh directed, “Submission,” an
> 11-minute movie featuring pertinent passages from the Koran (such as when it
> is a husband’s duty to beat his wife) projected on the bodies of naked
> women.
>
> It was shown twice before Nov. 2, 2004, when van Gogh, bicycling through
> central Amsterdam in the morning, was shot by an Islamic extremist who then
> slit his throat with a machete. Next, the murderer (in whose room was found
> a disc containing videos of “enemies of Allah” being murdered, including a
> man having his head slowly sawed off) used another knife to pin a long
> letter to van Gogh’s chest. The letter was to Hirsi Ali, calling her a
> “soldier of evil” who would “smash herself to pieces on Islam.”
>
> The remainder of her life in Holland was lived under guard. Neighbors in her
> apartment building complained that they felt endangered with her there and
> got a court to order her evicted. She decided to come to America.
>
> Holland evidently tolerates everything except skepticism about the
> sacramental nature of multiculturalism. One million of the country’s 16
> million residents are Muslims, and the political left has appropriated the
> European right’s traditional celebration of identity grounded in racial and
> ethnic traditions and culture. But the recoil of many Dutch people from
> Hirsi Ali suggests that the tolerance about which Holland preens is a
> compound of intellectual sloth and moral timidity. She was more trouble than
> the Dutch evidently think free speech is worth.
>
> Her story is told in a riveting new book, “Murder in Amsterdam,” by Ian
> Buruma, who is not alone in finding her - this “Enlightenment
> fundamentalist” - somewhat unnerving and off-putting. Having experienced
> life circumscribed by tribal and religious communities (as a girl she
> suffered the genital mutilation called female circumcision), she is a fierce
> partisan of individualism against collectivism.
>
> She reminds Buruma of Margaret Thatcher’s sometimes abrasive intelligence
> and her fascination with America. He is dismissive of the idea that she is a
> Voltaire against Islam: Voltaire, he says, offended the powerful Catholic
> Church, whereas she offends “only a minority that was already feeling
> vulnerable in the heart of Europe.”
>
> She, however, replies that this is hardly a normal minority. It is connected
> to Islam’s worldwide adherents. Living sullenly in European “dish cities” -
> enclaves connected by satellite television and the Internet to the tribal
> societies they have not really left behind - many members of this minority
> are uninterested in assimilation into open societies.
>
> She calls herself “a dissident of Islam” because, given what Allah
> supposedly enjoins and what she knows is right, “the cognitive dissonance
> is, for me, too much.” She says she is not “a militant atheist,” but the
> emphasis is on the adjective.
>
> Slender, elegant, stylish and articulate (in English, Dutch and Swahili),
> she has found an intellectual home here at the American Enterprise
> Institute, where she is writing a book that imagines Muhammad meeting, in
> the New York Public Library, three thinkers - John Stuart Mill, Friedrich
> Hayek and Karl Popper, each a hero of the unending struggle between (to take
> the title of Popper’s 1945 masterpiece) “The Open Society and Its Enemies.”
> Islamic extremists - the sort who were unhinged by some Danish cartoons -
> will be enraged. She is unperturbed.
>
> Neither is she pessimistic about the West. It has, she says, “the drive to
> innovate.” But Europe, she thinks, is invertebrate. After two generations
> without war, Europeans “have no idea what an enemy is.” And they think, she
> says, that leadership is an antiquated notion because they believe that
> caring governments can socialize everyone to behave well, thereby erasing
> personal accountability and responsibility. “I can’t even tell it without
> laughing,” she says, laughing softly. Clearly she is where she belongs, at
> last.
>
>

Posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 4:05 pm
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