In this excellent piece at Real Clear Politics, George Will of the Washington Post introduces us to Hirsi Ali, a unique immigrant to America from Holland via Somalia. Ali is well known to those of us who follow the clash of civilizations closely but is likely completely unknown to the American general public who will undoubtedly get to know her soon. I encourage our readers to take a few moment to read the entire article, but we give you a small sample: 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).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. 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.
George Will
This Video Clip is fairly typical of what is going on in the UK. Muslim thugs are not afraid and have no shame of standing outside Westminister Abby and confronting worshipers emerging from Sunday mass. In this clip, Home Secretary John Reid is literally shouted down by a thug who is treated with kid gloves. The Brits seem completely intimidated by the radicals in their midst.
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Reid handled it very well (IMO). He's not my favourite person, but he handled it well. What did you want him do? Get the men in black to bash this extremist over the head with a baton, and drag him out of the room by his ankles? No, that would have played 'right' into the hands of that extremist. They go on their provokative marches to try and deliberately arouse a martial law kind of response from us, and when they 'don't get it, it enrages them and disarms the propaganda they hope to spread (and which he tried to imply towards Reid), which is that we are Big Brother thugs in our own country, only targetting Muslims. How many non-muslims have had their doors bashed down at 3am this year? If that guy cared to research, I suspect he'll find it happens in any community. Reid was not 'intimidated'. He may have been temporarily shouted down, but he had the last laugh. You can't intimidate a Scot. He let this guy rant and show his true colours, which is that the extremist guy doesn't believe in "others" freedom of speech. Reid proved his point, and said they will never be allowed to intimidate. I think you miss the point of just how valuable radicals carrying viscious plackards on the streets, and people like this guy intruding on other's speeches, are. They shoot themselves in the foot. Bashing them over the head with a baton and bundling them into a black van, seems like a good idea. But ultimately it only hands them more fuel for the 'victim' complex they hope to play on.
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