George Rebane

‘Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Islam’s Most Eloquent Apostate’ now makes her latest attempt to explain the sum and substance of Islam in a well-summarized interview conducted at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.  Longtime RR readers will recognize that this American scholar, born as a Somalian Muslim, corroborates every point made in these pages about the threat that the spread of Islam portends to western civilization and all non-Islamic cultures.

In the above WSJ article, the multipli-fatwaed Ms Hirsi Ali (portrait by Zina Saunders) issues yet another dire warning to the west while our politically correct cadres continue to blindly support the growing communities of the so-called moderate Muslims in our midst.  As a former Muslim and now a celebrated academic and student of Islam, she cannot underline strongly enough that the west is in a civilizational war with the disciples of the Prophet Muhammad.  An early herald detailing the nature of this war in these pages is my ‘Of Ragheads and Racism’.

Let me attempt a structured summary of Ms Hirsi Ali’s understated yet eloquent cri de Coeur which she expands in her latest and extensively referenced The Challenge of Dawa.  The compact book is published online as a pdf (download here) by the Hoover Institute where she is a research fellow.  She is also a fellow at the Kennedy Government School at Harvard University, and married to Scottish historian and public commentator Dr Niall Ferguson whom we have also met in these pages (here, here, and here).

1. Dawa – “the call to Islam. In theory, dawa consists of communication or proselytization. In practice, dawa by Islamist groups constitutes a process of radical ideological indoctrination, often under the cover of humanitarian relief work that is connected to jihad. Dawa activities carried out by Islamists target the individual, the family, the educational system, the workplace, the broader economy, society as a whole, and the political system.”  It is “the ceaseless, world-wide ideological campaign waged by Islamists as a complement to jihad … (and) “the greatest threat facing the West”.
2. Mecca and Medina Islams – Respectively, Quranic verses written in Mecca (610-622AD), and those written in Medina (622-630AD). Mecca verses are mostly spiritual and non-political; Medina verses comprise the latter 80% of the Quran and contain the political and militaristic commission of Islam.  Where they conflict, the Medina verses supersede those revealed in Mecca.
3. Islam must and “can be reformed only by Muslims themselves”, the so-called ‘Mecca Muslims’.
4. Islam is a religion AND a political ideology with an agenda. To ignore dawa is to ignore “the activities carried out by Islamists to keep Muslims energized by a campaign to impose Shariah law on all societies—including countries of the West.”
5. Dawa’s global goal is “to destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with Shariah.”
6. The Islamists’ jihad is what we call terror. Focusing on taking down jihad is futile, it is scripturally designed to regenerate no matter how many of its terror organizations are eliminated.  Focusing on playing “jihadi Whac-A-Mole” makes us blind to dawa as it enables Islamists to access and penetrate “all Western institutions of socialization” – families, schools, universities, prisons, the military, … .
7. Islam is “fundamentally incompatible with the U.S. Constitution” in its guarantees of freedom of speech, religious pluralism, the equality of men and women, and other fundamental rights, including the toleration of different sexual orientations”, and will use it only to advance dawa.
8. “Islam the religion … is a Trojan horse that conceals Islamism the political movement. Since dawa is, ostensibly, a religious missionary activity, its proponents ‘enjoy a much greater protection by the law in free societies than Marxists or fascists did in the past.’”
9. US has several Islamic groups led by CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) that claim and are recognized by our media to be moderate Muslim organizations. These “take advantage of the focus on ‘inclusiveness’ by progressive political bodies in democratic societies, and then force these societies to bow to Islamist demands in the name of peaceful coexistence.”
10. Islamism is helped by Lenin’s “useful idiots” in organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the ACLU. “The Islamists are infiltrating all these institutions that were historic and fought for rights. It’s a liberal blind spot.”
11. “Western liberals are also complicit in an Islamist cultural segregation. (Hirsi Ali) recalls a multiculturalist catchphrase from her years as a Somali refugee in Amsterdam in the early 1990s: “ ‘Integrate with your own identity,’ they used to tell us—Integratie met eigen identiteit.Of course, that resulted in no integration at all.” 
12. Citing philosopher Karl Popper’s, “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them”, she urges the Trump administration to counter “the agents of dawa (who) hide behind constitutional protections they themselves would dismantle were they in power.”
13. “Dawa has become an existential menace to the West”. Today Islamists are “working overtime to prevent the assimilation of Muslims into Western societies. It is assimilation versus dawa. There is a notion of ‘cocooning,’ by which Islamists tell Muslim families to cocoon their children from Western society. This can’t be allowed to happen.”
14. The solution includes Congress giving President Trump “the tools he needs to dismantle the infrastructure of dawa in the U.S.” This includes “supervised parenting” to enable Muslim “children to be exposed to critical thinking, freedom, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the rights of women.”  Immigrants and refugees should be ideologically scrutinized “so as to deny entry, residence and naturalization to those involved with, or supportive of Islamism.”  (Essentially update the still used ‘communism questionnaire’ upon US entry.)
15. With dawa “we’re dealing here with a lethal ideological movement and all we are using is surveillance and military means? We have to grasp the gravity of dawa. Jihad is an extension of dawa. For some, in fact, it is dawa by other means.”
16. The U.S. is in a “much weaker position to combat the various forms of nonviolent extremism known as dawa because of the way that the courts have interpreted the First Amendment”. This is a “situation where American exceptionalism turns into … an exceptional handicap.”

[10apr17 update]  A thoughtful commenter below asks what Ms Hirsi Ali “would say to (me) about the use of ‘raghead’ as a term of art?”  I think Ali’s response to such usage will depend on how she understands my ‘Of Ragheads and Racism’ essay (see above), and how she would evaluate the utility of the emotional and operational responses that a wider adoption of the label for the murderous Islamic animals would engender.  To me she appears to be a person who understands the nuances of attaching provocative labels without automatically viewing such as simply being issued from the “gutter of namecalling.”

We all have our styles for countering radical Islam and Islamic dawa.  Since I agree with the radical Islamists that there is no basis for negotiation, and that dispensing wholesale and gratuitous death is their solution/means for the achieving their caliphate (global Sharia), I want us to annihilate them root and branch.  And that, as we learn in warcraft, is greatly aided by forming and holding an image of them as being something subhuman.  In short, they are not anything like we are, and there is not room enough on this earth for both western civilization and caliphate/Sharia.

(I am reminded here of the illustrative interview with an American sniper whose job was to surreptitiously kill ragheads.  He was asked what he felt when he pulled the trigger and watched his target crumple dead to the ground.  He answered, “Recoil.”)

As Ms Hirsi Ali also teaches, we are in a civilizational war with Islamists, and it is the more dangerous since it is being conducted essentially sub rosa in our midst.  Nevertheless, the war is real and requires the west, at every opportunity, to be shocked into awareness of its scope and nature.  We did that in our last shooting wars by appending labels like ‘jap’, ‘kraut’, ‘slope’, … to our enemies.  Today we don’t declare wars – shooting or any other kind – anymore, even as we continue to be engaged in them (more from me on that soon).  But the existentials are still there, and bigger than ever.  I use ‘raghead’ to call attention to that reality; and to the extent that Ms Hirsi Ali agrees with the operational utility of that, I believe she would approve even as she continues with her more eloquent approach to fighting dawa of which the ragheads’ globally murderous jihad is but “dawa by other means.”