Ayaan Hirsi Ali Uninvited for Brandeis Honorary Degree

5 Comments

1. 

   Oui on April 9, 2014 at 2:51 am

   .

   I was almost in the Honor Diaries – Why I Backed Out

   In April of 2012 I got an email from a woman who said she was a friend of a friend of mine – she had gone to school with one of the women that I painted in Technicolor Muslimah.   From her personal gmail account, she wrote that my paintings “capture a unique expression which is often lost through mainstream media.”  She was in the early stages of a documentary film focused on women’s rights and women’s activism “mainly focusing on Muslim-majority countries” and wanted to maybe include me.

   We did a phone interview, then a skype interview with her and the director.  Throughout the two-month process, we exchanged a number of emails, and the Clarion Fund was never mentioned.  We spoke about the controversy around Mona El-Tahawy’s “Why They Hate Us” article, and I felt like we were on the same page.  I sent her some links and quotes like “I struggle with the fine balance of condemning violations of human rights without accidentally submitting to contemporary extensions of Orientalism” (link).  Her words seemed to speak to a respect and admiration for Muslim women, and an interest in understanding the nuance of this subject matter.

   My flight was booked to go film in NY with the other women.  The very last email I received was from a different email address, one that said “clarionfund.org” at the end …  At the top it said “National Security through Education, Clarion Fund.”

   what.

   National security?  What does National Security have to do with any of this?  Who are these people?  I looked back to the front page. There was a graphic of a film reel with images from past blockbuster hits like “The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America,” and “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.” Their graphic designers had done things like incorporated an Islamic crescent moon and a gun into the typography.  Wowzas.  I had not heard of the Clarion Fund, so I googled them and perused their website, which was “radicalislam.org” at the time.  I felt like I was going to throw up.  This group wasn’t about women’s rights.

   [Read on …]

   I should have searched the site about producer Raphael Shore …
   Clarion Fund RIP, Meet JerusalemOnlineU, New Academic Hasbara Project

2. 

   Oui on April 10, 2014 at 6:10 am

   .

   U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Presents Ayaan Hirsi Ali

   Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes herself as a “dissident of Islam.” Despite threats to her life, Ali remains outspoken about freedom of expression, hatred of Jews, and reform of Islam.

   AYAAN HIRSI ALI:
   And later we got introduction to history, so I got an introduction to the Second World War, the Holocaust, the concentration camps, the gassing, and so on. And I was not only appalled at what had happened and the stories, but I was also deeply ashamed because at the time–it was in the Dutch context–it was all about trying to work out what had gone wrong in the 1930s and in the 1940s. How could Dutch people have exported so many people to their death? And is it in everyone, or was it only the German psyche? And I was just quiet and ashamed and thinking that if I had lived in the 1930s growing up as I had done with the belief that Jews are evil, that I might as well have participated. And I know a huge number of people who would have participated.

   There is no competition with radical Islam, and with the spread of hatred against Jews that it brings about. The hatred against Jews is not something that’s being spread by private agents, but it is public policy. I mean I remember living in Saudi Arabia, and Jews were spoken of in the official press, in the official state media, as evil as people that should be hated. The rhetoric is similar to the rhetoric of the one I had been introduced to of the Nazis–Jews as people who control power, who control people’s minds, money, and the media, and this conspiracy of Jews to destroy Islam.

   And I think that it is for us to shed that barrier and spread a different message of hope and humanity.

   DANIEL GREENE:
   Voices on Antisemitism is a free podcast series of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Join us every other week to hear a new perspective on the continuing threat of antisemitism in our world today. We would appreciate your feedback on this series. Please visit our website, http://www.ushmm.org.

   Why is Ayaan Hirsi Ali pushing the envelop as Islamophobe, talking about issues she has no lnowledge of and therefore spreading false information. Is that her task being employed as resident fellow for the American Enterprise Institute and accepting funding from the Clarion Project for her awkward film the Honor Diaries?

   Mondoweiss: Brandeis retracts plan to honor anti-Muslim activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

   The latest article by Richard Silverstein @Tikun Olam – Hirsi Ali Says Israel-Palestine Peace Impossible Due to Muslim Fanaticism.

   So in the end, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is once again reunited with her former colleague in Dutch parliament, Geert Wilders, with the same Islamphobic backers of Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller and Daniel Pipes. At least this provides clarity: anti-Islam and pro-Israel on the issues in the Middle East.

3. 

   Oui on April 11, 2014 at 1:08 pm

   Ayaan Hirsi Ali blames Islam for the miseries of the Muslim world. Her new autobiography shows that life is too complex for that …

   Dark Secrets

   (The Economist) Feb. 8, 2007 – Even the title of her new autobiography reflects her talent for reinvention. In the Netherlands, where Ms Hirsi Ali got her start campaigning against the oppression of Muslim women, the book has been published under the title “My Freedom“. But in Britain and in America, where she now has a fellowship at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, it is called “Infidel”. In it, she recounts how she and her family made the cultural odyssey from nomadic to urban life in Africa and how she eventually made the jump to Europe and international celebrity as the world’s most famous critic of Islam.

   Some of the best passages in the book concern this part of her life. As a teenager, Ms Hirsi Ali chose to wear the all-encompassing black Arab veil, which was unusual in cosmopolitan Nairobi. “Weirdly, it made me feel like an individual. It sent out a message of superiority,” she writes. Even as she wore it, Ms Hirsi Ali was drawn in other directions. She read English novels and flirted with a boy. Young immigrants of any religion growing up with traditional parents in a modern society will recognise her confusion: “I was living on several levels in my brain. There was kissing Kennedy; there was clan honour; and there was Sister Aziza and God.”

   Ms Hirsi Ali sounds less frank when she tells the convoluted story of how and why she came to seek asylum at the age of 22 in the Netherlands. She has admitted in the past to changing her name and her age, and to concocting a story for the Dutch authorities about running away from Somalia’s civil war. (In fact she left from Kenya, where she had had refugee status for ten years.) She has since justified those lies by saying that she feared another kind of persecution: the vengeance of her clan after she ran away from an arranged marriage.

   However, last May a Dutch television documentary suggested that while Ms Hirsi Ali did run away from a marriage, her life was in no danger. The subsequent uproar nearly cost Ms Hirsi Ali her Dutch citizenship, which may be the reason why she is careful here to re-state how much she feared her family when she first arrived in the Netherlands. But the facts as she tells them about the many chances she passed up to get out of the marriage–how her father and his clan disapproved of violence against women; how relatives already in the Netherlands helped her to gain asylum; and how her ex-husband peaceably agreed to a divorce–hardly seem to bear her out.

   Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not the first person to use false pretences to try to find a better life in the West, nor will she be the last. But the muddy account given in this book of her so-called forced marriage becomes more troubling when one considers that Ms Hirsi Ali has built a career out of portraying herself as the lifelong victim of fanatical Muslims.

   h/t Hurria @BooMan – “Somali-born politician admits lying to get asylum.”

4. 

   Oui on April 11, 2014 at 2:05 pm

   [Links added are mine – Oui]

   Book Review: Ayaan Hirsi Ali in ‘My Freedom’ or ‘Infidel’

   Re: Book Thread (none / 1)

   Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s anti-Islam diatribe is a piece of propagandistic crap. If you want to read something real about Islam, try reading something from Karen Armstrong, who is a well recognized and well-respected authority on religion, and who does not have an axe to grind about Islam one way or another. I recommend starting with her book Islam: A Short History.

   by Hurria (Muslawia@gmail.com) on Sat Jun 14th, 2008 at 04:06:50 PM PDT

   +++++

   Re: Book Thread (none / 0)

   I don’t think the story of her life is propagandistic crap.  I think her experiences with Islam in Somalia and Kenya were so negative that she tends to generalize about that brand of Islam as if it is the norm, which in many significant ways it is not.  

   Obviously, genital mutilation, if you have been unlucky enough to experience it, it going to have the potential to put you off the belief system responsible for it.  The question is, to what degree is Islam responsible?  

   In any case, it is worth a read.  

   “Shadow boxing the apocalypse, wandering the land.”

   by BooMan on Sat Jun 14th, 2008 at 05:30:20 PM PDT

   +++++

   Re: Book Thread (none / 0)

   FMG is not necessarily related to religion. It is also prevalent among Christians in e.g. Kenya and Ethiopia.

   Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep. It starts when you’re always afraid. You step out of line, the man come and take you away. Stills

   by ask on Sat Jun 14th, 2008 at 07:04:51 PM PDT

5. 

   Oui on April 12, 2014 at 2:32 am

   Ayaan Hirsi Ali, watch who come out to defend her and join in her attack on her ‘abusers.’ Tells a lot about the company she keeps and the persons/organization that exploit her. It’s the same with the Dutch VVD leadership of Gerrit Zalm and Neelie Kroes who secretly invited her and gave her a position on the election list for Dutch parliament. It started her political career. Ms Ali doesn’t quite make the grade as a useful tool in the pro-Israel community and the bashing of Palestinians. The ‘recognition’ of her quality with an honory degree at Brandeis University would have patched that descrepantie.

   FoxNews Says Brandeis Withdrawal of Honorary Degree for Hirsi Ali is “Honor-Killing”

   (Tikun Olam) – My only regret in reading Zev Chafets’ slash and burn article on FoxNews about the Brandeis-Hirsi Ali controversy is that he didn’t name me as a “suspect” in the “honor-killing” of Hirsi Ali’s degree.  Instead, the Likudist sychophantic biographer of Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh, reserved his ire for CAIR:

   Awad added: “This victory over hate was achieved because the American Muslim community joined with interfaith partners in presenting a unified front to challenge Ali’s intolerance.”

   He offered specific thanks to the Brandeis Muslim Students Association, the editors of The Justice student newspaper at Brandeis, Tikun Olam blog editor Richard Silverstein, Imam Suhaib Webb of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, the Islamic Council of New England, Brandeis Professor Joseph Lumbard, and the many Jewish activists and academics who joined in demanding that Brandeis University withdraw its invitation to Ali.

   … The slightly less lunatic right, in the person of Bill Kristol, is trying to make a comparison between Tony Kushner, who received a Brandeis honorary degree, and Hirsi Ali, who didn’t.  The argument is that Kushner is supposedly an Israel hater and anti-Zionist, and how is that any different from Hirsi Ali?  The problem with this is that Kushner is a proud Jew and Hirsi Ali detests Islam.  Kushner is not an anti-Semite, no matter how hard Kristol will try to transform criticizing Zionism into anti-Semitism.

   Jeffrey Goldberg goes so far as the following piece of brainlessness:

   I have to read carefully, but she hasn’t struck me as more hostile to Muslims than, say, Tony Kushner is to Jews.

   He, of course, hasn’t “read carefully” at all.  Here, Goldberg is guilty of the same old false pro-Israel elision between Judaism and Zionism.  Hirsi Ali, as the Reason Magazine interview demonstrates, documents her support for genocide against Muslims.  Kushner isn’t even in the same league.

   The libertarian, Andrew Sullivan, who concedes he is a close person friend of Hirsi Ali and her husband, Niall Ferguson, derides those of us who dislike Hirsi Ali’s toxic utterances about Islam, as “the hard left:”

   Lori Lowenthal Marcus at The Jewish Press

   Tweet by Jareer Kassis:

   @Ali_Gharib correctly advises supporters of Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, the atheist version of Sarah Palin, to stop whining.

   No, Brandeis Isn’t ‘Silencing’ Ayaan Hirsi Ali – Forward Thinking

   Why does anti-Islam activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali claim that Brandeis `silenced’ her when it didn’t? And why do so many of her defenders come from the American Jewish right?

   Why Brandeis Revoked Its Invitation For Ayaan Hirsi Ali To Receive An Honorary Degree

   (Think Progress) – Brandeis University this week announced that it had reversed its decision to give Ayaan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree after a grassroots campaign highlighting many of Hirsi Ali’s most anti-Islam statements.

   Hirsi Ali and her mostly right-wing defenders have cast the controversy as one of disallowing her the right to speak, a point that Ali Gharib debunked on Thursday in a piece at the Jewish Daily Forward (in fact, Brandies has invited Hirsi Ali to speak on campus at a later date).

   According to Fear, Inc. [pdf], a report released in 2011 by the Center for American Progress on Islamophobia in America, “One of Al Qaeda’s greatest recruitment and propaganda tools is the assertion that the West is at war with Islam and Muslims — an argument that is strengthened every day by those who suggest all Muslims are terrorists and all those practicing Islam are jeopardizing U.S. security.”

   And this is exactly what Hirsi Ali has done. In 2007, she told Reason Magazine that Islam should be “defeated” and when asked to clarify whether she meant “radical” or “militant” Islam, she made herself very clear. “No. Islam, period. Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in peace.”