Ayaan Hirsi Ali in San Francisco

The NY Times:

There are few women in the world who generate as much animosity, and as many accusations of hypocrisy, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She denounces Islam for its absolutism and intolerance, and then vilifies the religion of more than one billion people as a “nihilistic cult of death.” 

Her own history perhaps makes her antagonism understandable — she was forced into genital mutilation as a child in Somalia, fled to the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage and, as an adult, has seen her life threatened by Muslim extremists so many times and with such credibility that she travels with security....

She calls herself an “infidel,” while many Muslims say she’s just an Islamophobe. She was put on a Qaeda hit list and called an anti-Muslim “extremist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

She praises Western liberalism at the same time as she suggests that Islam is so incompatible with it that Western democracies need to consider suspending their core values in the service of self-preservation. She’s an asylee who calls for an end to asylum as we know it.

Her latest project only amplifies these incongruities. “Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights” argues that immigration from majority-Muslim countries imperils the hard-won rights of European women. 

Muslim men, who are by Hirsi Ali’s telling accustomed to gender-segregated societies in which female modesty is mandated and women are harassed out of public life, arrived in Europe in droves during the previous decade’s migration crisis, bringing old orthodoxies — and violent enforcement of them — to their new Northern homes. 

As a result, she says, European women face endemic sexual harassment and violence. Even worse, in an effort to not be seen as xenophobic or feed into rising right-wing nationalism, liberal Europeans are complicit in their own mounting oppression, playing down misogyny as mere multiculturalism even as Western women are criminally assaulted, told to cover their bodies and driven from the streets of their own cities. 

Hirsi Ali calls for a new feminist movement, one in which true feminists are “prepared to stand up for the rights of all women” and coalesce around the issue of “women’s safety from predatory men”....

See also A rising tide of [Muslim] violence in France.

Rob's comment:

Good that The Commonwealth Club didn't cancel the scheduled appearance of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. It's important to point out that she isn't just anti-Islam; she's an atheist against all religions.

By the way, Christianity can also be called a "death cult" given the centrality of the crucifixion to that major superstition.