I believe that the dysfunctional Muslim family constitutes a real threat to the very fabric of western life. It is in the family that children are groomed to practise, promote and pass on the norms of their parents’ culture.
AYAAN HIRSI ALILet us recognize that we can no longer tolerate violent oppression of women in the name of religion and culture any more than we would tolerate violent oppression espoused by any other bully in the name of a twisted rationale.
More Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes
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Islam was like a mental cage. At first, when you open the door, the caged bird stays inside: it is frightened. It has internalized its imprisonment. It takes time for bird to escape, even after someone has opened the doors to its cage.
AYAAN HIRSI ALI -
We had a world dominated by the Soviet Union on the one hand, and the Americans on the other hand. They called it the Cold War. But it wasn’t cold. I am someone who comes from the third world. In the third world, the cold war wasn’t cold. Millions had been killed. It was a proxy war.
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My conscience is informed by reason. It’s like Kant’s categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.
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I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.
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I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that Islam is peace and tolerance.
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My friend, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered in 2004 for having been insufficiently reverent toward Islam.
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Many people in Europe and the U.S. dispute the thesis that we are living through a clash of civilisations between Islam and the west. But a radical minority of Muslims firmly believes that Islam is under siege, and is committed to winning the holy war it has declared against the West.
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I see no difference between Islam and Islamism. Islam is defined as submission to the will of Allah, as it is described in the Koran. Islamism is just Islam in its most pure form.
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The demand that Islam makes of women is to not attract attention to yourself, and if you are in a secular society, that attire does exactly that, and it is a political symbol, no longer religious.
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I have had to pay a price for leaving Islam and for speaking out. I have to pay for round-the-clock security because of the death threats against me.
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I call myself a liberal – a classical liberal as in John Stuart Mill.
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The more we oblige, the more we self-censor, the more we appease, the bolder the enemy gets.
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No one in the American Enterprise imposes their beliefs. We clash, and I think that’s what the West is all about.
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Avoiding offense means that we don’t accept each other as equals.
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Young people, some of whom are not born into the faith, are being fired up by preachers using basic Islamic scripture and mobilized to wage jihad by radical imams who represent themselves as legitimate Muslim clergymen.
AYAAN HIRSI ALI