I once wanted to burn ‘The Satanic Verses.’ Now I weep for Salman Rushdie.
Washington Post | Ayaan Hirsi Ali
“If Rushdie had been murdered then, I would have been happy. Now that he has been nearly killed in a knife attack, I am shattered,” explains FAIR Advisor Hirsi Ali. “When someone attempts to take Rushdie's life, what’s at stake is not just the inventive language and far-sighted vision of one person. Also at stake is our freedom to share ideas: the lifeblood of Western civilization.”
“Then” was when Hirsi Ali was “a teenager in Kenya, a Muslim with the righteous convictions of the young, eager to obey the edicts of the highest religious authorities…”
Hirsi Ali writes that, ultimately, “I came to realize that the religion of my youth was an oppressive, dangerous version of the faith…I [now] cherish the freedoms afforded by Western civilization, and I especially cherish the freedom to speak freely. That is why the attack on Rushdie, beyond the terrible fact of his injuries, is so abhorrent…”
“The freedom to speak out — to challenge and even to offend — is the driver of every form of progress,” she argues. “The advance of science, the emancipation of women, revolutions that have taken down monarchies and corrupt regimes — these achievements, at their core, were driven by free expression.”
Unfortunately, Hirsi Ali does not see much conviction in her American compatriots—“In place of the courageous confrontation and unified defense that such an assault demands, I see around me today far too much shuffling of feet and mumbling… The secular cult of wokeism uses diversity, equity and inclusion — words that should be pillars of progress — to impose a fearful conformity that is fundamentally inimical to free speech.”
Hirsi Ali exposes the marriage of today’s progressives with religious oppressors— “Indeed, the wokeists and the Islamists have this in common: Both use the language of offense and hurt feelings to shut down ideas. ‘Hate speech’ can be just a secular version of ‘blasphemy.’”
She then calls on us to step up at our universities and beyond: “Enough of the tired declarations of sympathy and outrage. It is time to act in defense of our ideals…[we must be] unafraid and unapologetic in championing Western freedoms and ideals, and fearlessly standing up for free expression — in our universities, as everywhere else.”
“Times like these reaffirm to me the clear necessity of championing Western values,” she concludes, “chief among them the freedom to speak and publish, regardless of hurt feelings, regardless of whether our words violate concepts of blasphemy, old or new.”