Most people, on the left and right, don't see Ali the way we see her

I asked a correspondent what he thought about my blogs on Diana West's sympathetic article on Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Here are my two posts:

- All About Ayaan: Part II
- The Vacillating Hirsi Ali, or All About Ayaan, Part III
[This series started off with All About Ayaan in 2010]

This is what my correspondent wrote back:

I've read your two blog posts and the West item on the Scroggins book.

I think your articles are on a different point from Diana's. She is talking about the wrongness of treating an al Qaeda person as the equivalent of an Islam critic like Ali. You are simply criticizing Ali as a non-friend of the West and as an outspoken anti-Christian. The problem, first, is that most people, on left and right, don't see Ali the way we see her. they see her as an anti-Muslim and pro Westerner. Clearly, based on Diana's account, the Scroggins book was objectionable. So I think you could have acknowledged the validity of Diana's point (instead of criticizing her) before going on and saying something like this:

"Yes, for the left to treat an Islam critic as the equivalent of a Muslim terrorist is disgusting, and just what we would expect of the left. But West should also have added that Ali herself is no friend of the West, but seeks her own feminist/Muslim empowerment in a radically open and de-Christianized West."

The final paragraph is fair. Ali is not advocating violence and death. Still, Ali's method is a gentle kill, and although it may take a lot longer, and is a lot less horrific, its goal is similar: to reduce the Western and Christian position and influence in the world.

Once this is in progress, Ali makes no suggestions for any kind of substitute other than a non-religious world, which is essentially what Muslims are looking, since they can fill this cultural and spiritual void with Islam. That is not a "peaceable" solution." Islam lays a death grip (fast or slow) on whatever nation or peoples it targets.

That is why I wrote that West would have been better off not comparing Ali to the truly violent Aafia Siddiqui. We should take Ali for the statements that she makes, and analyze them independently of all the other virulent anti-Westerners. Perhaps her sentiments differ only in degree rather than in content. Yes, many Muslim countries do function rudimentarily well, and others such as Iran and Turkey did have sophisticated cultures, yet their histories are violent, and their cultures and societies stifled and aborted. Iran culminated with the horrific Ayatollahs, and Turkey's democracy has become a chimera. Where there is Islam, there is no long term peaceable solution. Ali should know this better than anyone else.