Did Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Reason Interview Sink Her at Brandeis?

Hat tip: Eric Dondero of
Libertarian Republican

After announcing that it would honor author and activist Ayaan
Hirsi Ali with an honorary doctorate, Brandeis University has
withdrawn
its offer, partly due to statements she made during a
2007 Reason interview. 

Born in Somali and raised in Kenya, Hirsi Ali fled to the
Netherlands and became an outspoken critic of the treatment of
women under Islamic law. She wrote the screenplay for the 2004
short film “Submission” (watch online). The film’s
director, Theo Van Gogh, was stabbed to death on the streets of
Amsterdam by an Islamic fanatic and Hirsi Ali ultimately fled
Holland for the United States.

Various student and faculty groups at Brandeis protested and a
petition posted at Change.org quoted from Rogier van Bakel‘s
2007 Reason interview with Hirsi Ali. The petition, which
garnered 6,802 signatures as of this morning, argued that Hirsi Ali
engages in “hate speech” and as such is not worthy of an honorary
doctorate.

Rogier van Bakel quotes her as follows: “Jews should be
proselytizing about a God that you can quarrel with. Catholics
should be proselytizing about a God who is love….Those are lovely
concepts of God. They can’t compare to the fire-breathing Allah who
inspires jihadism and totalitarianism.” Van Bakel notes religions’
ability to bring about change for good: “Do you think Islam could
bring about similar social and political changes?” Ms. Hirsi Ali
responds, “Only if Islam is defeated.” Van Bakel asks, “Don’t you
mean defeating radical Islam?” To that she responds, “No. Islam,
period.” (Reason, 11-07)

How can an Administration of a University that prides itself on
social justice and acceptance of all make a decision that targets
and disrespects it’s own students? This is hurtful to the Muslim
students and the Brandeis community who stand for social
justice.

Read the petition here.

Brandeis officials have issued a statement
that at best shows themselves to be completely ignorant of her
work, especially her best-selling autobiography, Infidel. They
claim:

She is a compelling public figure and advocate for women’s
rights, and we respect and appreciate her work to protect and
defend the rights of women and girls throughout the world. That
said, we cannot overlook certain of her past statements that are
inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.  For all
concerned, we regret that we were not aware of these statements
earlier.

Yeah, whatevs. Try learning about this brand-new
resource called the Interweb. You can download a “browser” for it
for free from a company called Mozilla. Obviously, a
university is fully within its rights to give awards or not to
whomever it chooses, just as Mozilla is free to promote or not
whomever it wants to CEO. And the Heritage Foundation is
free to quickly accept
the resignation of policy scholars who are attacked in
the liberal media. As I wrote about the Brendan Eich affair, this
sort of controversy is only going to become more common as
technology empowers more actors to create pressure groups and as
our economic and social interactions become
more and more symbolic. That’s a mixed bag, for sure, but just
like Internet piracy, it ain’t going away any time soon.

I don’t agree with Hirsi Ali’s unqualified condemnation of
Islam—in
the interview with van Bakel, she says “there is no moderate
Islam” and calls for banning free speech about the religion—and I’m
not surprised that Brandeis caved at the first sign of trouble.

There is something particularly appalling about an institution
that is predicated upon the idea of free and open discourse
throwing in the towel so quickly. Either the people running the
school there are simply total ignoramuses or they are cowards who
refuse to defend their choice. Of course, they could be both. In
any case, the reputation of the school should suffer, both as a
place where ideas can discussed and where smart people congregate.
Who wants to be the first person to turn up far more dubious
recipients of Brandeis honorary degrees?

Hirsi Ali runs a foundation dedicated to the proposition that
“women everywhere, of all cultures, merit access to education and
basic human rights.” It focuses especially on the issues of female
genital mutilation and refugee status in the West of women fleeing
the worst sort of patriarchal political and social situations.
Read more about it here.
One of the great achievements of Infidel, in my opinion,
is its description of the brutal reality of female circumcision and
the ways in which the practice is often supported by women who have
been subjected to it. Infidel is a profound contribution
to feminist and libertarian discourse precisely to the extent that
it forces all of us in the “tolerant” West to check out assumptions
about the universality of our ideas regarding pluralism and the
possibility of peaceful coexistence.

And check out Reason‘s interview with Hirsi Ali, which
is relentlessly interesting and provocative. Here’s a snippet:

Reason: George Bush, not the most conciliatory
person in the world, has said on plenty of occasions that we are
not at war with Islam.

Hirsi Ali: If the most powerful man in the West
talks like that, then, without intending to, he’s making radical
Muslims think they’ve already won. There is no moderate Islam.
There are Muslims who are passive, who don’t all
follow the rules of Islam, but there’s really only one Islam,
defined as submission to the will of God. There’s nothing moderate
about it.

Reason: So when even a hard-line critic of
Islam such as Daniel Pipes says, “Radical Islam is the problem, but
moderate Islam is the solution,” he’s wrong?

Hirsi Ali: He’s wrong. Sorry about that.

Whole
thing here.