Date: October 19, 2017
01) Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Islam–Mecca vs Medina?
“We discuss Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s recent paper for the Hoover Institute, The Challenge of Dawa (http://hvr.co/2xLuz6e), her conceptualization of Mecca vs Medina Islam (roughly the distinction between peaceful and militarized/expansionist), and the possibility of rapprochement between Islam and the JudeoChristian world.
We turn from that to the role the Saudis play in accommodating their radical Wahhabi clergy– propagandizing and destabilizing Western and Islamic societies alike. Like Qatar, Kuwait and Iran, the Saudis are waging a long-term ideological war against the West, which we are too arrogant and too naïve to take seriously.
We also discuss the failure of Western women to stand up and demand that the denial of women’s rights and restrictions of freedoms that characterize those countries come to a halt—or at least that they demand that our political leaders consider that issue of utmost international importance.
Ali notes that Western feminists, in their obsession with European patriarchy, refuse to discuss the issues of oppression of women by non-European men outside of the West, and accept the doctrines of multi-culturalism and cultural relativism (and that such acceptance is a catastrophic for women internationally). In consequence, regarding them as more committed to their world-view than the rights of genuinely oppressed women in many non-Western countries, she does not consider them feminists at all.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the author of four books, The Caged Virgin (2004) (http://amzn.to/2xLH168), the autobiographical Infidel (2006) (http://amzn.to/2gIQVuH) and Nomad (2011) (http://amzn.to/2xJWWgk), and her latest (2015) Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (http://amzn.to/2glwkQ2).”
