Originally a comment by newenlightenment on In a fair world he would get it.
They ruined her a while back: Kissinger was at Hirsi Ali and Niall Ferguson’s wedding. (Admittedly by his invitation, not hers.) Particularly galling when you consider that Christopher Hitchens was on his deathbed at the time, had been a close friend and defender of Hirsi Ali, and his greatest work was in exposing Kissinger’s war crimes to the world. Hirsi Ali’s actions are a total betrayal, not only of human rights, but of basic human decency.
Hirsi Ali also claimed that the welfare state was responsible for the murder of Theo Van Gogh, since ‘the killer was on welfare, if he had had to look for work to support himself, he would not have had the time to plan the murder’ – a statement so wingnut it makes James Delingpole look almost logical.
Hirsi Ali may have been just as bad before she joined AIE, in Infidel she claimed that as an MP she had advocated ‘dramatically cutting unemployment benefits and abolition of the minimum wage’ to eliminate a supposed poverty trap where Muslim migrants were able to earn more on benefits than by working, and thus could avoid mingling with unbelievers. Even if one accepts the facts of this claim, abolition of the minimum wage would make no sense, one does not ‘make work pay’ by cutting wages! If Hirsi Ali had argued for cutting unemployment benefits and raising the minimum wage she might at least have made sense on her own terms, but as it is, she merely exposed the right-wing agenda she determined to promote, under any rationale, no matter how flimsy.
My feelings about her Brandeis award being unceremoniously withdrawn a while back have changed O_O
niall ferguson has long been an outright supporter of the old school british empire
like straight-up raj “white mans burden” hagiography past even what kipling stood for
( kipling @ least was well aware of the hypocrisies of victorian england & exporting its “morality” arnd the world & satirized it as much as celebrated it )
which makes her marrying him even wierder bc its not like his beloved imperialists were atheists OR that becoming an atheist will turn a person white
I suspect that if Ayaan Hirsi Ali had gotten what she wanted, then Islamist groups would likely have picked up the slack. Much like what Hamas and Hezbollah already do: *lots* of charity.
In any case, AHA’s position seems like classic right-wing concern trolling about poor people.
Just a little message from the Netherlands, “Told ya.”
#2 Indeed; I read Furguson’s colossus where he celebrates the British empire as a force for good, and calls for the US to emulate it. He breezily dismisses claims of government complicity in the Indian famine of 1876-1878,which killed around 29 million people, a greater fraction of the world’s population at the time than were killed in Mao’s great leap forward, and for similar reasons: the reckless pursuit of narrow economic dogma and the financing of militaristic ambition. Here’s a good piece on the details: http://www.monbiot.com/2005/12/27/how-britain-denies-its-holocausts/
I’d say Furguson was the worst historian this side of David Irving!
Oh, PS, thanks Ophelia for posting, my two cents!
Oh, but certainly you must know the right wing talking point on this? Without minimum wages, there would be more jobs! (Which does nothing to solve the “make work pay” problem…but logic is not their strong suit.)
Frankly I’ve never understood what the progressive Left sees in her. A horrible childhood is simply insufficient justification for such hero worship of someone who again and again says and does incredibly classist and bigoted things, and who is such an obvious tool of the industrial war machine. We simply would never have heard of her were she not an incredibly convenient icon, a la Clarence Thomas or Herman Cain, the perfect quisling for Zionist and Petrocolonial messaging. Just as John McCain’s time as a POW may inspire a combination of pity for his pain and respect for his perseverance, but says nothing whatsoever about whether he is fit to craft sensible policy with regard to war and peace, so it is with Hirsi Ali. Some Muslims were cruel to her — this means exactly WHAT, with regard to Middle East policy????
#7. I think it’s an example of what Bertrand Russell called ‘the fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed’ – the illusion that suffering ennobles its victims and makes them inherently virtuous and above criticism. Add to that the fact that she’s a pretty damn good writer and has a certain amount of charm and you have the makings of a personality cult
Wait, what? The “progressive left” has always hated her, because “Islamophobia.” Cf Nick Gotts above.
@Ophelia
Wait, what? The “progressive left” has always hated her
Aren’t we also the progressive left?
Deepak, yes, factually we are, but there’s a fault line in the left, and I was referring to that.
The thing is that Hirsi Ali’s criticisms of islam have always been of the bloodthirsty type rather than the rational type. She really and truly is islamophobiac and has never hidden the fact, just as she’s never hidden her other assorted right-wing lunacies. She is now exactly who she’s always been in her time as a public figure: a terrible and antirational person advocating mass murder. The “fault line” is between people who willfully blinded themselves to Hirsi Ali’s violent wingnuttery because she’s a atheist who had suffered oppression and those who didn’t.
It should not be hard for a skeptic to say “I was wrong for ever supporting Ayan Hirsi Ali and I’ll try to do better in the future.”
but there’s a fault line in the left,
Thats true – probably more than one as well..
re: progressive left & Hirsi Ali
I don’t know why she generates these discussions, and I’m not going to make assumptions about why so many on the left see her as an ally,, that would be silly and presumptuous. She’s just not part of the left, progressive or otherwise.
In the Netherlands, she started her career in the think tank associated with the social democratic party (all serious political parties have one here), but switched to a right-wing party when they offered her a position as an MP first. As an MP she consistently voted with her new party and she echoed their talking points.
That aside, my problem with her islam criticism is that it has all the nuance of Geert Wilders’. If you disagree with her, you get . It’s not a good look.
I support AHA.
There’s nothing wrong with holding “conservative” views while at the same time being an atheist.
Just what kind of atheist catechism is this “Otto”?
Nothing sticks in the craw of white liberals more than some uppity brown person informing them that their world views, wishful fantasies really, are not only skewed but also inaccurate and dishonest.
Her characterization of Islam as a death cult has been matched by other quite reasonable ex-muslim women I’ve encountered hailing from the MENA region.
And those women, too, have been dragged through the mud by indignant white liberals. I see a pattern emerging
And why shouldn’t Benny Netanyahu be given a Peace Prize?
Do people here have any idea what Israel is up against? A bunch of psychos who spend billions in foreign aid building concrete tunnels so as to better ambush and kill Jews, that’s what. A bunch of psychos who can’t be bothered constructing bomb shelters because they’re aiming for maximum civilian casualties among their own fucking kith and kin, that’s what. A bunch of psychos who, after having humbly acted on the ‘will’ of god, are now being denounced, hunted down and beaten up by the very civilians whose lives they purposely placed in danger, that’s what
Bibi deserves The Peace Prize!
When I look at the combox here I sometimes see nothing but a long line of Roger Garaudys.
When AHA stands up and says Islam is a vicious, murderous, nihilistic death cult, you’d better believe it!
Just as Garaudy should have believed Khruschev when he stood up in front of millions of Soviets and declared Stalin a rancid son of a bitch, responsible for the deaths of TENS of millions.
Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Mohammed…all the same shit, just a slightly different smell.
One last item in my rant: What good are White liberals too reticent, too ‘ascared’, to extract the salient points of fascism from an ideology just because those embracing the ideology happen to have less-than-white hides and happen to hail from the Third World?
What cowardice!
@Decker
What the Palestinians are up against is a bunch of psychopaths who’ve been fighting for 100 years to ethnically cleanse the them from Palestine because of some Bronze Age religious horseshit; psychopaths who’ve been able to convince the West to arm them to the teeth to fight people whose only weapons are stones and firecrackers; psychopaths who’ve been offer a peace deal with the entire world 10 years ago, which would have given them everything they claim to want, but it would require them to stop stealing the Palestinian territories and stop oppressing Palestinians for sport, so of course they reject it out of hand; psychopaths who don’t appear to have even an ounce of humanity as they murder children playing on beaches, drop bombs on refugee centers and use the cruelest of weapons such as white phosphorous and flichette bombs on babies, infants and unarmed adults. And the people of Gaza can’t build shelters because they’ve been under a cruel blockade for years by the psychopaths, (and the Israelis would probably just murder anyone gathered there anyway, and then blame those who were murdered for their own murder.)
So fuck Adolf Netanyahu, fuck Israel, fuck its supporters worldwide and fuck you, too.
#5 newenlightenment thanks for reminding me how awful that book was NOT ENF BRAIN BLEACH FOR CONSERVATIVE BOOKS ARGH ( JUST HIT A GREAT PODCAST “BUT I DON’T EVEN OWN A TELEVISION” EP REDISCOVERING BILL O’REILLY “ROMANTIC THRILLER” OMFG THE PAIN)
but tyvm for the link so i can post that to some kids who think they invented anti-imperialism last year
Decker @15
Because killing hundreds of people is not peaceful.
You should know that Hamas was organized by Israel as a counter to Fatah. Like so many things, it didn’t work out quite as planned. So the Israeli government shouldn’t be surprised their creation is pro-Palestinian rather than pro-Israeli.
Does anyone have a Gibberish to English dictionary?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vittorio_Arrigoni
@16 Grow up!
@18 Same!
Decker @20
What a cutting reply. It was…what’s the word I want…oh yes, silly.
I’m not sure if anything survives of the ideology of the progressive social democratic left that flourished last century. Contemporary leftists seem to be obsessed with ‘niche’ causes, social and political vision has been left to reactionary neo-liberal ideologues and their corporate supporters.
Perhaps someone can enlighten me—why has the US, for so many years, been so unconditionally supportive of Israel?
Bronze Age religious horseshit; psychopaths who’ve been able to convince the West to arm them to the teeth to fight people whose only weapons are stones and firecrackers;
You’d have to be a bit simple between the ears to bring a pen knife to a gunfight.
Yes, they’re armed with stones, firecrackers and IQs firmly ensconced in the double digits.
Decker,
They are Jew-killing machines andsimpletons for not finding ways to kill more Israeli.
Is this like how Israeli are performing their operations perfectly and occasionally totally accidentally, unfortunatelly, shooting a school at the same time?
@RJW #22: That is a question with a number of possible, indefinite, and very complex intersecting answers. You’re going to have to Google around a bit and read a lot to even begin to get a handle on why. The simplest response is some combination of guilt over the role of the USA in the rise of Nazism (which was extensive; this part rests primarily on the fact that Zionism has been successfully conflated with Judaism in mainstream American discourses) and imperial/hegemonic interest (especially as it relates to the petroleum trade), but that elides all of the nuance and detail necessary for anything approaching a real understanding. I’ve taken three classes that dealt with this issue specifically and in depth (The Holocaust and the Construction of Meaning, Human Rights and Rhetoric, and Global Studies: Global Securities) and read a whole lot more outside of them, and I know I still only have pieces.
@16 Morris Hattrick,
Yes, indeed. One very effective Zionist propaganda lie is to present Israel and Palestine as two nation states at conflict over ideological differences, and that brave little Israel is on the front line defending the West from the Islamic hordes.
The creation of Israel was a colonialist project that was planned in the 19th century and created by cynical European imperialists and Zionist zealots. Structural genocide has always been on the Zionist agenda.
Anyone who doubts this, need only read the history of Zionism, or if you can stand it, read the morally bankrupt comments of those well-funded apologists for Israel who infest the media.
@25 John Horstman,
Thanks for your comment.
Contemporary Israel is is the product of both Zionism and extremely indulgent US foreign policy makers who seem oblivious to what support for Israel costs their country in the ME and the world.
Of course criticism of Israel has also been successfully conflated with anti-Semitism.
The ‘imperial/hegemonic’ theme is interesting, perhaps Americans feel kinship with the Zionist –‘Chosen people pioneering the wilderness’ ideology.
I forgot to add, despite all the American and European guilt over Nazism, it was the Palestinians who were made to pay the price for Western anti-Semitism.
It seemed so easy in 1945, guilt assuaged, problem solved.