This is via a hat-tip to Ayaan Hirsi Ali who says: “Very Powerful. Do as Bari urges us to do: Get Up and Fight.” The introduction by Mr. Theodore W. Ullyot, Co-Chairman, Board of Visitors, The Federalist Society — is here.
Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture | The Federalist Society, November 10, 2023 (Washington, D.C.)
The Last Line of Defense By Bari Weiss
(This was originally posted May 27th, 2010)
Here is the Tavis Smiley video (thanks HOTAIR for the h/t):
Here is my upload dated the same, moved to my RUMBLE:
The Southern Poverty Law Center decided to turn itself into a racist organization, with its attacks on principled and courageous critics of radical Islamism such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali (left), a prominent ex-Muslim writer, and Maajid Nawaz (right), a moderate practicing Muslim writer, radio host and politician.
This is a story from GATESTONE INSTITUTE, and it shows yet the continued depths the The Southern Poverty Law Center still reaches in regards to it’s irrelevant radical positions:
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SLPC), based in Montgomery, Alabama, has struck again. The self-appointed boundary-markers and policemen of free discussion have issued what they call a “Field Guide” to help “guide” the media in “countering prominent anti-Muslim extremists.” It is hard to know where to start with such idiocy, so let us start from the beginning.
The SPLC was founded in 1971, ostensibly to fight for civil rights among other good causes. By the end of its first decade it was targeting the KKK and other racist organisations. So far so good. But like many a campaigning organisation, they experienced the happy blow of basically winning their argument. By the 1990s, there were mercifully few racist groups in America going about unchallenged. When a member of the KKK cropped up everybody in civil society pretty much understood that here was a bad person who should not be given a free pass.
[….]
The SPLC’s latest production is disgraceful, discrediting and sloppy even by its own increasingly disgraceful, discredited and sloppy standards. For this publication, they have listed “Fifteen anti-Muslim activists,” most likely in the hope that they will scare the media off inviting them on, or the wider public from being allowed to listen to them.
Among the list is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The SPLC lists a set of allegedly outrageous things that she has said, which have appeared in such obscure and extreme venues as The Wall Street Journal and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. They mention in passing — as though it were an incidental mishap — that Hirsi Ali’s film-making partner, Theo van Gogh, was slaughtered on an Amsterdam street by a jihadist, with a death-threat to Hirsi Ali pinned into van Gogh’s dying body. But they still clearly cannot imagine why anybody would have a problem with such a thing. One wonders how the staff of the SPLC would feel if one of their colleagues was murdered in such a manner? Doubtless they would shrug it off. Yet it remains that case that here is this “anti-racist” organisation, largely made up of white men who present themselves as being anti-racists, and yet who spend their time attacking a black immigrant woman.
Hirsi Ali is of course well known for being an ex-Muslim. But the SPLC’s list of “anti-Muslim activists” also includes a practising Muslim. Of course, if Maajid Nawaz were an Islamic extremist then SPLC would have nothing to say about him. But Maajid Nawaz is not an extremist — he is one of the most principled and courageous people around calling out the extremists in his faith for their bigotry and hatred. He does so, like Hirsi Ali, at no small risk to himself. If the jihadists within Islam are ever going to be defeated, it will be because of Muslims like Nawaz, who are willing to argue for reform on liberal, progressive, pluralistic and democratic grounds.
Yet for the SPLC, this Muslim is not just not the right type of Muslim — he is “anti-Muslim.” The charges that SPLC levels against Nawaz are (this is not satire) that he has (a) co-operated with, rather than worked against, the British police (b) suggested that customers in banks should have to show their faces (c) once failed to abide by the most hardline interpretation of Islamic blasphemy law (d) once visited a strip club on his stag-night….
Are women oppressed in Muslim countries? What about in Islamic enclaves in the West? Are these places violating or fulfilling the Quran and Islamic law? Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an author and activist who was raised a devout Muslim, describes the human rights crisis of our time, asks why feminists in the West don’t seem to care, and explains why immigration to the West from the Middle East means this issue matters more than ever.
Via Truth Revolt:
In a recent interview with the Washington Examiner, human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali discussed the “real war on women” being conducted by adherents to radical Islam and the need for the American left to acknowledge that reality. During the conversation, Hirsi Ali recalled a particularly telling encounter she had with Vice President Joe Biden in which he attempted to correct her on “one or two things about Islam.”
Hirsi Ali explained to the Examiner that in the left’s attempts to protect anyone they perceive as “victims of the white man,” they have failed to look honestly at the true war on women waged by radical Muslims.
“They feel all religions are the same, and they’re not,” she said. “I think if I adopt the position in good faith to multiculturalists and leftists, I would say [they take the position they do] because they see them [Muslims] as victims. They see them as victims of the white man and so they think: ‘Let’s protect them from the white man. Let’s protect them from capitalism.’… That is misguided at best and malicious at worst.”
Hirsi Ali’s organization provides some disturbing statistics on the treatment of women under Islam, including 5,000 honor killings occurring worldwide each year—between 25 and 28 of those occurring in the United States—and an estimated 800 million women and girls living under the constant threat of such consequences. WHO estimates that more than 125 million women and girls alive today have undergone female genital mutilation.
“Wherever [Islamists] gain power, you see exactly what they do: The first thing they do is they chase women out of the public space, force them to cover up, beat them up, rape them, sell them into slavery,” said Hirsi Ali.
The purpose of her organization is to expose reality such as this, particularly to Western liberals, who she said must “review their thinking.” But getting the left to do so is no easy task, as Hirsi Ali’s encounter with Vice President Biden exemplifies.
At a dinner in Washington, Biden attempted to correct her perspective on relationship between the Islamic State and Islam, saying, “ISIS had nothing to do with Islam.” When she pushed back, Biden said, “Let me tell you one or two things about Islam…”
“I politely left the conversation at that,” Hirsi Ali said. “I wasn’t used to arguing with vice presidents.”….