Friendly Hemant says PZ gets Ayaan Hirsi Ali all wrong, because she didn’t say that, she said the opposite.

I’ve seen complaints online about how Hirsi Ali was minimizing problems caused by conservative Christians, as if they weren’t as big a deal as those caused by extremist Muslims. PZ Myers called it “fatwah envy” and said Hirsi Ali was suggesting “we should meekly accept the lesser injustice because of the threat of the greater” and trying to “silence those who strive for respect and dignity in their lives.”

But when I watched her speech (because I actually did that instead of relying on a couple of sound bites and tweets), I didn’t get that impression at all.

Well what impression one got or didn’t get isn’t the issue. The issue is what she actually said.

Through her examples, she compared the religious concerns we often deal with on a regular basis with those we may not understand because of our geography. We’re undoubtedly familiar with LGBT-rights issues in the U.S., but she wanted to call our attention to injustices perpetrated by people in the name of Islam — injustices she’s all too familiar with.

It’s a funny thing – that was actually the subject of my talk at the American Atheists Convention in 2013. I spelled it out pretty much the same way. It was on the Sunday afternoon, so one of the last talks, so I started with something along the lines of “we’ve heard a lot about religious bullshit here in the US and I want to tell you about some activists working on religious bullshit elsewhere in the world.” Then I talked about Maryam Namazie and others. But it was an “and” not a “but.” It was meant as an addition to everyone’s understanding of the fight against religious bullshit, not as a replacement of everyone’s understanding with a different understanding. I didn’t say forget your issues, pay attention to these issues instead. I just said here’s some more religious bullshit and some more people fighting it.

A few weeks later I introduced Dave Silverman to Maryam Namazie at Women in Secularism 2, and she was a speaker at the 2014 Convention.

Hemant quoted from Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s talk:

I understand, I empathize, and you have my support in fighting religious bigotry. And in Christian America, there’s probably a lot to do. But I want to draw your attention to a different kind of religion. If you become a Christian apostate, the highest price you’ll pay is that your family, your neighbors, your communities will disown you. And trust me, I understand that pain…

Yet given the limited resources we have, the limited time we have, and the potential energy and force and magnitude and resources of the Islamic threat, I wanted to draw your attention to the religion that threatens us the most in 2015.

…

If you are gay, today in the United States of America, the worst the Christian community can do to gay people is not serve them cake… I tweeted Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, whom I think is very brave by going out there and describing what it is that the LGBT community faces in predominantly homophobic communities. The discrimination is subtle, and it lurks in the shadows. But I just want you to think about being Muslim and gay today. In the worst case scenario, you’ve seen it on television, on YouTube… if you’re accused of being gay, you are marched to the tallest building in town and bullies throw you off that building and there’s a crowd of people waiting there…

Emphasis his.

So that’s AHA not “suggesting ‘we should meekly accept the lesser injustice because of the threat of the greater'” according to Hemant.

Really?

I’m sorry but that’s exactly what it looks like to me. Or, at least, to put it less rhetorically than PZ did, it does look to me as if she is saying that because Islam is much worse therefore we should be devoting our limited resources and time to issues related to Islam. It looks that way to me because that’s what she said.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

More about that Daily Beast interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The interviewer is Cathy Young, who writes for Reason magazine among others and is great buddies with Christina Hoff Sommers – in short, she’s a conservative and she takes a very jaundiced view of feminism. She asked Ayaan HA questions carefully shaped to elicit the politically correct (in conservative terms) answers.

Her introduction, for instance, helps to set the tone.

Never one to shy away from battles, Ali has also made a foray into America’s gender wars: Last November, in a speech before the right-of-center Independent Women’s Forum, she declared that feminism in the West has “won” and that feminists were wasting their victory on “trivial bullshit”…

Yes, and this is the very thing we take exception to.

But to be fair, she also says some good things.

So you’re very hopeful about what’s happening right now.

I just want to remind the free world that there was a time when they were not free—Europeans and Americans were not free. There was a time when Christian theology and Jewish theology was used to commit atrocious acts. Remember the witch hunts, remember the Protestants. I think Americans associate religion with something positive. In Europe, Protestants were killing other Protestants, Catholics were killing Protestants, Protestants were killing Catholics, just as the Sunni and the Shia are doing now. That is now in the history books. I look forward to a time when atrocities committed in the name of Islam will be in history books and museums and movies, but not happening to real people in real time.

I have no quarrel with that.

But then they move on to feminism.

You’ve had some reactions from Western feminists to your statements about Islam that you’ve found a bit disconcerting.

We are seeing that Western feminists are shy about pointing out the misogyny that’s committed in the name of the religion of Islam, because they feel we can’t impose our ethnocentric or Eurocentric or American-centric ways. If you read the [faculty] letter at Brandeis, that’s the core of it. Which is—don’t be ridiculous. It doesn’t matter where you are as an individual human being; freedom is freedom. Nobody likes to be oppressed. Human rights are universal. Individual rights are universal. This is the message to American feminists and other Western feminists: the best thing to share is the outcome of the emancipation.

Yes but that’s not feminism per se, and it’s not all of feminism. Much of the left is like that, but not all of it, and feminism is mostly on the left, so some feminists are squeamish about criticizing Islam, for a mix of good and bad reasons. But it’s only some. Yes I know; notallfeminists; bite me.

One women’s issue that you write about and work on is honor violence. Do you think it’s less of a problem in the United States than in some immigrant communities in Europe?

It is a huge issue, and we see—at my foundation, the AHA Foundation—more and more girls and young women coming to us with the exact same problems that we’ve been seeing in Europe. The minute they reach puberty, they are stopped from going to school, their movements are controlled. There are honor killings and there is honor violence. Honor violence is when you’re not allowed to get out of the house. When you have a boyfriend, you’re beaten until you give him up. You’re over 18 years old and your parents don’t allow you to go to college; they get someone from the country of origin and force you to marry that person, and if you speak against it you are threatened with death. I don’t think the story of honor killings and honor violence in the United States has yet been told. And that’s because of the honor brigade. Because every time you start talking about these things, you get these people clamping down on everything—[slams hand] on the press, on the government—saying it’s not Islamic, or it’s Islamophobic even to discuss it, or that you’re racist if you talk about honor violence. Unbelievable.

Once again, you get an argument from some Western feminists who will say that it’s not that substantially different from domestic violence and sexual assault, which also happens in our society, so it’s unfair to single out [Muslim cultures].

What’s feminist about a woman who makes a statement like that? A person who makes that statement is basically saying, let’s change the subject, there’s nothing wrong. And so they are completely letting down that victim who cannot speak for herself, who is voiceless, who has to deal with the entire family, male and female, who are silencing her. It’s for those of us who have the platforms and the voice, and can articulate what’s going on, to talk about it. And the woman who sits there on her faculty saying, “Oh, yeah, this and that”—what’s so feminist about it, honestly?

Nothing, but again, it’s not feminism as such, and it’s not a reason to tell feminists here that feminism has “won.”

Presumably, they would say that we should take all violence against women more seriously, whether it’s honor violence or not.

They can chitchat as much as they like, but they shouldn’t call themselves feminists.

What? Feminists who say we should take all violence against women more seriously shouldn’t call themselves feminists?? That’s an outrageous thing to say – so outrageous that I wonder if she misunderstood what Cathy Young said, or lost the thread. I agree with her that feminists over here should not ignore violence against women in the rest of the world, but that doesn’t rule out also agreeing that we should take all violence against women more seriously. She seems to be saying we should take violence against women over here with scorn and belittlement, and that can’t really be what she thinks. She must be letting her indignation run away with her and let her say things she doesn’t actually think.

The feminist project was a struggle for the rights of women. And now we have those equal rights by law, and most of us are enjoying it and most of us are able to take advantage of it. But we have a large immigrant community—and, by the way, not only Muslim—who are being denied these rights here in the United States. Let’s not silence it.

No. We do not have “those equal rights” by law, not all of them – because it’s not that simple. Having good laws doesn’t just magically fix all problems. She’s right to say let’s not silence immigrant women who are denied right, but she’s dead wrong to say feminism here has done its work.

You’re giving the keynote speech at the American Atheists National Convention [on April 3]. Are you going to talk about Islam primarily?

I am. And I think I have the same message as I have for feminists and for other groups who are addressing various issues in the world we live in today. For atheists, it’s: You address the issues of organized religion and atrocities committed in the name of organized religion. And I want them to focus on Islam today, because it’s in the name of Islam that most lives are taken, that most subjection, most intolerance is spread around the world. So for my fellow atheists, it’s a matter of: Listen, it’s one thing to protest about Christmas trees on December 25, but it’s quite another to witness fellow human beings in cages and burned alive, and women taken as slaves, again, in the names of this religion. So it’s very much a matter of organizing our priorities.

Sigh. That’s just insulting. It’s not only Christmas trees. It’s enormously more than that. And I don’t think she lost the thread in that answer, because it’s about her speech, which she’d had time to think about.

And she does more belittling. Young asks about prejudice against atheists. AHA says there is some, but it’s not like the kind she faced.

There is a massive difference. Same thing with the feminists. Listen, if you’re not allowed into a golf club, that doesn’t sit well with me, but if I were to prioritize, I would say: This girl, she’s just been denied her right to school, she’s just been forced into marriage, she’s just been genitally mutilated. That’s the sort of thing that we need to be, as women, signing up against—and as atheists. And by the way, the LGBT community—I think it’s awesome, and it’s taken some great steps. But in the name of Islam, gay men, or men who are accused of being gay, are put on the roofs of buildings and thrown down by a mob shouting “Allahu akbar!” doing this in the name of their faith. And it’s time that the gay community stood up to this. HIV is no longer the biggest killer of the gay community; it’s [violence] in the name of Islam, and no one’s talking about it.

So that’s feminists, atheists, and LGBT people who all need to stop paying so much attention – or maybe any attention – to local issues, and pay attention to violence in the name of Islam instead.

The American Enterprise Institute would like that, wouldn’t it.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Daily Beast talks to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and gets yet another scornful Dear Muslima out of her. We get it, Ayaan: you have contempt for feminists in the US. Thanks a lot for the solidarity.

There’s an argument, which I’m sure you’ve heard, that Western women face their own forms of oppression, which are different but may be just as bad, or almost as bad—

Like what? Who does the dishes at home? That’s what it boils down to: How can we balance work-life.

Of course that’s challenging. But can you imagine how far we’ve come from the points when women weren’t allowed to get out of the house, couldn’t be in public, couldn’t take public office, weren’t allowed to vote, couldn’t own their own bank accounts. Even the money they inherited wasn’t theirs, it was for the male guardians to look after. And now, [it’s], “Who loads the dishes in the dishwasher, who does the unloading?” And I think it’s still very important; I have massive fights with my husband about who does what at home. But that is more on the micro level, and it’s a luxury. And I don’t think that the government can do anything about that. What kind of law are you going to pass that says who does the dishes, who does the diapers, who looks after the children, who’s going to work and whose career is going to go up or down?

First: no, that’s not all that’s left. Far from it – or to put it another way, don’t be ridiculous.

Second: who the hell said feminism is only about what the government can do? What’s that got to do with anything? Feminism is about how everyone thinks about women, views women, makes assessments of women – everyone including, of course, women ourselves. It’s not just about laws, and never has been, not even in the first wave. There have been some feminists who focused only on laws, and there still are, but that doesn’t mean feminism itself has focused only on that or that it does (or should) now. And no, that is not trivial, it is not “the micro level” in a pejorative sense, and no it fucking is not a luxury. If a peaceful secular coup replaced the Saudi monarchy this afternoon and all the anti-woman laws were repealed, that wouldn’t mean everything was perfect, or so close to perfect that the remainder was a “luxury.”

Brandeis was wrong when it invited Ayaan HA to speak and receive an honorary degree and then grabbed the invitation and the honorary degree back, and Ayaan HA is wrong when she says US feminism is about who washes the dishes. She’s insultingly wrong, scornfully wrong, Christina Hoff Sommers wrong. Phooey.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)