Pro Secula Mori
Posted on May 7th, 2009
by Freddy Gray |
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a brave and impressive woman. Yet she’s also a crashing bore and a bully. Here she is today, fulminating again against feeble Europe for not standing up to the Islamic menace.
Most of the article is, as you might expect, standard beware-the-Muslim-in-your-midst stuff. We should loathe multi-culturalism and remember that Islam is antithetical to abortion rights and gay pride. And on and on.
Nothing new there. Her opening, however, struck me as astonishing.
In 2006, I had a debate with Tariq Ramadan, the author of Western Muslims and the future of Islam. In the hypothetical event of a war between Egypt and Switzerland, for which community would he be prepared to die, I asked him.
Mr Ramadan has dual citizenship. He’s an Egyptian by birth and a Swiss by naturalisation. His response was one of rage on different levels. Above all I think he was outraged that one should ask such a question. He refused to answer.
In this way, they evade one of the chief criteria of citizenship. Political allegiance to the constitution of your country is the minimum requirement. It is this state of affairs that makes Christopher Caldwell’s book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration and the West (Allen Lane, £17.99), which opens with the sentence, “Western Europe became a multi-ethnic society in a fit of absence of mind,” a chilling read.
This absence of mind, which Caldwell lays bare, is reflected in Europe’s immigration policies and especially in its response to Islam. No debate today is more explosive, more sensitive, more confusing and more frightening than the debate on the future of Islam in Europe.
In March this year, the French intellectual Pascal Bruckner and I spoke about Caldwell’s book. Bruckner said, “Americans [like Caldwell] do not understand Europe. There are many Muslims who, in their daily lives, are more agnostic and in their practices even atheist, but are just Muslim in name.”
This seems to be reassuring. But would these agnostic and unpracticing Muslims, if push came to shove, die for Islam or for France? My guess is they would, most likely, die for Islam.
This is crazy nonsense. Who would you rather die for? What if you don’t want to die at all? Does belief in secular liberalism now demand a death pledge?
Imagine if Miss Ali started asking Americans whom they would rather be slain for: America or Jesus Christ? She would be reviled, and rightly so. Ramadan was quite justified in taking offense; Ali’s question was rude and wrong — she demanded what the new president would call “a false choice.”
Besides, when was the last time anybody ever died for Switzerland? Answer here.
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”
Filed under: Iraq, Uncategorized, War
I remember in HS, a social studies teacher asked a very pro-Israel secular jewish kid (i’m of the tribe, as was the teacher so relax): “If Israel and the US went to war, which side would you chose?” His answer was the only possible one a thinking person could give, he said “It depends….”
Her’s a hypothetical for Alaan Hirsi Ali. What if Switzerland lost its collective mind and started systematically murdering it’s ethnic Arabs? Which side would Ms Ali fight on in that case? An aburd hypothetical? No more absurd than the one she tossed out.
Quite right, Hankest. And I’ve added a link to some details about Swiss neutrality above.
we shouldn’t loathe multiculturalism? what exactly are we “conserving” at the american conservative?
Is there something about the messenger that undermines the message?
One can certainly see that the brave and wonderful Ayaan Hirsi Ali is earning her keep over at the American Enterprise Institute.
She made have imprecisely phrased the question, but he knew what she was saying. She is a secular liberal loser atheist no doubt, but the Tariq Ramadan is likely no better.
Once upon a time on a planet called Earth there lived an enormous big dragon. The dragon was so big that it covered 1/4 of the surface of the earth! Funnily enough, the people that lived on that planet weren’t really afraid of that dragon, because they reasoned that only a small part, even less than 1%, like the teeth and the breath of fire were really dangerous and that the rest was pretty harmless.
It was known, though, better not to tease or make fun of the dragon, because if you did, it would start making funny noises and spewing flames. So the people made an effort not to upset the dragon and to always appease it. Of course there were the occasional accidents where the dragon would trample a building or county or two, but hey, what would you expect with a dragon of that size and still growing? After such calamities, important people would always say: the dragon is an animal of peace.
Then some people started to shout and say that the dragon was actually more dangerous than it made itself look. One woman even came forward with the preposterous claim that she had escaped from the belly of the beast and that a lot more women were being kept there in submission, not only by the dragon but by the dragon’s servants that lived there too: men.
Other people started to claim that the dragon’s actual objective was to become so big it would cover all of the earth. While they were making these claims most other people would try to make them shut up, because they didn’t want the dragon to get upset and why would they make these wild accusations in the first place?
Well it turned out that this dragon was ordered by a god, who claimed to be the one god. The order was passed on to a prophet who created the dragon just by writing down this one god’s message, word for word in a book. And because it was this one god’s word nobody would be allowed to question it, making sure no deviation from the original plan would be possible, ever. Basically, the plan calls for the spreading of the word of the one god until all people live by the laws set out in this book. No more need for discussions, votes or democracy, because everything is written in this book!
The dragon is the collective work of not only those who actively, sometimes forcefully, promote this plan, but as much so of those who passively submit to it. Some make up the teeth, some the belly, some are responsible for the breath of fire and a lot are just part of it because they don’t know any better.
the only thing for evil to win is for good to do nothing
I hope most American Christians would reply with Thomas More, “I die the king’s good servant but God’s first.” That is, until recently my country was a more or less a Christian one where civic values and Christian virtue ran along generally parallel lines.
The same cannot be said of Muslims in any non-Muslim society. My experience of them is that they cannot just agree to disagree. They always insist on the primacy of their values, as primitive as they are.
Still, is she trying to save Europe or attacking her former co-religionists at the behest of her new paymasters? There is a lot of inflammatory propaganda around funded by the usual suspects. People like Mark Steyn may be the enemy of our enemy (to use an Arab expression), but that does not make them our friends.
spot on Mary. Don’t they love a ‘turncoat’ !
Mary, i’ll assume you’re being facetious when you call her brave and wonderful, but these days one cannot be sure.
Nevertheless, what would be the reaction if Ms Ali asked someone like Dershowitz, or Senator Liberman “If the US and Israel went to war, which side would you be on?”
NOW that would be brave.
AMEN to what “wm” said.
Sounds like Mr. Grey is fighting against “Islamophobia.” Just like David Duke, who loves to make common cause with “anti-racists” like Ahmadinejad, and victims of the “racist attack on Gaza.”
Its all some variation of the idea that my enemy’s enemy is my friend.
Non-native Muslims residing in Europe need to have the same respect for Christianity and European majority rule that European visitors to the Middle East are expected to have towards the people of those countries, their history, culture and traditions.
Just because this woman works at AEI doesn’t mean she’s not right about this.
So the dragon is the United States? I thought some pats of the anology were rather strained.
I believe the point is that whereas Jews have been accused for a long time of having dual loyalty, in fact Muslims definitely have it, without question. If push came to shove, who would they side with? The country they happen to be living in, or the ummah? If you don’t believe Ayaan is correct in her thinking, try putting that question to any followers of Islam you happen to know. See what kind of response you get.
Miss Ali is a radical atheist who, it should be remembered, is a darling of the neocons because she despises Christianity with a white-hot hatred that’s just one shale less than that with which she despises Islam.
She is no friend of Christianity, or conservatism, or traditional values.
Atheists must be laughing their asses off, watching people of tradition and faith fighting each other, and knowing that they will be the ones who benefit.
Someday, American conservatives will understand what a bunch of suckers they are. But by then it will be too late.
The craziest part is, “Political allegiance to the constitution of your country is the minimum requirement.”
I think that this has a lot to do with the Nationalism/Patriotism divide that Daniel Larison often writes about. Hirsi Ali takes the “proposition nation” idea to a wild extreme. I think Hankest’s hypothetical is a very astute point. Hirsi Ali talks as if the current secular/liberal values are an eternal part of Europe. Obviously, this isn’t true; the last century was filled with counterexamples. What if the nations of Western Europe enacted crazy new laws or constitutions? According to Hirsi Ali’s logic, anyone who disagreed with these political structures would be totally estranged from the “community” (the fact that she uses the word community to refer to nation-states is pretty weird too). But that’s clearly not the whole story; people aren’t only bound to their communities by political assent, but also by ties of tradition, language, history (i.e., patriotism).