Ali on Paris Killings

For John, BLUF:  I don't think we have to kill a lot of people, or even any, but we must take a stand.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Over at The Wall Street Journal is an OpEd by Ms Ayaan Hirsi Ali,♠ the bête noire of the understanding Progressives.♥  Ms Ali probably escaped death at the hands of radical when living and working in the Netherlands.  Her cinematic partner in Holland, Theo van Gogh was brutally butchered on the streets of Amsterdam.

The headline is "How to Answer the Paris Terror Attack".  The article says "The West must stand up for freedom—and acknowledge the link between Islamists’ political ideology and their religious beliefs."

After the horrific massacre Wednesday at the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, perhaps the West will finally put away its legion of useless tropes trying to deny the relationship between violence and radical Islam.

This was not an attack by a mentally deranged, lone-wolf gunman.  This was not an “un-Islamic” attack by a bunch of thugs—the perpetrators could be heard shouting that they were avenging the Prophet Muhammad.  Nor was it spontaneous.  It was planned to inflict maximum damage, during a staff meeting, with automatic weapons and a getaway plan. It was designed to sow terror, and in that it has worked.

The West is duly terrified. But it should not be surprised.

If there is a lesson to be drawn from such a grisly episode, it is that what we believe about Islam truly doesn’t matter.  This type of violence, jihad, is what they, the Islamists, believe.  There are numerous calls to violent jihad in the Quran.  But the Quran is hardly alone.  In too much of Islam, jihad is a thoroughly modern concept.  The 20th-century jihad “bible,” and an animating work for many Islamist groups today, is “The Quranic Concept of War,” a book written in the mid-1970s by Pakistani Gen. S.K. Malik.  He argues that because God, Allah, himself authored every word of the Quran, the rules of war contained in the Quran are of a higher caliber than the rules developed by mere mortals.

Here is how Ms Ali ends her opinion piece.

There can only be one answer to this hideous act of jihad against the staff of Charlie Hebdo.  It is the obligation of the Western media and Western leaders, religious and lay, to protect the most basic rights of freedom of expression, whether in satire on any other form.  The West must not appease, it must not be silenced.  We must send a united message to the terrorists:  Your violence cannot destroy our soul.

In case you are still looking for an answer to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's question, "What difference at this point does it make?" Charlie Hobdo is part of the answer.  We let an extremist group attack our diplomatic staff overseas and blamed it on a cheap video about the oppression of Coptic Christians in Egypt.  Coptic Christians who get more support from Egyptian President al-Sisi than they do from the US Government.  The difference is that if we let the Salafist extremists get away with this sort of thing without strong condemnation and action, then they will continue to do it and intimidate us and run our lives.  Ultimately, it is about our freedom.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Ms. Hirsi Ali, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, is the author of Infidel (2007). Her latest book, Heretic:  The Case for a Muslim Reformation, will be published in April by HarperCollins (maybe).
♥  For example, Brandeis University backing out on giving Ms Ali an Honorary Degree, under pressure.