By Philip Walzer
The Virginian-Pilot
© February 4, 2015
NORFOLK
Ayaan Hirsi Ali stood before a slide of the caged Jordanian pilot about to be set afire by Islamic State group extremists.
That, she said at Chrysler Hall on Tuesday night, will be the norm if they are not defeated.
"You are going to see people beheaded, their hands and legs cut off, the mass enslavement of women," warned Hirsi Ali, a sharp critic of Muslim leaders and radicals and an advocate of women's rights.
"We have had over a long period of time... even before the Reagan administration, so many warning signs that we have ignored," Hirsi Ali said. "But now we have no more excuse to ignore them."
In an interview Tuesday, she labeled the Western response to Islamic threats as "incoherent and haphazard."
During her speech at the Norfolk Forum, she advocated "a battle of ideas.... Their slogan is, 'We love death.' Ours should be, 'We love life, and we're going to fight for it to the end.' That is an easy war to win."
Hirsi Ali grew up a Muslim in Somalia. She was subjected to genital mutilation and fled to the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage to a stranger. There, she served in the Parliament from 2003 to 2006.
She wrote the script for the 2004 movie "Submission," criticizing Muslim attitudes toward women. That year, the director, Theo van Gogh, was murdered. His killer pinned a death threat against Hirsi Ali with a knife to van Gogh's body.
Hirsi Ali serves as a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, part of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
During her lecture, she drew connections between radical groups such as the Islamic State and Muslim countries with which the United States has relations.
Pakistan, she said, "mocked us. For years, they helped Osama bin Laden, and we found him without their assistance." Saudi Arabia has supplied the Islamic State group with volunteers and imprisons people for such crimes as "drinking alcohol, being ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖ and for charges of indecency, whatever that means," Hirsi Ali said.
She also criticized Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and dismissed U.S. attempts to negotiate with Iran.
All of them want to see a "global order that is based on the constitution of the Quran," Hirsi Ali said. "Where all these groups differ is the means to get to that place. Now there is no excuse not to see it."
Hirsi Ali, who has renounced Islam, said she has "no faith" in "so-called interfaith dialogues." "I see one side pushing for their values and the other side trying to accommodate and accommodate."
She won a standing ovation at the end of her talk and several bursts of applause throughout. But she also has faced criticism for her fierce critiques of the Muslim world. Brandeis University in Massachusetts last year withdrew an invitation for her to receive an honorary degree, saying her "past statements are inconsistent" with the school's values.
She has been quoted as calling Islam "a destructive, nihilistic cult of death" and "the new fascism." Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called her "one of the worst of the worst of the Islam haters in America."
In the interview Tuesday, Hirsi Ali said Brandeis' administrators bowed to "Muslim students with strong voices who felt that a Jєωιѕн university was doing something that was against their values."
She added: "If you read all of my work, I am not using a broad brush. We all know there are multitudes - millions and millions - of people who have no say over their own lives. I'm not talking about those people."
Hirsi Ali said she is focusing on the "jihadis" who are in charge in the Muslim world. "We are at war against the jihadi elite."
She brought up Jordanian pilot Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh in the interview: "We thought in the West that we had put that kind of thing behind us a long time ago. That's the kind of evil we are facing. They have the audacity to put images like that on YouTube to be watched by every child, every woman, every man."
But Ali added: "I don't know if we agree that this is an evil we have to defeat."
Posted to: Military Nation - World News Norfolk