Topic: Liberal Fascism
Brandeis University just provided us with an exemplary demonstration of politically correct cowardliness by reversing its decision to award an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is well known for her strident critique of radical Islamism, particularly as regards its oppression and mistreatment of women. Under pressure from apologists for Islamist extremism including the disreputable Council on Islamic-American Relations, Brandeis caved to the false charge that Ali is a hate-spewing Islamophobe. But now that Muslims have become a designated mascot group of progressivism, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised. And to expect a demonstration of moral courage from university administrators is, well, utopian in the literal sense of the word.
Even so, can we take a moment to express disgust for one group that might possibly have been expected to rise to Hirsi Ali’s defense? I mean feminists, on the Brandeis campus and elsewhere. These women—privileged Western women who never had to worry about undergoing genital mutilation or being forced into an arranged marriage or being stuffed into a burka—spend endless hours gassing about the glass ceiling and the pay gap and the patriarchy and the injustice of being denied the right to a partial-birth abortion on demand. Wouldn’t you think that they could spare a particle of outrage on behalf of a sister who is battling far worse forms of oppression?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has walked the walk. A native of Somalia, she grew up in a fundamentalist Muslim family that inflicted upon her genital mutilation among other horrors. Fleeing her homeland, she found refuge in the Netherlands. There her vocal opposition to radical Islamism, her exposure of its oppression of women and girls, led to a partnership with a Dutch filmmaker. Together the produced a documentary on the subject. In return they received multiple death threats from Muslim fanatics, one of whom eventually stabbed to death Hirsi Ali’s partner. This so frightened the liberal Dutch establishment that there was talk of revoking her refugee status. The Dutch police expressed doubts that they could protect her from assassination. So she came to America. And here this courageous woman has been welcomed, though not of course by progressives and certainly not by feminists.
You can read what Hirsi Ali planned to say in her Brandeis speech and judge for yourself if the charges of bigotry and Islamophobia leveled against her are true. Personally, in view of her life story, I find such charges nothing short of vile. They confirm every negative judgment I’ve formed about the intellectual and moral corruption of liberalism, progressivism, leftism—call it what you will. Confronted with an inconvenient truth—that their latest mascot group, adopted out of dislike for George W. Bush and his war on terror, is the primary culprit in the great crime of our time—progressives stick their fingers in their ears, close their eyes and chant the same old la-la-la. And that portion of progressivism that markets itself as the champion of women’s rights is particularly worthy of contempt. The shame of Brandeis is nothing compared to the shame of feminism.
