Lifting the veil: Hirsi Ali’s awkward truths about Islam

Last week’s media storm about the Islam critic abandoning her trip highlights how debased our politics has become.

Last week’s media storm about the decision by Muslim reform advocate Ayaan Hirsi Ali to abandon her trip to Australia — and the spin various media put on the cancellation — is the ultimate culture war false narrative and highlights how debased our politics and media have become.

Hirsi Ali was described as an extremist in Fairfax Media. Some senior journalists on Twitter were so wild in their criticism of the refugee from Islamic terror threats to her life that they only made it clear to informed readers they had not read her writings.

How conflicted must Q&A host Tony Jones have felt to hear his guest Linda Burney and many in the audience spout utter nonsense about the Somali-born former Dutch politician who was to have appeared on last Monday night’s show. Jones’s good friend, the late Christopher Hitchens, had lionised Hirsi Ali and her writings as a hero of enlightenment values.

No such uproar occurred only three years ago when another Muslim female refusenik, the Canadian-born Muslim writer ­Irshad Manji, appeared on the show, and the previous Hirsi Ali visits did not erupt in violent ­Islamophobia.

Yet last week Hirsi Ali, winner of literally dozens of feminist and free speech awards globally, was treated like a pariah. What is going on in this social media-­inspired world of offence and ­virtue-signalling?

Like so much in modern politics and media, much of the journalism was based on a dislike of who supported Hirsi Ali. Because Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones and ­others on the right supported her, many progressive news sites treated her as an extremist and gave no indication of knowing her books or the fact that she had been a hero to many in Denmark and Sweden, as well as in the US, in much the same way Satanic ­Verses author Salman Rushdie, a friend and supporter of Hirsi Ali, had been a generation earlier.

The foreign editor of The ­Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Maher Mughrabi, published a silly piece denying the violence of Islam as a religion (read what the Koran and what many Imams say about apostasy if you doubt that violence) and denying its link to terrorism but blaming the postcolonial West and the politics of oil. Try telling that to the dead of Paris and Brussels, London and New York.

SBS gave plenty of weight to the quotes of decidedly non-veiled Hana Assafiri, who runs Speed Date a Muslim and owns the Melbourne Moroccan Soup Kitchen.

“Violence against women is an expression of misogyny underscoring all societal systems,” Assafiri told SBS.

Assafiri is a spokeswoman for an online Facebook protest group which rejects “any Islamic basis for the violence that occurred to Hirsi Ali in her life and the violence perpetrated to women all over the world”.

Prize for the best demolition of Assafiri and her fellow anti-Hirsi Ali protesters goes to my former reporter and now ABC journalist, Andrew West, who calmly and methodically exposed Assafiri on Radio National’s Religion and Ethics Report on Wednesday.

Well Dutch film maker Theo Van Gogh’s killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, who shot the director of the Hirsi Ali film Submission eight times including at point blank range as he lay wounded and then tried to behead him, made it clear before his life sentence without parole that he committed the crime in defence of Islam. The film, narrated by Hirsi Ali, was about the subjugation of women in many Islamic societies.

Assafiri and some of the veiled women filmed for the Facebook protest should get past their university women’s studies gender theory to remember Sharia law recommends the stoning of women for infidelity and permits the honour killing of the victims of rape, as Hirsi Ali told Andrew Bolt in an interview on Thursday night that you can watch on his blog.

Hirsi Ali also pointed out that the women in the protest video were free to have their say ­precisely because they were in a democracy rather than in the Muslim world. She asked where was the film from these women in protest against last week’s ­gassing of children in Syria? Where indeed?

The daughter of a violent, murderous Somali warlord, Hirsi Ali was educated in Nairobi when sent there with her mother and siblings after her father took a younger bride. Hirsi Ali was the victim of female genital mutilation as a five-year-old and has led global campaigns against the practice, including demanding that European doctors inform authorities when they detect cases. Why were progressive women not supporting that?

Yet the 400 signatories to the Facebook petition and the veiled Muslim women shown speaking against Hirsi Ali claimed they were being physically threatened by the proposed visit.

Progressive media false narratives were bad enough a few years ago during the Rudd and Gillard governments when Fairfax and the ABC, big supporters of action against climate change at literally any price, were unable to bring themselves to report the problems with the $2.4 billion pink batts scheme that killed four installers and burned down hundreds of homes. But that was ignoring a story. This is turning a story upside down.

Hirsi Ali was driven into hiding in The Netherlands after van Gogh’s murder in 2004. A letter threatening Hirsi Ali’s life was fixed to van Gogh’s heart by a dagger. How does that compare with the injured feelings of Australian Muslim women? What are the families of murdered ­Sydney police employee Curtis Cheng or of the dead at the Lindt cafe siege to think of this denial of the ­obvious?

I don’t support a ban on Muslim immigration for obvious reasons. As the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Federal Police will tell you, such a ban would only ­exacerbate the problems of alienated young Muslims turning to ­Islamic State and other terror groups. Interestingly, Hirsi Ali supports continued Muslim immigration to the US. Yet I am a supporter of reporting and telling the truth. I was The Australian’s editor-in-chief who backed editorial cartoonist Bill Leak and reporter Paul Maley when they were threatened with death by ISIS.

Hirsi Ali has toned down her criticism of Islam, and all religions, since her first book, but is surely correct in her present position: she supports an Islamic reformation. So too do many Islamic scholars and much of the Islamic middle class in the Middle East.   She was a controversial figure in the Dutch parliament, especially after a Dutch television program proved she had lied about her circumstances as a refugee in her application for citizenship. As Julie Szego wrote for Fairfax Media last week, when has lying by refugees seeking safety become a crime for the left?

I read Hirsi Ali’s books, Infidel and Nomad in Turkey in 2011. I read the books in public and it never occurred to me to hide them. Turkish friends I spoke to were interested in the books and many Turkish women, who at that time were far less likely to wear the veil than they are today, agreed with Hirsi Ali’s criticisms of the way Islam treats women in some countries.

How then to explain the videos of Australian Muslim women claiming they felt threatened by the proposed visit of Hirsi Ali? How do we compare the horror of middle-class Australian women potentially facing “Islamo­phobia” with the fate of van Gogh, and the horror of Hirsi Ali receiving death threats?

I recommend people read her books and decide for themselves. And for young women unsure whether Muslims need a reformation and the role of Islam in world violence, I highly recommend the work of British academic David Pryce-Jones. All of this makes Australian debate look parochial and childish. Hirsi Ali is a world figure. Australians need a good under­standing of changes in global Islam.

Just as much of the Sunni Middle East is radicalising, Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, is coming under the thrall of radical political Islam.

We should name this global movement for what it is, and be honest about what is does. Even if it makes a few local women who have embraced the veil — once considered by feminists as an ­instrument of oppression — ­uncomfortable.