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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Speaking Freely when the Guns Go Off

07 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Politics, Religion

≈ Comments Off on Speaking Freely when the Guns Go Off

Tags

Adam Gopnik, and the True Enemies of Free Expression, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charb, Charlie Hebdo, Copenhagen, extremism, free expression, Free Speech, Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Speech, Hypercacher, Islam, Islamism, Islamophobia, liberty, Maajid Nawaz, Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Podcast, Sam Harris, terror, Terrorism, Waking Up Podcast

[Play the brief clip above]

“This is what it’s like for peaceful people to gather in a cafe and attempt to have a conversation about our basic freedoms in an open society.

You have to ask yourself: what kind of a world do you want to live in? What kind of world do you want your kids to live in?

This is the world you’re living in now. And as someone who is spending a fair amount of time dealing with these issues, I can tell you that I no longer feel safe doing so… And this is not just me. I’m talking about those people in Copenhagen. I’m talking about those people in open societies everywhere, who have to deal with this growing menace of Islamic jihadism.

Unless we can speak honestly about this, unless we can resist the theocratic demands being placed on us, we will lose our way of life. In fact, we have already lost it in many respects.

We have to reclaim our freedom of speech. So if you care about living in an open society that doesn’t more and more resemble Jerusalem or Beirut, if you care about free speech, real freedom of speech, not just its political guarantee — the reality of being able to speak about what you need to speak about in public, without being murdered by some maniac or without having to spend the rest of your life being hunted by a jihadist mob…

If you care about my work, or the work of other secularists, or of other Muslim reformers like Maajid Nawaz or Ayaan Hirsi Ali; if you care about our ability to notice and criticize and correct for bad ideas, then you have to condemn [the dishonesty of the regressive left]. Please push back against this. Please lose your patience at shocking displays of intellectual dishonesty used to excuse it. Your response to this really matters.”

__________

Sam Harris’s reflections on the shooting at the Krudttoenden cultural center in Copenhagen last February, in which 40 people had assembled to discuss the state of free expression in post-Hebdo Europe.

The audio clip records the horrific seconds when a gunman burst through the door, letting off a hail of bullets that would kill one and injure several others. The woman’s voice you hear in the opening is that of Inna Shevchenko, the Ukrainian feminist activist, who had just taken the stage and was discussing the excuses many Westerners make on behalf of those who kill because of cartoons.

Today is the one year anniversary of the Hebdo massacre, and Saturday will be the anniversary of the Hypercacher Kosher supermarket shooting (but who remembers that?). I’ve just ordered the posthumously published book — completed three days before the attacks — by Charb, with a forward from Adam Gopnik, Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, and the True Enemies of Free Expression.

Go on:

  • Flemming Rose, editor of the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten, talks about “the tyranny of silence”
  • A brief reflection on 25 years of the Salman Rushdie fatwa
  • Douglas Murray shows us some strangely uncontroversial cartoons

Freedom of Speech by Norman Rockwell

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Terrorism Works

14 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, BBC, Charlie Hebdo, Douglas Murray, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Islam, Islamism, Jyllandsposten, Maajid Nawaz, Muhammad, Muhammad Cartoons, terror, Terrorism

150114_EM_CharlieHebdoEbay

Interviewer: In a sense the terrorists are winning, aren’t they? They’ve cowed the Western media into not reprinting the cartoons.

Douglas Murray: Not only are they winning, they’ve won. They’ve won. Terrorism works — that’s the brutal fact of it.

And a lot of people will take lessons from that today.

You know, after the 2005 Jyllandsposten cartoon, by the conservative paper in Denmark, the only paper in Europe, really, that was still willing to draw pictures of Muhammad in the same way they’re willing to draw pictures of every other religious, political — you name it — figure, was Charlie Hebdo.

So Charlie Hebdo stood alone. Charlie Hebdo was attacked.

That’s why I’ve suggested that there’s really only two options that the press can choose from here.

The first is that we all agree that we live under an element of Islamic blasphemy law. I think that would be highly regrettable. I don’t think that is what our society should live under. I think we should do everything possible to avoid it.

But if we are going to avoid it, I think that it’s going to have to be done unanimously. All of the newspapers, all of the magazines — the BBC, Sky, Channel 4 — should unanimously publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons at a particular hour, because as Ayaan Hirsi Ali said after the Danish cartoons row, we have to spread the risk around.

It cannot be that a single cartoonist is holding the line for all freedom of speech. Or that a single, small satirical magazine is doing it.

It has to be everybody.

__________

Douglas Murray, the clearest voice on the issue of Islamism in Europe, speaking during a BBC discussion with Maajid Nawaz.

  • I wrote an open letter to Brandeis University defending Ayaan Hirsi Ali
  • Douglas Murray gives one of my favorite speeches: If we don’t stand for Western values, who will?

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If We Do Not Stand for Western Values, Who Will?

25 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Debate, Freedom

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Douglas Murray, ethics, Irshad Manji, Islam, Islamism, morality, Morals, Muslim World, politics, Reform, religion, Secularism, Theocracy, Western Civilization, Western Values

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

“I talk at a lot of campuses, and I was at one last night in London where a student got up and started protesting because I had said that an Islamist government was of itself a bad thing, which I think it is. I replied to this student — and it’s not a hard question to ask — ‘Well name one Islamist state that you would want to live in.’ And this is a serious question, ladies and gentlemen. It is also a personal question…

One of my best friends, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is in hiding again tonight because of what she says, and she would be killed if she went into any Muslim country. And I think that matters… We have the great blessing of living under this system. And we take it for granted. And we spit on it. And we can because we’re living in that freedom. But I beg you ladies and gentlemen not to pretend that that means that we shouldn’t assert the superiority of that system, because that is what it is. It is a superior system…

And if we do not stand for our values, ladies and gentlemen, who will? Who will assert them across the Muslim world? Who are the reformers in the Muslim world going to look to when they want to see, and desperately need, separation of church and state? If we do not say that we believe this is the best way to live, who is going to do it elsewhere? As Irshad Manji said a few weeks ago when she was in London: ‘If you give up on us, people like me are dead.’

And ladies and gentlemen, I think we should take that call seriously. To assert the superiority of Western values is to state the obvious. It is to have faith in ourselves and it’s to have faith in other people.”

__________

Some highlights from Douglas Murray’s rousing opening remarks in his debate on the motion ‘Is West Best?’ – Should we be reluctant to assert Western values as superior?.

I’d never heard of Murray until I was just sent this video, and I have to note that it’s one of the strongest short bursts of public speaking I’ve seen in a very, very long time.

  • In related news: Last week, I wrote an open letter to Brandeis University about the imperative to defend Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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