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Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Books

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“Shrinking from men, being on guard, avoiding drawing attention to oneself: this is the daily life of women in Africa and the Middle East. As girls growing up in Mogadishu and Nairobi, my sister and I covered ourselves with hijabs to conceal ourselves from public view. Today, women in Europe must consider what manner of dress will best deflect the attention of the increasing numbers of men on the prowl.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“Societies that permit the existence of parallelthe girl’s situation did not meet the requirements for coercive measures under the law, and if the girl would not voluntarily move away from her husband, it could not force her to. As a direct consequence of the case, the social services in Mönsterås had to move to a different location after receiving threats.14 This is a blatant breakdown in the rule of law. This girl’s rights were not protected by those who are paid by Swedish taxpayers to enforce the law against child marriage. And there are many more like her. In the United States, an estimated 248,000 children, some as young as 12, were married between 2000 and 2010.15 In Germany, too, the problem of child marriage arose as asylum-seeker numbers increased. In 2016, the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community reported that 1,475 refugee minors were married, three-quarters of them girls and 361 of them under the age of 14.16 In response to these figures, the following year, the German government passed a law stating that the minimum marriage age is 18 years. In an attempt to pander to Muslim constituents, both the Left and the Greens voted against the law for being “too general.”17 SHARIA COUNCILS AND LEGAL DOUBLE STANDARDS Societies that permit the existence of parallel communities resign themselves to the growth of parallel legal systems. This is the case with sharia courts that apply Islamic law to the marital affairs of believers. Dutch researcher Machteld Zee’s study of sharia councils in the United Kingdom estimates that between ten and eighty-five sharia councils operate there.18 Zee documents cases of women seeking divorce being sent back to abusive husbands by sharia courts and being denied the legal protections that non-Muslim wives receive under UK law.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“True white supremacists want to enslave, subjugate, or annihilate nonwhites—much as true jihadis think that those who refuse to submit to Islam ought to die. Ordinary Europeans who express concern that waiting lists for hospital services and housing will worsen as more migrants enter the country are not white supremacists. However, simply ignoring their concerns or labeling them racist will only create political opportunities for true racists.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“Europe must stop pretending that the stabilization of the Muslim world is somebody else’s problem. More than “soft power” is required to restore order to the countries from which so many immigrants are coming. EU member states must be willing to engage in leadership and, if necessary, to intervene militarily to restore order in international conflict areas rather than continuing to depend on the United States to deal with each crisis. As it stands, European defense budgets are unjustifiably low considering the rapidly escalating violence of the regions to the south and east of the Mediterranean.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“They [feminists] did not accept that some women, simply because they were born into a patriarchal religion, were unworthy of the freedoms they themselves were fighting for. Today, by contrast, feminists steeped in multicultural ideology excuse the inequality imposed upon women across the Muslim world, including in the parallel societies of Europe. They pointedly “respect” this misogynistic culture rather than agitating for it to evolve. Western feminists have effectively relegated their Muslim sisters to the past. They are sleepwalking as their own rights begin to be eroded.”

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“We must not forget that the very concept that women are equal to men is a relatively new one. It emerged only in the West and despite its advancements—from the right to vote to protection from discrimination in the workplace—has yet to achieve the complete equality to which feminists aspire. This fragile near equality, which exists in law if not in every home and workplace, has existed for only a fraction of time, and history has shown us that such achievements can be quickly reversed.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“For decades Western authorities have turned a blind eye to unequal treatment of women in immigrant communities not only when it comes to marriage and divorce but also in regard to education. Examples of voluntary gender segregation at university student events may seem like minor encroachments on equal rights, but when university heads defend gender segregation, we should be concerned. In 2013, the University of Leicester’s Islamic Society seated women at the back of the room for a training course.21 Rather than condemning the discrimination, the head of Universities UK, Nicola Dandridge, defended it, suggesting that segregation of the sexes was “not completely alien to our culture.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“The social contract between citizen and state is breaking down in places where welfare schemes are accommodating large numbers of beneficiaries whose families have never contributed to the system. The original welfare state was predicated on a notion of reciprocity, but to newcomers it looks more like universal basic income. Welfare states are national, not universal. There must therefore be meaningful limits on what outsiders can claim based on the feat of having crossed a nation’s border.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“The world’s population has trebled since 1951, when the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees was ratified in Geneva. It was created in a completely different global context from the one that exists today. It was devised following the mass displacement and attempted genocide of European Jews during World War II and aimed to offer a safe haven to relatively small numbers of individuals from countries fleeing explicit, documented political persecution by governments. [...] In 1967, the convention was extended universally so that anyone living in a dangerous place, not just those personally persecuted by the state, had grounds for asylum. Millions—potentially hundreds of millions—of people now qualify.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“More than any other major religion, Islam formalizes the subordination of women. Islamic religious law, as codified by the “official” schools of Sunni Islamic law (the Hanbali, Shafi’i, Hanafi, and Maliki schools), insists on male guardianship over women. In Islam, “any woman must have a ‘guardian,’ wali; her closest male relative if she is unmarried, her husband if she is not.”16 This remnant of seventh-century Arab culture—which has spread through Islam to the other parts of the world that are now Muslim majority—has never been revised in official schools of Islamic law.17 Imams and other Islamic religious leaders today continue to chastise women for disobeying the modesty doctrine. They cite passages in the Quran to assign girls a position in the family that requires them to be docile, to depend on male relatives for money, and to submit to their husband’s dominion over their bodies. Marriage is typically arranged, and there is often an exchange of money in the process. Under the religious rule of Islam, it is still common today that a woman’s rights are essentially sold to a man she may not even know.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“When I lived in Holland, I would try to make myself physically shrink when Somali or other African men sat next to me on the train. They behaved in a proprietary manner, as though I were theirs to be subjected to lewd comments. Now I see that it is not just Somali girls editing themselves out of city streets. European women, too, are facing increased rates of sexual violence and harassment on public transit and are adopting coping mechanisms similar to those used by women in Africa and the Middle East.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“There is a paradox at the heart of contemporary Western feminism. Ideological feminists insist on grandiose goals such as “ending the patriarchy.” Yet campaigns against men-only clubs or for female representation on corporate boards are elitist concerns far removed from the daily existence of the average woman. If we think back to the sociologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, the issues Western feminists prioritize today are in the realm of self-actualization: enhancing conditions at work, having access to state-sponsored child care, joining all-male associations, balancing housework duties with male partners, and gaining prestige. This is not to say that we should forgo laudable goals such as smashing the glass ceiling. But the freedom for all women to live free from violence should come first.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“Islamism has become the “go-to” haven for those seeking order amid such chaos. Sharia courts have been established in these countries, filling the void of social control. After the savagery of dictatorship and civil war, the promise of divine law is understandably welcomed by a population hungry for order and stability. When the Islamists come to town, they therefore reestablish order again with their own savagery. For example, the immodest woman is no longer considered simply immodest; she is an adulterous sinner who must be flogged and stoned.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“The extreme, yet perhaps inevitable, expression of all these beliefs and behaviors—polygamy, religiously sanctioned bigotry, unchecked sexual harassment, a lack of sex education, repressed sexual urges, and the honor/shame dichotomy—is taharrush gamea, “the rape game” in Arabic.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“In 2006, Egyptian bloggers witnessed hundreds of men thronging the streets to celebrate the end of Ramadan, harassing women with or without hijabs, ripping off their clothes, encircling them, and trying to assault them.48 Girls ran for cover in nearby restaurants, taxis, and cinemas. As protests continued in Tahrir Square in 2012, mob attacks against women became more organized. Men formed concentric rings around individual women, stripping and raping them.49 Some Egyptian women spoke out, taking their accounts and video evidence of sexual assaults to police, but little headway was made until laws against sexual harassment were introduced in 2014.50 The rape game crossed the Mediterranean in December 2015. During New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne, as we have seen, more than a thousand young men formed rings around individual women, sexually assaulting them.51 When the victims identified the perpetrators as looking “foreign,” “North African,” and “Arab,” they were pilloried as racists on social media.52 The local feminist and magazine editor Alice Schwarzer’s dogged reporting established that the young men had coordinated and planned the attacks that night “to the detriment of the Kufar [infidels].”53 Schwarzer was vindicated twelve months later, when Cologne police chief Jürgen Mathies confirmed that the attacks had been intentionally coordinated to intimidate the German population.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“It may no longer be fashionable to make such comparisons, but the economic evidence is unequivocal: liberal democratic societies are more peaceful, prosperous, and tolerant than those that permit autocratic rule, as in Russia; one-party rule, as in China; or theocracy, as in Iran. Yet these days, those who advocate the superiority of Western civilization are demonized, especially on university campuses, as racists or white supremacists. Few within the establishment are willing to challenge the politically correct consensus and insist instead on upholding the core classical liberal values.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“Western feminists had been so focused on themselves they had ignored what was happening to other women in societies where they are seen only as sexual objects, mothers, and caregivers. Meanwhile, the concept of universal women’s rights yielded ground to the new ideals of multiculturalism and intersectionality. Women in Islamic societies who demanded equal rights were told that those were Western values. Western feminists came to believe that imposing their values on the Muslim world was a form of neocolonialism.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“men monopolizes the most desirable mates. Since accumulating wealth and status takes time and work for most men, the norm of polygamy pushes up the age of marriage for males, drives down the age of marriage for females, removes incentives for female educational and economic attainment, and increases the fertility rate. The surplus of unmarried males scrambling for an artificially reduced pool of marriageable females spurs the growth of crime and violence.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“Rapists are created, not born” has become the accepted wisdom.39 But when it comes to migrants and minorities, pointing to cultural explanations for their behavior toward women is taboo. This seems contradictory. Indeed, when you consider how Muslim men are educated about sex—or not—it makes no sense at all.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“Dawa is happening not only in Muslim communities but also in Western prisons. Believing that religious education will benefit prisoners, the authorities mistakenly give agents of dawa access to Muslim prisoners. Like wolves in sheep’s clothing, they claim to be religious community representatives, all the while harboring links to terrorist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, and Hizb ut-Tahrir.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“Honor violence is a set of enforcement measures used to uphold the modesty doctrine. Girls and women who step out of line face injury and even murder at the hands of relatives if they drift too far toward emancipation. So-called honor killing is meant to remove a stain on a family’s honor caused by real or alleged sexual misconduct. In Western countries, the victims of honor violence also include Sikh, Hindu, and Kurdish women, but most appear to be Muslim.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“Young people in Western societies have grown up with the assumption that gender equality is a given. They did not have to fight for basic equality and are often oblivious to its being undermined around them. Even when they are confronted with the erosion of women’s rights in the street, they sometimes apologize for criticizing their attackers. In court, victims of sexual assault appearing on the witness stand have to insist that they are not racists. Almost every woman I interviewed in the course of researching this book felt obliged to begin with a caveat: “I’m not against migrants,” “I’m from the Left,” or “I am not racist.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“The feminist mission has drifted, and women’s rights have been trumped by issues of racism, religion, and intersectionality. Liberal feminists today care more about the question of Palestinian statehood than the mistreatment of Palestinian women at the hands of their fathers and husbands. In the battle of the vices, sexism has been trumped by racism.”

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Book:Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights
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“Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls’ genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs or stones them for falling in love. A culture that protects women’s rights by law is better than a culture in which a man can lawfully have four wives at once and women are denied alimony and half their inheritance. A culture that appoints women to its supreme court is better than a culture that declares that the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man. It is part of Muslim culture to oppress women and part of all tribal cultures to institutionalize patronage, nepotism, and corruption. The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better. In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn’t translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse. Many people genuinely feel pain at the thought of the death of whole cultures. I see this all the time. They ask, “Is there nothing beautiful in these cultures? Is there nothing beautiful in Islam?” There is beautiful architecture, yes, and encouragement of charity, yes, but Islam is built on sexual inequality and on the surrender of individual responsibility and choice. This is not just ugly; it is monstrous.”

IslamCultural Relativism
Book:Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations
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“Female genital mutilation predates Islam. Not all Muslims do this, and a few of the peoples who do are not Islamic. But in Somalia, where virtually every girl is excised, the practice is always justified in the name of Islam. Uncircumcised girls will be possessed by devils, fall into vice and perdition, and become whores. Imams never discourage the practice: it keeps girls pure.”

Violence Against WomenCircumcisionFemale Genital MutilationGenital MutilationFemale Circumcision
Book:Infidel
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“The morning after the 9/11 attacks...we began talking about the Twin Towers attack. Ruud shook his head sadly about it all. He said, "It's so weird, isn't it, all these people saying this has to do with Islam?" I couldn't help myself...I blurted out, "But it *is* about Islam. This is based in belief. This is Islam." Ruud said, "Ayaan, of course these people may have been Muslims, but they are a lunatic fringe. We have extremist Christians, too, who interpret the bible literally. Most Muslims do not believe these things. To say so is to disparage a faith which is the second largest religion in the world, and which is civilized, and peaceful." I walked into the office thinking, "I have to wake these people up."...The Dutch had forgotten that it was possible for people to stand up and wage war, destroy property, imprison, kill, impose laws of virtue because of the call of God. That kind of religion hadn't been present in Holland for centuries. It was not a lunatic fringe who felt this way about America and the West. I knew that a vast mass of Muslims would see the attacks as justified retaliation against the infidel enemies of Islam.”

ReligionPoliticsIslam
Author:Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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“In Somalia, like many countries across Africa and the Middle East, little girls are made "pure" by having their genitals cut out. There is no other way to describe this procedure, which typically occurs around the age of five. After the child's clitoris and labia are carved out, scraped off, or, in more compassionate areas, merely cut or pricked, the whole area is often sewn up, so that a thick band of tissue forms a chastity belt made of the girl's own scarred flesh. A small hole is carefully situated to permit a thin flow of pee. Only great force can tear the scar tissue wider, for sex.”

PatriarchyViolence Against WomenFemale Genital MutilationGenital MutilationFemale CircumcisionViolence Against Girls
Book:Infidel
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