Bloody Borders

Many of the Left's trained hamsters in the media would be more likely to do an on-camera interview (without protective clothing) with an Ebola victim than they would allow the public to hear Ayaan Hirsi Ali express her views on Islam. Here are a few recent comments, published in The Wall Street Journal:

“Islam’s borders are bloody,” wrote the late political scientist Samuel Huntington in 1996, “and so are its innards.” Nearly 20 years later, Huntington looks more right than ever before. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, at least 70% of all the fatalities in armed conflicts around the world last year were in wars involving Muslims. In 2013, there were nearly 12,000 terrorist attacks world-wide. The lion’s share were in Muslim-majority countries, and many of the others were carried out by Muslims. By far the most numerous victims of Muslim violence—including executions and lynchings not captured in these statistics—are Muslims themselves.

Not all of this violence is explicitly motivated by religion, but a great deal of it is. I believe that it is foolish to insist, as Western leaders habitually do, that the violent acts committed in the name of Islam can somehow be divorced from the religion itself. For more than a decade, my message has been simple: Islam is not a religion of peace.

When I assert this, I do not mean that Islamic belief makes all Muslims violent. This is manifestly not the case: There are many millions of peaceful Muslims in the world. What I do say is that the call to violence and the justification for it are explicitly stated in the sacred texts of Islam. Moreover, this theologically sanctioned violence is there to be activated by any number of offenses, including but not limited to apostasy, adultery, blasphemy and even something as vague as threats to family honor or to the honor of Islam itself.

Hirsi Ali is a hero, an African woman who has suffered greatly at the hands of radical Islam, an activist who has been repeatedly threatened with death for speaking against the violence perpetrated by adherents of a religion she was born into, and a compelling spokesperson who tells inconvenient truths.

She is therefore shunned by the Left, despite her gender, her skin color, her harrowing story, her bravery—she is persona non gratia.

By promoting the fantasy that a very small percent of Muslims support Jihad (know one knows what the percentage is because know one wants to know), we refuse to call Islam to account. Hirsi Ali comments further:

Instead of letting Islam off the hook with bland clichés about the religion of peace, we in the West need to challenge and debate the very substance of Islamic thought and practice. We need to hold Islam accountable for the acts of its most violent adherents and to demand that it reform or disavow the key beliefs that are used to justify those acts.

Christians and Jews went through a reformation of sorts centuries ago, rejecting the most violent passages in their holy books. That's why the Crusades are a very distant memory (except, it seems, for Barack Obama who inexplicably raised the Crusades in a recent speech, and Islamic radicals, who raise the issue repeatedly). Islam must have their own reformation if it intends to become an active partner with the world's people as we progress into the 21st century, but there seems to be little progress in that direction. In some ways, that's as troubling as the Islamic thugs who terrorize vast swaths of the Middle East, threaten Israel with annihilation, and the West with extreme violence.