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| Ms. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the founder of the AHA Foundation, a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, and is the author of Infidel (2007). Her latest book, Heretic: The Case for a Muslim Reformation, will be published in April by HarperCollins |
The Daily Beast:
Our Duty Is to Keep Charlie Hebdo Alive The author of ‘Infidel’ on the Paris massacre, memories of Theo Van Gogh, and why the Western media should reprint the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.
"God, I thought yesterday, how could this possibly happen? Charlie Hebdo is not new to this. They had reprinted the cartoons of Muhammad from 2006. They were under police protection for a good long time. They moved from their offices to new offices. So my first thought was, how could this even happen? How could the entire staff of Charlie Hebdo be gone—murdered in cold blood?
And then came the memories. In Holland, when my friend Theo Van Gogh was killed just over 10 years ago, what followed—after the initial shock—was that a lot of people started saying that he was a provocateur, and that he had offended Muslims. For me, it was morally very clear. You were morally very confused if you thought that somebody who uses speech, who uses words, who uses the pen, should be killed for that; if you thought that the only way to have a dialogue is for one side to use words while the other side uses violence to make their point. Everyone out there who says, “Charlie Hebdo provoked,” is making the same fundamental error.
We do need to wake up to the fact that there is a movement—a very lethal movement, very cruel—that has a political vision about how the world should be organized and how society should live. And in order for them to realize their vision, they are willing to use any means. They are willing to use violence. They are willing to use terror."
Read complete article here
The Wall Street Journal: Ayaan Hirsi Ali: How to Answer the Paris Terror Attack
The West must stand up for freedom—and acknowledge the link between Islamists’ political ideology and their religious beliefs.
