Newsweek: Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The Global War on Christians

The fact that people are more willing to discuss Hirsi Ali as a flawed person rather than christians being opressed in the Middle East is unbecoming.

@Taoist 68: Yeah, she has clearly never heard of the Kahanists.

@Best Of: I don't fault her for "focusing on Muslims", I fault her for being a bigot. I'm an atheist and I focus on Judaism because I was brought up Jewish. I could sit here all day telling you every single way it makes no sense. But I don't call it fascism:

I don't advocate friggin' FORCE-CONVERTING jews:

(Frankly I don't know how to describe this next one)

She is not "against Islam", she hates Muslims. And frankly I'm annoyed that you keep trying to defend her; you remind me of the hypothetical man from Politics and the English Language who says "While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement." because he cannot say "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so."

If you didn't notice, the conversation has "Ayaan Hirsi Ali" in the title, so it's pretty on topic to discuss her and her claims about Christianity and Islam.

I do think that there needs to be more global acknowledgement of the persecution that Christians are undergoing in the Mideast, India, China and other countries (most people will dismiss any mention of it out of hand as something that doesn't exist). It's not solely related to Islam: in India there's substantial violence against Christians by radical Hindus; in China it's by the atheist government, which doesn't like religious groups they can't directly control.

But I think that Hirsi Ali hurts the cause more than she helps it, and I don't particularly want her on my side. The previous posts on this site have demonstrated pretty clearly that she's bigoted against Muslims. There's also the fact that she's an atheist, which makes it feel like she's just using persecution of Christians as a tool to stir up anti-Muslim feeling, rather than writing such a book because she's genuinely interested in increasing people's understanding and knowledge of what's occurring. (Historically, atheist governments are probably responsible for more persecution of Christians than Islam or any other religion is; the Soviet Union in particular.) I don't appreciate an atheist trying to stir up conflict between two different religions for her own purposes.

@Black Humor,

I would agree with you, except that if Stalin didn't pay for the industrialization of Russia with the lives of ~20 million Ukranians and other ethnic minorities World War II would have gone quite poorly for us, so it's a question of "which is worse?" between the Axis Powers and the Soviet Union...

Anyhow, wow, whoever this person is, they're a neoconservative fuckwit who's full of shit.

Neoconservative fuckwit is like, your catchphrase.

The fact that people are more willing to discuss Hirsi Ali as a flawed person rather than christians being opressed in the Middle East is unbecoming.

Thing is, her flaws make her a bad source on Christian oppression in the Middle East, so they're relevant to this discussion.

...that was a paraphrase from Politics And The English Language. By George Orwell. I am not saying anything about Stalin, but I really hope you are not saying that what he did was justified.

Anyway this is vastly off topic.

No, I'm saying that in terms of hindsight, those people were fucked anyhow—between Hitler or Stalin—and so the outcome was effectively set to be the same either way regardless. The way it turned out in reality just happened to be convenient for the rest of the Western world, in the short-term. Convenient =/= good.