In praise of Hirsi Ali

Re: Can Islam be reformed? Robert Fulford, Feb. 11

Thank you Robert Fulford for featuring a column on this clever woman. Where are the other female voices like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalia- born Muslim, who escaped from a marriage arranged by her father? She studied the great philosophers at a university in the Netherlands, and in her own words journeyed “from a world of faith to a world of reason.”

Why is it that so many Muslim countries are intolerant of other faiths? Why do they not respect their women and allow them the same rights and freedoms as men? Do people who immigrate to North America from these highly intolerant countries change their way of thinking when they arrive here?

Let’s hope so. Michelle Ward- Kantor, Edmonton Robert Fulford states that Hirsi Ali “opens a pressing issue and demands we think seriously about it.” We also need to talk publicly about it. Yet Hirsi Ali would not be permitted to speak at any major university in Canada. Any attempt to have her speak would be met with a Berkley- style violent shutdown. Canada used to be a country that prided itself on reason and free speech to resolve difficult issues. That time is gone. With the left in the ascendancy both on university campuses and in the federal government, the threat to free speech has never been greater. As Barbara Kay warned in the National Post last week, Motion 103 is an attempt to legalize the Berkley solution: shut down debate.

The left wants to criminalize those with whom it disagrees. Instead, what we urgently need, as Hirsi Ali proposes, is “a commission on Islam so that the public can know what it’s facing.” If we deny this pressing problem and exclude it from reasoned debate, the extreme right will take up the issue and their solutions will not be pretty. We are already seeing evidence of this in the U.S. and Europe. Denis Walsh, West Vancouver