Rights group goes astray on Hirsi Ali
What separates humans from other species, the late William F. Buckley Jr. admonished a sanctimonious college student in his office 40 years ago, “is the capacity to make distinctions.” With a White House as relentlessly repulsive as this one is and significant elements of American society willing to indulge conduct reminiscent of 1930’s fascists, it is perhaps a bad time to expect that people will make distinctions, and the capacity of some people to do so has eroded badly.
A case in point is the decision of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an admirable organization founded in 1971 to combat hatred, to list human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the world’s most courageous voices against hate, as a practitioner of it.
Hirsi Ali, whose journey from an Islamist upbringing and a forced marriage to international stature as a critic of human rights abuses by radical Islamic state and non-state actors led Time Magazine to call her one of the most influential individuals in the world. And yet she was branded by the Center last year as a prominent “anti-Muslim extremist.” This kind of Alice-in-Wonderland stuff by a respected civil rights group can only have been cheered by extremists, who are pleased to see Hirsi Ali defamed, and would be even more pleased to see her disappear.
Hirsi Ali has long been considered Public Enemy #1 by apologists for Islamic extremism. She has been a powerful defender of the rights of women and girls both in Islamic countries and in the West who are victimized by honor killings, genital mutilation, sexual coercion, child marriage and other forms of degradation.
Her foundation provides training to law enforcement, shelters, educators and social service providers who work to protect women and girls. It also lobbies for the strengthening of protections against practices which, as Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google’s parent company, put it succinctly, “have no place in the 21st century.”
Her credentials as an African-born feminist raised as a Muslim are regarded as profoundly threatening by those who for some reason would prefer to see radical Islam and the human rights nightmares resulting from it whitewashed. It is small wonder, therefore, that she has been subjected to endless attempts to intimidate her, including plenty of death threats, all of which have thus far failed to silence her.
For this body of courageous work you might guess progressives would treat Hirsi Ali as a hero. You would guess wrong. Instead, she has often found herself derided by comfortable western liberals, shunned by them as a “hot potato” whose unwelcome shining of spotlights on human rights abuses in the Islamic world renders her an “Islamaphobe.”
By labeling Hirsi Ali an extremist, the Center has displayed an inability to distinguish between someone who has risked her life denouncing hate, on the one hand, from someone guilty of it, on the other. That, of course, reflects poorly on the Center.
More importantly, girls and women, members of the LGBT community, Christians, Jews and others within striking distance of radical Islam are ill-served by the moral dithering of those who hold themselves out as progressives, but who attack Hirsi Ali for speaking uncomfortable truths because they feel that acknowledging those truths constitutes unacceptably bad form.
These are not only angry times, but furious ones, and understandably so. The Oval Office is occupied by a narcissistic empty suit, with tendencies toward thuggishness that are unprecedented in the history of the American presidency.
The Muslim bashing and the demonizing of “the other” that has plainly spread in America is appalling, rightly decried by all decent people. But the Southern Poverty Law Center does the cause of human rights no good by permitting itself to be used to delegitimize Hirsi Ali, who deserves a great deal better.