![]() ![]() ![]() She laudably admits that the data are extremely limited, but that doesn’t stop her from insisting that they nevertheless support her claims. She speaks with a handful of law enforcement officials, people who work on immigrant assimilation efforts and average citizens. In seeking to make the case that hordes of sexually violent Muslim men are setting back women’s rights in Europe, Hirsi Ali excavates crime data, newspaper articles and social science research. It’s a dizzying rhetorical style, and succeeds only in knocking out straw men. But this is the one-two punch of “Prey”: Swear allegiance to Western liberalism, then push ideas and policies that would undermine it. So it’s rather odd to see Hirsi Ali claim that feminists have created a near-paradise of liberalism for women in the Western world, and then accuse them of failing to adequately care about women’s rights because they also want their homelands to open doors to seekers of safe harbor, regardless of religion. #The prey book quotes free#Feminists the world over have agitated for greater freedoms for women, putting the right to be free of male violence at the center of their work and steadily rejecting the argument that patriarchal abuses are excusable in any culture. Those are certainly laudable goals for a feminist movement, which is precisely why you may be wondering: Isn’t that what feminists have been doing this whole time? Hirsi Ali calls for a new feminist movement, one in which true feminists are “prepared to stand up for the rights of all women” and coalesce around the issue of “women’s safety from predatory men.” Even worse, in an effort to not be seen as xenophobic or feed into rising right-wing nationalism, liberal Europeans are complicit in their own mounting oppression, playing down misogyny as mere multiculturalism even as Western women are criminally assaulted, told to cover their bodies and driven from the streets of their own cities. As a result, she says, European women face endemic sexual harassment and violence. Muslim men, who are by Hirsi Ali’s telling accustomed to gender-segregated societies in which female modesty is mandated and women are harassed out of public life, arrived in Europe in droves during the previous decade’s migration crisis, bringing old orthodoxies - and violent enforcement of them - to their new Northern homes. “Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights” argues that immigration from majority-Muslim countries imperils the hard-won rights of European women. Her latest project only amplifies these incongruities. She’s an asylee who calls for an end to asylum as we know it. She praises Western liberalism at the same time as she suggests that Islam is so incompatible with it that Western democracies need to consider suspending their core values in the service of self-preservation. She was put on a Qaeda hit list and called an anti-Muslim “extremist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. She calls herself an “infidel,” while many Muslims say she’s just an Islamophobe. But she herself rejects that framing as sexist and presumptuous. She denounces Islam for its absolutism and intolerance, and then vilifies the religion of more than one billion people as a “nihilistic cult of death.” Her own history perhaps makes her antagonism understandable - she was forced into genital mutilation as a child in Somalia, fled to the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage and, as an adult, has seen her life threatened by Muslim extremists so many times and with such credibility that she travels with security. ![]() There are few women in the world who generate as much animosity, and as many accusations of hypocrisy, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights By Ayaan Hirsi Ali ![]()
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