YouSaid · the spoken record

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

lines on the record: 51
first: 2024-11-25
most recent: 2024-11-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Then we are the ones who are intolerant. And I think the mistake we make is we become tolerant of intolerance. We become tolerant of misconduct. We become tolerant of violence. And we get conditioned to it and inadvertently we become like the society I came from. So it's actually the other way around.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's how I would like you to frame it. Today we are in a place where in most large cities, the countries that have taken immigrants from societies that don't respect women's rights, women have to think twice about should I go out, it's at night, am I in the right clothing? Should I have a chaperone, etc., etc. I've written another book on this one and this is a growing problem and it is that lack of confidence. And we never get there. We never get to enforcing the laws and norms. We need to enforce because we formulate the question this way. We say if we demand this of the immigrants”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To Germany and then went to the Netherlands, and I remember making Dutch friends. And in the evening when it gets so dark, they say, we're going out, we're going on our bicycles, and we lived in a village and we would cycle for about 10 kilometers. And then we girls alone would come back and I thought they were nuts. And I told them, you're mad, it's dark. You're women only, you don't go out alone at night. And they thought I was crazy. They said, what are you afraid of? It was virtually unheard of thirty years ago for women to feel unsafe in the public space. That's because of that confidence. It was taken for granted that women could walk about. I'm not saying that it's every society's ideal, but it was the West that enforced it.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think you're framing the question To Western society that I came to was tolerant, pluralistic The plural, we were able to be pluralistic. Because we enforced the law and we enforced the norms. And 30 years ago when I came, I think Western society was much more confident in itself than it is today, maybe not confident enough, but it was much more confident. I'll give you an example. I was 22 years old when I”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To become a Muslim society and is nothing wrong with saying to anyone who's trying to get this done If you love Sharia laws so much and you want to abide by it you've come to their own country you've come to the wrong society”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think that's how you go about it. I think the way you go about it is that we are a British society and here are our norms and values and laws. And as long as you abide by them, I remember Roger Scruton saying it is we have our culture and we invite you to be a part of it. We don't invite you to reject it or to be a parallel or establish you on parallel societies, but we invite you to be a part of it. And there is absolutely no, I never saw any problem with being British and at the same time praying five times a day or being observing what is genuinely a religious practice in Islam. But I think you can and openly should reject any attempts at Islamization or at the transformation of this society.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Truth for its own sake, all of these things that until quite recently we took for granted are coming apart, and I think it is now time to acknowledge that this cutting off, you know, taking off the roots of rejecting the roots of society, I don't think it's a good idea.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Liberal, highly secular. Communities have children that are struggling. Again, look at that Maslow pyramid. They're almost all at that self-actualization place. And they're really struggling with questions like the purpose and meaning of life. And there is a void and a vacuum. And it's being filled by all sorts of different forces, woke-ism, Islamism, New Ageism. Today you experiment with Buddhism, tomorrow you take fentanyl. It's all over the place. And I think if you just have these, you have an amazing tradition in the Christian faith rituals, a way of teaching children about morality. It starts in school, it starts at the church if you go to church, it starts in the classics, the university as an institution for the pursuit of”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can impose things on people's conscience. It's really a recognition of where these things come from. If you don't know what's in the Bible, you don't read the Bible, you don't go to church. So America, I mean, up until I think the 1950s and 1960s, there was a copy of the Bible in every household. And America being a young nation, one way of transmitting her history to the next generation was doing it through this. You know, the foundational documents, the founding fathers harking back to their Christian roots, finding Europe too rigid and going to America and experimenting and innovating in the ways that they did. And then you get to that point where they abandon. Christianity. And it's not when I say they, it's only. Some states and some communities that do that. So from an empirical perspective, you can go and compare the”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is definitely Christian, whether you like it or not. I mean, take the Magna Carta. These were very intense fights between the church and the king. And at that point, the church leader was arguing for the idea that the king also has to obey the law and is not above the law. And those arguments of individual dignity and freedom all the way to even rights of women were made within this Christian context and between these Christian factions. And so, yes, it is an outcome of Christianity. And I think you just have the courage to accept it and acknowledge it. I think where things go sideways is when you say I'm therefore going to demand that people Be Christian, I don't think you can demand that”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More importantly, you have to pass it on to the next generation. And I think I like to use that. Someone has to help me with where the quote comes from, but that there are two groups of barbarians. It's newborn babies and aliens, immigrants from elsewhere. And so what do you pass on to newborn babies? And if you have immigrants coming from elsewhere, what do you pass on to them? And that's the story of the remoralization.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you cut off those fruits and you say, I'm just going to start somewhere here with this branch because I find that attractive, that is the Enlightenment period, I found that very attractive when I left Islam. And I'm going to start the history of the West with Descartes. Going to have what I think Osguine has described as cut flower civilization. I think the remoralization story is. Can have the branches and the beautiful flowers and beautiful buildings and the wonderful life and the medicine and the technology and all of these advances. But don't forget that this is all, you also have to take care of these roots.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As part and a fundamental part, yes. And when I say a fundamental part in terms of remoralization is to acknowledge, you don't have to believe in God and you don't have to be religious yourself. That is up to you, it's between you and your conscience. But I think it's a starting point to... Acknowledge the long and painfully history of your own nation state and what it has brought forth think of it as the roots of a tree and if you cut Know if you cut the tree and you say all of the, and it isn't just the religious foundations, it's even what was before the religious foundat”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I detect this demoralization when it comes to our institutions of government, education, higher education as in universities, the media, the individual's sense as individuals you feel that something is wrong and then you ask yourself what can I do? I vote, I pay taxes, I do the right thing and still things are going bad. So there's this sense of demoralization. I think what I would like to inspire, activates, Collectively get together with people who are worried is to say let's demoralize.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think restoration is the word that I have chosen, which was inspired by in trying to diagnose, we were all trying to diagnose what is the problem with us, what is the problem with the West. And I landed on this KGB, former KGB agents, Yuri Benzmanov, who is at the time, I think it's in 1983, he's giving a lecture on how the Soviet Union would design their subversion activities against open societies and he would say you have, they go through four phases. Phase one would be Demodalization phase followed by destabilization and then crisis and then create chaos and they march in and they take control or they let things implode.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The self improving ways we can do things. But at the moment, there are many threats, and in Europe in particular, Islam is a threat, yes.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Threats to basically match through the institutions along with it. Then the second threat, which is internal, I think, is the abandoning of the foundational principles and the cohesive story of what glues this society together. You abandon that, you create a vacuum, something else fills it. Russia is a threat to the West. The Communist Party of China is a threat to the West. But they are a threat like empires in the past because there is a sense that the West is weak and that perhaps this is the time to strike. The extreme polarization that we see in America, that invites trouble. So the West is not weak and the West has a great deal of strength. I mean, just look at the technological innovations. Look at all...”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Centers of Islamization in America and in various countries in Europe. And if I were a member of the Muslim Brotherhood looking at Britain, for example, I would say, well, 20 years ago we were this small. Today, I think they do form a substantial threat. It's not the only threat, the only threat to the West is not the Islamist threat. The number one threat to the West is the West itself. Because the West, for instance, has produced this idiotic idea called wokeism that's literally destroying our institutions from within and making it easy for external”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If the West is the societies that are targeted, so I would say the Societies that are threatened the most Muslim societies, Afghanistan was a threat, was targeted by the Islamists, while the Taliban have it's under their control. Erdogan, early on in his political career, he targeted Hercule and Turkey, the secular community in Turkey, talked to them about gradual evolution. And also you come to the West. West is a target. And it is a target in the sense that I'm going to focus only on the Muslim Brotherhood. Muslim Brotherhood has established”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's use all the means necessary and let's work together. That's adaptation. That's very smart. And it's stupid to underestimate that sort of development.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you have, of course, an adaptation of those who want the Medina Islam to these new circumstances. And the most important thing to pay attention to are the discussions between the Islamists, between the Medina Muslims. And the main discussion is this. Do we Islamize society or the world through violence, through shock and awe, or do we do it gradually through these other less spectacular but time-consuming means? Now, if you listen to that, you'd say 20 years ago it was either or. But in 2024, what I find more and more is them saying, hang on a minute, sometimes it makes sense to use violence, sometimes it makes sense to use persuasion, sometimes it makes sense to infiltrate these institutions.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exporting Medina Islam to all corners of the world through its oil money. And so it was the UAE and some of these other Gulf countries. In 2024, Saudi Arabia is not doing that anymore under the leadership of Mohamed bin Salman. They've decided they want to pivot away from oil as their main source of economy. They want to enter the economy. They're not doing it for us. They're doing it for themselves. They've also come to realize that these Medina Muslims, they want to destroy them. Same thing with the UAE. If you look at the population of Iran, yes, the regime is Islamist, but the population of Iran, they hate the Islamists and they don't want any of this. So the good news is there's a growing number of Muslims, some of them in very powerful leadership positions who reject Medina Islam.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You would say in 2001 when this 9 11 2001 the numbers who are medina Muslims were significantly smaller than today's Medina Muslims and I say this because we fought them not on the battleground of ideas but on the battleground of military means and the like and the numbers Who believe, sincerely believe in the Islamization of their societies? Significant enough for us to keep seeing these events like 9-11-2001 like November 13, 2015, with the attacks in Paris, Manchester, 77, Madrid, and October 7. I tell you, there's some good news 9 11 2001. Saudi Arabia was completely in denial about its role in.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the Islam that animates them. They look at Muhammad and they say, that's the figure that I. So if you say there's one Islam and there are three sets of Muslims, one set of the Mecca, one set are the Medina Muslims who are the ones who are declaring war on the rest of us. And then the third group are these modifiers that I have now become friends with and who are looking into ways of salvaging something out of that Mecca area and saying let's take the revelation in Medina and Muhammad's life and let's see that in historical context. Are they going to succeed in doing that? I don't know, but at least they're attempting it.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Muslim, I follow Muhammad. I'm not going to look at what happened in Medina. I'm just going to focus. I call them Mecca Muslims. And then you get to the other group that's the Medina Muslims. And so when Muhammad goes to Medina, he forms a militia and he goes back to Mecca, he wages war, and he discovers very quickly that if he wanted to convert large numbers of people, you don't just say give up your gods and come to mind. You have a pair of swords and you say it's your head or you accept the faith. And religion, Islam then becomes, Muhammad becomes a warrior, he becomes a general, and it becomes a religion of conquest. And these medina Muslims of today, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, the Diobandi, Islamist regime of Iran, the president of Turkey,”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In writing that book, I concluded there is one Islam, but there are three sets of Muslims. And the three sets of Muslims are the Muslims who emphasize, they, oh, you know, if you're a Muslim, you see the Prophet Muhammad as your moral guide. In the early years, the first decade of the Prophet Muhammad's life was in Mecca when he says that he hears the angel Gabriel speak to him and then he goes talking to the people of Mecca and telling them, can you give up your gods? And can you come to the one god? And in that period, he's using the means of persuasion. He's saying things along the lines of to you, your gods and to me, my God. And there you could say the concept of freedom of religion or freedom of conscience is there. So there are Muslims who well then emphasize that period and say,”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I wrote this book in 2015 called A Heretic, and I wrote it after I had spoken to a growing number of really good Muslim, good moral Muslim human beings who wanted to hold on to their religion, hold onto their civilization, hold on to their identity. So 2015, if you remember, was ISIS at its height. And so they were again being confronted with this constant dissonance themselves of saying Islam is a religion of peace because I'm a peaceful Muslim. But then here we had ISIS burning a Jordanian Muslim in a cage for the whole world to see, beheading people doing all this. Crazy and gruesome things. And so”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Project people who are coming who are telling you that your way of life, be it Christian or secular, is wrong and it needs to be destroyed and replaced with Sharia law, when you come out yourself and you set your own foundational spiritual principles just as ugly and just as bad, you basically hand them a card. And so I think, yes, I have changed my mind about that. I also do not think”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're saying all religions because there is this disclaimer that you have to make, you know, Islam is the religion of a minority in Europe and we wanted to respect that minority. And so it was, we're first going to knock down Christianity and then say all religions are wrong and bad and so on and then get to the point of talking about Islam because in that way and of course I think it was I'll speak for myself. It was wrong for me at that point to claim that Christianity and Islam were the same or that Christianity is a religious religion of war whatever because I didn't really know much about Christianity. And number two, I think it's also wrong and again this is inadvertent. If you have an Islamic”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's another dissonance. I think that we were not, so my fellow atheists and I, Christopher Hitchens, who passed away, I wish he was alive. I wonder what he would have thought of this. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Dan Dennis, I mean, so many of us, I think at that time,”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to innovate the way we fight it. Right now, the only way we're fighting it is through highly expensive means of military means, you know, intelligence community with throwing so much money at it. And we're not the entire battlefield of ideas, human beings are shaped by ideas. The battlefield of ideas for the hearts and minds of the Muslims that they want to radicalize, the non-Muslims that they want to Islamize or to subdue, were doing nothing with any of that.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And reclaims all the land in Gaza and Rafah, etc., the problem is not going to go away because al-Qaeda was dismantled, as you remember. They were chased to the gates of hell, and so was ISIS. So Al-Qaeda, the organization, is gone, but Al-Qaeda, the idea, is not gone. ISIS was also in the same after these gruesome attacks that they displayed to the whole world, the US helping the Kurds and local people dismantled ISIS. ISIS does not hold territory in Syria or in Iraq, but the idea of ISIS is not gone. The idea of Hamas is not gone. So that is basically the message I want I really want us. It's really important that we see that we define this problem right because if we define it right, I think we're going to”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“October 7, but also the conflict the Israelis think this is a territorial conflict. And Israel's allies, America, the United Kingdom, are saying, give this piece of land back or do this or withdraw from this. They're defining it as a material problem. For Hamas, it's not a material issue. It is a holy war. All the Jews on that land have to go. And they want the whole of Israel. For them, it's a holy land and it's a holy war. If you get that concept wrong, you're not going to get peace if Israel today really succeeds in dismantling the tunnels, taking down the Hamas fighters and the jihadi brigades.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People who believe in the same ideology in the same project. And I've come to that conclusion because once upon a time, when I was a teenager, I was only 15 years old when the Muslim Brotherhood missionaries came to our town in Nairobi. I lived in Nairobi, Kenya. And I was steeped in that project and in the different ways of how to achieve a society that lives according to Sharia law or Islamic law, and that it first starts with the call, the invitation to say, please, this is what it is accepted. And gradually, when people say, no, we don't want it. Then force is justified, and that's called holy war. Within this ji”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then just again, material satisfaction, I become depressed. I think the terrorist threat got under my skin. I didn't want to live that way. It's very difficult to live that way. I was medicating myself. I was going to be seeing doctors taking antidepressants, drinking. During one of those therapy sessions, one woman pointed out and said, I really think what you are going through is spiritual bankruptcy. And so as an individual, for my individual needs, I did turn to God because the alternative was death. It was nothing. But that is, again, that's a very personal story. I want to be very careful that we don't confuse the two developments. If you want, if you think that my personal story... Interesting or meaningful, or if it has any purpose for you. It is that the events of 9-11-2001 and October 7 were perpetrated.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think in a way it is connected, it may not be connected. So my personal journey to Becoming a Christian, I think, is really separate from. From confronting the forces that were behind 9-11 and behind October seventh and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and all of these radical Islamist conflicts, political Islam as a project to Islamize the world by all means necessary. Me becoming a Christian, I don't think has anything to do with it. Even if I wasn't born, you would all have to reach the conclusion somehow that fighting Religious force with material means. It's not going to work. You're going to be exhausted and bankrupted and all that. So let's just put that aside. On my personal journey, as I've told you many times, I just reached a place where I think in my evolution, I wanted more than...”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to what extent is it religious? And if it is a religious war, if it's a holy war, then how should we fight it and how should we respond? But then again, Freddie, as you know, I mean, this 23 years ago, and I don't think it has stopped, there was still these people who are putting brakes on the floor of the conversation and saying it just simply cannot be Hollywood. It has nothing to do with Islam. It has nothing to do with these people are not moved by conviction and they would just take refuge in all of these material arguments. And that's unfortunate because had we not done that, had we actually had the courage to face the problem, then we would have been able to dissect it. And I think we've missed at least two decades of doing something about this and now the problem has just become bigger and bigger and bigger.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I interview you because what you're saying instinctively that we feel there is something in there, it's right, or more people need to hear it, or, you know, there's something in there. And over time, it became clear that actually people understood that That there was something they weren't allowed, they thought it, they reached similar conclusions. I mean, this is all empirical. You didn't have to guess. You didn't need experts to tell you what bin Laden intended. Once you got the works of bin Laden and you were reading the material yourself, you understood what he meant. And so there were people in Holland and beyond who wanted to have the conversation about what exactly is this?”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They mean well, but they don't realize they just simply don't realize this is a declaration of war and everything they are saying is accommodating, it's playing into the hands of this religious force that has declared on the war on the West. And so, I don't know, I'll explain to them. I'll just show them. I'll tell them one more time. I'm having arguments with the mayor of Amsterdam. I'm a junior person. I just graduated from college. And he's this seasoned, experienced man, and he's saying, I'll just, I'll explain to you how things work. And I listen as sweetly as possible and as nicely as possible. And I say, but you're wrong. And on and on it went with all of These different people, but then at the same time, they were individuals, other thinkers, other politicians were saying”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe in a naive and very stupid way it was these on the one hand really brilliant people. My colleagues at the think tank, the party media wider society, this is in the context of Holland. And I think the brilliant”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, liberating, but also sort of troublesome because again, like I said, there was the dissonance and the relief, okay, I'm not afraid of a life after death, I'm not afraid of being burned and broiled and all of that. But then my followers on the phone and my family members were on the phone and Muslims, some of them known to me as relatives and others strangers, were threatening me. So it wasn't as, you know, straightforward as Just thinking now, I'm just going to get on with my life. And there was this challenge. It's almost like you are in the... I don't know a force of something. I could have, of course, just shut up. I could have just apologized to everyone and said, I'm really sorry. I take back everything. I said, and chosen to do something else, left the think tank, maybe applied for a job at Shelley.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Living according to the direction and the purpose of their convictions, of their sets of ideas. And there are competing ideas and the ideas underlying Western civilization. So at the time, I mean, if you did political theory, you started from somewhere the Greeks, the Romans, the Catholic Church, and on and on. I think John Rawls was sort of the last one. And I just remember thinking, These ideas that are based on curiosity that human beings can innovate, that they can improve things through discussion, that's what Western civilization is built on and that's superior to the alternative idea that these radical Islamists want to give us, which is let's just keep going back to this one hollybook, this one holy man, and this is just the way things ought to be. To be done regardless of time and place.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think here's the transformation. I lived a life of conviction when I was a Muslim and when I left Islam, it was a life of dissonance. But at the same time, I enrolled in political science in the University of Leiden in 1995, and I finished in the year 2000. So I was now living a life of the mind, a life of ideas. I had come to the conclusion ideas shape human beings, and there's no need to be afraid of Islam because it's really just a set of ideas. And if we understand it that way, then basically with these 19 men who attacked America, they were”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A teenager and we were poor and life was painful and life was unpredictable and we were surrounded by violence. The life I was enjoying as a Dutch citizen woman was great. And so I thought if this is life then, live it.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of integrity since the question was asked me alone and I couldn't sleep at night and I kept coming back to it and then for me I think I remember reading Batron Russell among other very famous atheists, some of them Dutch. Concluded, well, if there's not afterlife, and first I concluded my faith in Islam, me being a Muslim, was centered around fear of God. And fear of what he would do to me on earth and in the afterlife. And once I lost the fear of the afterlife, I just remember having this sense of just relief. Like it's okay to just die and rot. That's what Batten results in. I thought this is it. This is the life we have. And at the time, I mean, if you compared my 31-year-old life, maybe I was 30 years old to when I was...”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I said, no, I used to believe in this stuff. So as the weeks went by, and I then found myself complete unknown to this person whom I was having the most senior journalists of the mainstream papers coming, you know, I want to interview you, I want to interview you. They were doing these threads on me Remember, I think it was a radio interview, a radio one interview. Maybe you would consider this BBC 4 or something very important channel. And this journalist asks me pointedly, So are you a Muslim then given all the criticism that you've been dishing out? And I remember thinking, I don't know, I haven't given that any thoughts. But of course the dissonance in my head was broken. I had managed somehow to balance the dissonance of identifying as a Muslim, calling myself a Muslim and avoiding all questions.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All my colleagues were saying, and all the commentary was about what was the motivation, and the conclusion was, well, American foreign policy, it was the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and I thought, no, this is nonsense. It's not the Israeli. I mean, those things are important. American foreign policy is important, but that's not what it is about. These 19 men were driven by the Islamic conviction. When I said this, and again, I was in a sort of media environment because of these elections that were upcoming, some of these journalists who were talking to me, they were talking to me before 9-11 had happened about integration. They found me, I think, an odd, interesting figure”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I identified as a Muslim. I didn't live The way a fatty something year old Muslim woman lived, I was living together with my boyfriend and I didn't pray five times a day. My attire was very westernized. I was drinking alcohol. So I didn't practice. I wasn't a practicing Muslim, but I definitely identified as a Muslim. And it was very difficult because as more and more information started to emerge, you know, the day itself and then the following weeks.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was put up for the campaign. I found them all glued to the screen and they had CNN on and there was a woman shouting the anchor woman. A second plane coming. There's a second plane coming. We don't think it's an accident. It's a terrorist attack. It's a terrorist attack. And I think the whole world changed for me, but even my own life changed at that moment. I forgot about the senior fellow upstairs. I forgot about telling everyone to be quiet. I just stood there thinking, my God, this is going to be war. This sort of brought the idyllic 1990s to an end.”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's a senior fellow who was there longer than I am sent to me downstairs and said, what's all this noise that's going on? We were in the attic. That's what they did with the think tanks. So there was an election that was upcoming. And it was one of these beautiful buildings on the canals. And the main floor was completely devoted to the campaign and we were in the attic and I think September, beautiful afternoon, so it was quite hot. And he said, can you go downstairs and ask them to be quiet? And being a very junior member, I wasn't really keen on going downstairs and telling all these incredibly savvy people who were there before me to tell them to be quiet. So as I made my way downstairs, I found them all. There were these big”
2024-11-25 · Intelligence Squared · Ayaan Hirsi Ali On Her Fight to Save the West · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT