While promoting her new book,
Heretic, on a March 23
episode of
"The Daily Show," Somali-born author and anti-Islam activist Ayaan
Hirsi Ali made a staggering claim: “If you look at 70 percent of the
violence in the world today, Muslims are responsible,” she told host Jon
Stewart.
Stewart did not demand any evidence and Hirsi Ali provided no citation. However, she made a strikingly similar statement in a
March 20 essay previewing her new book for the
Wall Street Journal:
“According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies,” Hirsi
Ali wrote in WSJ’s Saturday Essay, “at least 70% of all the fatalities
in armed conflicts around the world last year were in wars involving
Muslims.”
I contacted the International Institute for
Strategic Studies (IISS), a leading British foreign policy think tank,
to inquire about the source of Hirsi Ali’s statistic. According to IISS
Media Relations and Communications Officer Kat Slowe, IISS did not
explicitly state such a figure in its research.
“I have spoken to a number of our experts and they cannot identify where this statistic may have come from,” Slowe told me.
“Their
best guess is that the journalist in question [Hirsi Ali] may have
access/a subscription to the [IISS] Armed Conflict Database and may have
calculated this statistic independently. There are some concerns that
it could be misleading as, without Syria (near 200,000 total deaths, and
almost half of last year’s global conflict deaths) the figure would
look massively different (and of course, this conflict did not have its
root in religion),” Slowe added.
Hirsi Ali’s AHA
Foundation did not respond to my request for a citation on the
statistic, nor did the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute
that employs Hirsi Ali as a resident scholar. My email query to Hirsi
Ali’s personal account at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of
Government, where she serves as a fellow, also went unanswered.
Around
24 hours after my initial query, Hirsi Ali publicly backed off her
claim that Muslims are “responsible” for most of the violence in the
world. “Depressing that 70% of fatalities in armed conflicts around the
world last year were in wars involving Muslims,” she declared on her
personal Twitter account.
Hirsi Ali
linked to a survey of casualties
in global conflicts by IISS’ Hanna Ucko Neill and Jens Wardenaer which
made no reference to Muslims or religiously inspired violence.
Apparently Hirsi Ali calculated the statistic on her own by using an
IISS report that documented fatalities in conflicts in territories from
eastern Ukraine to sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East to Mexico,
where drug gangs fueled widespread killing. The IISS's Slowe noted that
year's surge in conflict-related deaths occured thanks to the fighting
in Syria, explaining that Hirsi Ali's claim "could be misleading"
because "this conflict did not have its root in religion."
Instead of responding to my question about her statistic, Hirsi Ali’s AHA Foundation forwarded my email query to the
Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing publication with its own history of Islamophobic
tall tales and
hoaxes. In a currently
un-bylined article about the query, the
Free Beacon accused me of anti-Semitism.
History of fraud
Hirsi
Ali’s highly suspect statistic is only the latest deception by one of
the world’s most prominent opponents of Islam. While other anti-Muslim
activists like Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller have marginalized
themselves on the fringes of the far-right, Hirsi Ali remains a darling
of the American mainstream media. In
Heretic, a polemic
recycling many of her past arguments against Islam, she calls for the
emergence of a Muslim Martin Luther — the authoritarian 16th-century
zealot who
called for burning
down the synagogues of Jews, whom he compared to a gangrenous disease.
With the book's release, Hirsi Ali has been welcomed with open arms by
the BBC, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, and a relatively accommodating Jon
Stewart. ABC News has even run an excerpt from
Heretic, while the
New York Times Book Review hosted her for an interview filled with
hardball questions about her favorite children’s books.
Hirsi
Ali’s power to persuade lies in her dramatic personal story and the
public persona she has constructed. She has marketed herself as a expert
native informant who has emerged out of the dark heart of radical Islam
and into the light of Western civilization. Her tale is an uplifting,
comforting one that tells many Westerners what they want to hear about
themselves and their perceived enemies. With anti-Muslim attitudes at
their peak across Europe and the US, her sweeping critique of Islam as
an endemically violent faith has enormous cachet. The only problem is
that like her writings on Islam, much of what she has told the public
about herself is questionable.
In May 2006, the Dutch
television program Zembla thoroughly debunked the dramatic story Hirsi
Ali had told to advance her career, concluding that Hirsi Ali had sold
the Dutch public “a story full of obscurities.”
Born
Ayaan Hirsi Magam, she migrated to the Netherlands in 1992, changed her
name to Hirsi Ali, and lied to Dutch authorities about her past.
Contrary to the story she told the government, she arrived in the
Netherlands not from war-torn Somalia, but from Kenya, where she lived
in a secure environment and under the protection of the United Nations,
which funded her education at a well-regarded Muslim girls’ school.
Though she told immigration authorities and the Dutch public she had
fled from civil war in Somalia, she left that country before its war
broke out. Indeed, she did not live through a war there or anywhere
else. Thanks to her fabrications, Hirsi Ali received political asylum in
just five weeks.
Hirsi Ali told astonished audiences on
Dutch talk shows that her supposedly devout family had forced her to
marry a draconian Muslim man, that she had not been present at her own
wedding, and that her family had threatened to kill her for offending
their religious honor. However, Zembla told a drastically different
story. Hirsi Ali’s brother, aunt and former husband each testified that
she had indeed been present at her wedding. It turned out that Hirsi
Ali’s mother had sent her brother to a Christian school, not exactly an
indication of Islamic fanaticism.
“Yeah, I made up the
whole thing,” Hirsi Ali admitted on camera to a Zembla reporter who
confronted her with her lies. “I said my name was Ayaan Hirsi Ali
instead of Ayaan Hirsi Magan. I also said I was born in 1967 while I was
actually born in 1969.”
Hirsi Ali’s claim of honor
killing threats also appears to be empty; she remained in touch with her
father and aunt after she left her husband. In fact, her husband even
came to visit her in the Dutch refugee center where she lived after
leaving him. Even though he had paid her way to Europe on the grounds
that she would join him in Canada, Hirsi Ali’s husband consented to the
divorce she sought.
(Watch the full Zembla program on Hirsi Ali.)
Fabrications that toppled a government
In
2003, just a decade after gaining political asylum in the Netherlands,
Hirsi Ali was elected to the Dutch parliament on the ticket of the
People's Party for Freedom and Democracy. VVD leadership knew that the
story Hirsi Ali told on her immigration forms was a gigantic lie — she
had told them as much — but covered up the fraud and even advanced it to
propel her career.
“She’s witnessed five civil wars in
her youth, and has fled with her family many times. She’s made of iron
and steel,” the VVD’s Neelie-Smit Kroes said of Hirsi Ali at the time,
reciting claims her party knew were false.
A year after
joining the Dutch parliament, where she said she attempted to ban
Islamic schools in the Netherlands, Hirsi Ali teamed up with Dutch
director Theo van Gogh to produce a documentary called
Submission.
The film portrayed violence against women in Muslim communities as a
logical result of Islamic belief, relying on actresses to portray abused
women and featuring semi-nude, niqab clad women with Quranic verses
scrawled across their torsos. Van Gogh, a filmmaker and columnist who
had taken to calling Muslims “
goat fuckers,” was
gunned down and stabbed to death soon after the film’s release by a
Dutch Islamist radical. Before fleeing the scene, the killer pinned a
note to van Gogh’s body threatening Hirsi Ali with death. Hirsi Ali’s
persistence in the face of the episode helped earn her hero status
across the West, particularly in post-9/11 America, where Time
magazine named her one of its 100 Most Influential People in 2005.
Zembla’s
revelations of Hirsi Ali’s lies in May 2006 interrupted her ascent and
threw the Dutch government into chaos. No one was more damaged than her
friend and close party ally, Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk.
Nicknamed “Iron Rita” for her ruthless anti-migrant crackdowns and her
demagogic appeals to xenophobia, Verdonk was shamed by the revelations
of Hirsi Ali’s deceptions. When she announced her intention to strip
Hirsi Ali of her citizenship, however, she was skewered in parliament
and forced to relent.
Days after Zembla aired its
exposé, Hirsi Ali announced her plans to leave parliament and take up a
position with the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington-based
think tank that housed many of the neoconservatives who helped
orchestrate the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In the immediate aftermath of the
furor she caused, Verdonk introduced the so-called “Law on
Integration,” one of Europe’s harshest anti-immigrant bills. Only one
member of the Dutch House of Representatives opposed it. However, the
governing coalition soon collapsed because of the scandal Hirsi Ali’s
deceptions inspired. With a new coalition seated in February 2007, and
without Verdonk and Hirsi Ali in power, the government was able to adopt
a more tolerant approach to immigrants.
Winning a Harvard fellowship, defending Breivik
Upon
her relocation to the US, Hirsi Ali was embraced by a coalition of
liberal interventionists, neoconservatives and “New Atheists” like
Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Bill Maher. With extended
appearances on
the Christian Broadcasting Network of Pat Robertson, who blamed
homosexuality for the 9/11 attacks, self-proclaimed feminist Hirsi Ali
won droves of fans among the Christian right. Despite her views on
Islam, which
she called a “destructive, nihilistic cult of death,” or perhaps because of them, she received a
fellowship from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
As
she rose in prominence among America’s intellectual elite, Hirsi Ali’s
history of lying tumbled conveniently down the Orwellian memory hole.
In
promotional material for her best-selling 2007 memoir,
Infidel,
Hirsi Ali’s publishers at Simon & Schuster have pushed the
discredited claim that “Hirsi Ali survived civil war.” More recently,
conservative pundit Peggy Noonan glossed over the reasons behind Hirsi
Ali’s flight from the Netherlands,
writing, “Ayaan
Hirsi Ali got death threats and eventually fled to America.” Few, if
any, American outlets have noted that Hirsi Ali left the Netherlands as
her public credibility collapsed and her anti-immigrant party fell into
crisis.
With support from across the American ideological
spectrum, Hirsi Ali sharpened her rhetoric against Muslims. In a candid
2007 exchange with Reason Magazine, she
declared that
the religion of Islam had to be “defeated.” “Once it’s defeated, it can
mutate into something peaceful,” Hirsi Ali stated. “It’s very difficult
to even talk about peace now….There comes a moment when you crush your
enemy.”
Junketed to Berlin in 2012 to receive the Axel
Springer Honorary Award from the right-wing German publisher, Hirsi Ali
appeared to
blame liberal
defenders of multiculturalism for the killing spree committed by the
Norwegian extremist Anders Breivik, claiming they left Breivik with “no
other choice but to use violence. (Breivik cited Hirsi Ali’s work in his
1,500 page manifesto explaining his plans to commit a series of
terrorist attacks across Norway.)
“[T]hat one man who
killed 77 people in Norway, because he fears that Europe will be overrun
by Islam, may have cited the work of those who speak and write against
political Islam in Europe and America – myself among them – but he does
not say in his 1500 page manifesto that it was these people who inspired
him to kill. He says very clearly that it was the advocates of silence.
Because all outlets to express his views were censored, he says, he had
no other choice but to use violence.” (Her words were met with an
extended standing ovation.)
When Brandeis University
canceled plans to
award Hirsi Ali an honorary degree in April 2014, it appeared that her
increasingly vitriolic tirades against Islam and its adherents had
caught up with her. But then came the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, a
seemingly clarifying moment that Hirsi Ali and fellow anti-Islam
activists seized on as confirmation of their darkest prophecies. Two
months later, she released
Heretic.
Having rebranded herself a brave “reformer”
following in the footsteps of
the Selma marchers, Hirsi Ali has found her way back into the
mainstream limelight. While American media demonstrates an endless
appetite for her polemics about Islam, holding her to account remains
taboo.
Editor's Note: Cat Slowe's official title
with IISS has been clarified -- her official title is Media Relations
and Communications Officer.
Any time James David
Manning opens his mouth, the shit just flies. Now it appears as though
someone has given the homophobic pastor a taste of his own medicine.
Identical twin brothers August and Liam
Easton-Calabriaand have spent their lives in the Boy Scouts, but now that
they are eighteen years old, only one of them will be allowed to
participate in the Scouts.
