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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
TinaS1
Published Letters: 780 Editor's Choice: 21
Hirsi is hard to take seriously given who she has chosen to work for, and her decision to flog her book through ultra-conservative Christian magazines (she also gives interviews to these rags).
To be fair, she is not a convert to Christianity--I just think she believes that it is so important to get her message out there that she is not being very careful about the venues she uses. But she's riding a tiger that may be difficult to get off later.
But yeah, I'd be interested in knowing if she thinks evangelical Christianity is a threat along the same lines as big bad Islam. I wonder what she would make of the FBI's terror watch list--it has more Christian organizations on it than Muslim ones. I wonder what she would think of the huge fundie Christian presence and pressure on impoverished and unstable places like Liberia and Honduras. I wonder what she would think of the Michigan Militia. Does she think all this is somehow better than Islam, or is not a threat to humanist,Enlightenment values?
Someone should press her on this topic. Now that's something that would be worth watching.
All her talk about "crushing" Islam is a little weird, too. She's getting more extreme in her rhetoric. Her books written while she lived in the Netherlands were not like that. But then, look at the company she's been keeping since she got here.
your reply is sketchy and a little disjointed. Basically because Ali has experienced trauma, you think she should become a tool of right wing think tanks and Christians who are pushing an agenda that would take this country back to a pre-Enlightenment era? And because they are paying her, it's okay?
Sorry, I'm not really buying it. She's a bestselling author; I'm sure she has different choices she can exercise. The only reason the Dutch government stopped paying her security costs, after heated debate, was because she was no longer living in Holland (so really, what it comes down to is, the Americans were being too cheap to pay for it. Not the Dutch, who were continuing to pay even though she had left the country). So there was no urgent threat to her life that was only mitigated when she joined AEI. That's a complete misreading of the facts.
All I am saying, and all the others are saying, is that she carries on almost endlessly about using reason, make that--Reason. Yet she doesn't seem to be doing using Reason herself. Either she isn't aware of the agenda of her employers, doesn't take it as seriously as the "threat" posed by her former religion, or doesn't care. Any of these three demonstrates a failure of her own reasoning process, which is a shame, given that she is pretty darn sharp on a lot of things.
She used to be politically liberal until she decided the liberals had let her down, mostly because they weren't paying her enough to just sit at a desk and write polemics against Islam, which was what she wanted to do. The neocons do pay her enough, so she jumps the fence. You know what that makes her, Anonymous? A sellout.
She probably knows a lot of this and struggles with it, I would guess. She is very intelligent. Someday I would like to see her back in the progressive fold, but her hatred of Islam trumps just about everything else right now.
Now let's all leave the thread quietly so they can spend some quality bonding time together, you know, plucking each other's eyebrows and doing their nails and so on. A real evening in, if you know what I mean.
Maybe they'll go off into the sunset together and next time around we can have a real discussion that, you know, relates to the topic at hand.
what was gay bashing about what I said? I think somebody's being uh, overly sensitive.
actually, there was only one guy I once knew who liked to wear nail polish and he was hetero and very hot.
but anyway--gays who enjoy using feminine affectations are a certain subset of the gay community; some people call them "swishes"--not in a derogatory sense. I think some people get upset about it because of popular gay stereotypes--that gays generally are all obssessed with clothes and hairstyles, use high-pitched voices, or are cross dressers (actually many cross dressers are hetero).
I don't see anything wrong with any of that, nor will I be insulted if you call me a dyke, although I'm not. I also did not use any gay slur. So just chill, okay?
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
