Don't "denounce your own people"!

How much more nationalist bullshit do we have to read here? Don't you know that a 'people' is a mere social construction based based on external exclusion and internal homogenisation?

No Borders! No NATIONS!!!

Some socially constructed groups are excluded and victimised more than others. For Hirsi Ali to use her position as a member of a minority group to further legitimise the oppression of that group is fucking unforgivable.

A black person dares be something other than a stereotype. Dares be anything other than the poor ward of the white left.

She is obviously quite mad to dare be anything other than a swollen-bellied orphan with flies around her mouth waiting for the white left to come to her rescue and parade her to the world's media as proof of their goodness.

Black people are all jolly, nice, socialists, and have a natural sense of rythm and music. They are so colourful. So tame, harmless and supine?

Shame on her for being an indivual. Conform to the 'minority' sterotype girl! The colour of your skin doesn't allow you to define who you want to be. And if you try, they will play the race card.

Does it get any lower?

Try shunning her for her crap ideology!

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book Infidel is the best thing i have read this year.

Ayaan has a valuable contribution to make.Margaret Kimberley scorns her for condemning Muslim treatment of women,but she doesn't mention that Ayaan Hirsi Ali gives graphic descriptions of her own genital mutilation and the whole sordid business in which women have their labia and clitorises scraped away and then are sewn up.Whether one puts this down to "Muslim" or the cultural tradition of countries that happen to be Muslim is of course another matter.The fact that i am opposed to war against Iran and consider the US and UK to be nuclear hypocrites breaking the same nuclear treaty they accuse Iran of breaking does not mean that i cannot be opposed to female genital mutilation does it?Also i don't want to see Palestinians or Muslims in general being attacked,but that does not mean i support the Muslim faith any more than any other faith that relies on a teacher long dead.(eg Christianity,Judaism,Buddhism etc).Ayaan Hirsi Ali also questions Mohammed's habits with his wives.While i agree that it is perverse to kneedle people unnecessarily over faith,for example the Mohammed cartoons,i do also think we should be free to discuss Mohammed.Ayaan points out that Aisha,Mohammed's third wife was 9 when Mohammed consummated the relationship when he was 54 at the time.So we may understand that that was OK within the context of the time and place and traditions that these events took place in, but surely Ayaan is raising an important subject for debate .
Also Margaret Kimberley does not mention that Ayaan was driven more closely into the American connection because her photographer ,filming in Holland,was stabbed through the heart by an extremist,with a message saying they'd get Ayaan too.

Every once in a while, a native informer comes along who is willing to affirm his or her own inferiority in order to help the West rationalize its neocolonial grip on the South. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the latest, and one of the more ambitious among them. This 38-year-old Dutch citizen of Somali origin has built a career on her criticisms of Islam, the religion she renounced after the 9/11, for its “brutality”. Through her unrestrained attacks on Islam, her close friendship with far-right Dutch politican Pim Fortuyn and rabid xenophobia, she rode a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment all the way into the Parliament [on a ticket from the right-wing People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD)] only to leave for the United States after an uproar over lies she had told to obtain asylum. Presently, she works for the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. In 2005, Time magazine named Hirsi Ali as one of its 100 Most Influential People of the World.

As her new book, Infidel, scales the charts to reach the New York Times Bestseller list, let us look at who this intrepid feminist really is.

Fact and Fiction

Over the years, Hirsi Ali has produced three books: The Son Factory, The Caged Virgin and Infidel. The latter, presently sits at No. 6 on the NYT Bestseller list, aided, no doubt, by the glowing reviews it received from Washington Post and New York Times. However, in Britain, reviewers seem less sanguine: The Economist writes:

The facts as Ms Hirsi Ali tells them here do not fit well either with some of the stories she has told in the past or with her tendency in her political writing to ascribe most of the troubles of the Muslim world to Islam…As a young woman, Ms Hirsi Ali’s mother, Asha, does not seem to have inhabited “the virgin’s cage” that the author claims imprisons Muslim women around the world. At the age of 15, she travelled by herself to Aden where she got a job cleaning house for a British woman…Ms Hirsi Ali sounds less frank when she tells the convoluted story of how and why she came to seek asylum at the age of 22 in the Netherlands. She has admitted in the past to changing her name and her age, and to concocting a story for the Dutch authorities about running away from Somalia’s civil war. (In fact she left from Kenya, where she had had refugee status for ten years.)…
However, last May a Dutch television documentary suggested that while Ms Hirsi Ali did run away from a marriage, her life was in no danger…the facts as she tells them about the many chances she passed up to get out of the marriage—how her father and his clan disapproved of violence against women; how relatives already in the Netherlands helped her to gain asylum; and how her ex-husband peaceably agreed to a divorce—hardly seem to bear her out.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not the first person to use false pretences to try to find a better life in the West, nor will she be the last. But the muddy account given in this book of her so-called forced marriage becomes more troubling when one considers that Ms Hirsi Ali has built a career out of portraying herself as the lifelong victim of fanatical Muslims.
In the United States, however, the book received a much different treatment. Both the top newspapers, Washington Post and New York Times, gave it glowing reviews (This is in stark contrast with the treatment they usually meet out to authors critical of Israel: the papers got people who are linked to the Israel Lobby to review books by Norman Finkelstein, Jimmy Carter, Robert Fisk, for instance) Each one offers its own gem for our modest amusement.

Washington Post:“The press began to explore her past, discovering the “inventions” that she had used to get her refugee status…Along the way, Hirsi Ali displays what surely must be her greatest gift: the talent for recalling, describing and honestly analyzing the precise state of her feelings at each stage of that journey.”

New York Times: “Ms. Hirsi Ali, at her English-language school, devoured Nancy Drew mysteries and English adventure series, ‘tales of freedom, adventure, of equality between girls and boys, trust and friendship’.”

Girl Power

While she describes herself as a woman who “fights for the rights of Muslim women, the enlightenment of Islam and the security of the West,” Hirsi Ali, according to Lorraine Ali of Newsweek, “is more a hero among Islamophobes than Islamic women”.

This statement would be clealry unfair if all that she and her sister had to suffer, and all that she has courageously decided to make a stand against, are indeed true. The Economist writes:

Another, even more disturbing story concerns her sister Haweya’s sojourn in the Netherlands. In her earlier book, “The Caged Virgin”, which came out last year, Ms Hirsi Ali wrote that her sister came to the Netherlands to avoid being “married off”. In “Infidel”, however, she says Haweya came to recover from an illicit affair with a married man that ended in abortion. Ms Hirsi Ali helped Haweya make up another fabricated story that gained her refugee status, but the Netherlands offered her little respite. After another affair and a further abortion, Haweya was put into a psychiatric hospital. Back in Nairobi, she died from a miscarriage brought on by an episode of religious frenzy. “It was the worst news of my life,” Ms Hirsi Ali writes.

The Identity Crisis

On May 15, 2006, officials of the Netherlands government cast doubt on Hirsi Ali’s status as a Dutch national, because she had provided false information in her application for refugee status. She had later used the same false information when she had applied for, and been granted, Dutch citizenship. The Dutch minister of immigration and integration, Rita Verdonk, moved to annul her citizenship, a move that was later overridden on the urging of Parliament.

Shilling for the Israel Lobby

Hirsi Ali is at present a resident scholar at the neocon hotbed, American Enterprise Institute and in an interview with the Chairman of the Board of Fellows at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Manfred Gerstenfeld, she expressed a remarkably favorable view of the country.

My main impression was that Israel is a liberal democracy. In the places I visited, including Jerusalem as well as Tel Aviv and its beaches, I saw that men and women are equal. One never knows what happens behind the scenes, but that is how it appears to the visitor. The many women in the army are also very visible…
Whether one arrives from Ethiopia or Russia, or one’s grandparents immigrated from Europe, what binds them is being Jewish. Such a bond is lacking in the Netherlands.
The only problem she saw with Israel, on the other hand, was that the country “has a problem with fundamentalists,” he ultra-Orthodox, “will cause a demographic problem because these fanatics have more children than the secular and the regular Orthodox.”

The responsibility for the “dilapidated” condition of the Palestinians, on the other hand, she lays on Palestinians themselves, and she chides Europeans for seeing an end to occupation as the solution to their problems.

“The crisis of Dutch socialism can be sized up in its attitudes toward both Islam and Israel. It holds Israel to exceptionally high moral standards. The Israelis, however, will always do well, because they themselves set high standards for their actions.
“The standards for judging the Palestinians, however, are very low. Most outsiders remain silent on all the problems in their territories. That helps the Palestinians become even more corrupt than they already are. Those who live in the territories are not allowed to say anything about this because they risk being murdered by their own people.”
Freedom of (Hate) Speech

One of the incidents that propelled her to stardom was her collaboration with Theo Van Gogh on a film, Submission. Van Gogh was subsequently murdered by an enraged Moroccan over the offensive content of the film, who also left a death threat against Hirsi Ali on the corpse. Although Van Gogh was immediately hailed as a martyr for freedom of speech by some liberals – and every Islamophobe — few mentioned the man’s (well known) rabid racism and bigotry, which included calling Muslims “goatfuckers” and suggesting that Eveline Gans, a Jewish historian, ”gets wet dreams about being fucked by Dr Mengele”.

It reads like you think the Moroccan was justified to kill the film man.Sounds like you want to replace one sort of oppression with another.

Congratulations Ayaan Hirsi Ali for refusing to be silent & for publicising important women issues.The torture of women must stop.Guantanamo Bay makes news.It is bad.But is small when consider torture of women each day.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book Infidel is the best thing i have read this year.

simon

Oh come on -- I think The Wizard of Oz is the best book written in that genre. Fiction is great, as long as it doesn't resort to desperate measures such as the following:

The facts as Ms Hirsi Ali tells them here do not fit well either with some of the stories she has told in the past or with her tendency in her political writing to ascribe most of the troubles of the Muslim world to Islam…As a young woman, Ms Hirsi Ali’s mother, Asha, does not seem to have inhabited “the virgin’s cage” that the author claims imprisons Muslim women around the world. At the age of 15, she travelled by herself to Aden where she got a job cleaning house for a British woman…Ms Hirsi Ali sounds less frank when she tells the convoluted story of how and why she came to seek asylum at the age of 22 in the Netherlands. She has admitted in the past to changing her name and her age, and to concocting a story for the Dutch authorities about running away from Somalia’s civil war. (In fact she left from Kenya, where she had had refugee status for ten years.)…

However, last May a Dutch television documentary suggested that while Ms Hirsi Ali did run away from a marriage, her life was in no danger…the facts as she tells them about the many chances she passed up to get out of the marriage—how her father and his clan disapproved of violence against women; how relatives already in the Netherlands helped her to gain asylum; and how her ex-husband peaceably agreed to a divorce—hardly seem to bear her out.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not the first person to use false pretences to try to find a better life in the West, nor will she be the last. But the muddy account given in this book of her so-called forced marriage becomes more troubling when one considers that Ms Hirsi Ali has built a career out of portraying herself as the lifelong victim of fanatical Muslims.

Has it really come to this, after decades spent trying to raise the consciousness of both women and men on the issues of female oppression? I can hardly believe what i have read in some of these comments, in the degree to which they are denigrating a brave woman who has dared to speak out against one of the basest forms of brutality against women, ie genital mutilation and the slicing off of a woman's clitoris. A woman who has spoken out not just from her own first hand horrific experiences, but with intelligence and sensitivity in what is mostly a superbly well-written book.

Reading her story as a woman, it took me beyond party politics and religious politics to a place of seeking human justice, and in this case, female human justice. i've marched out countless times against the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq and will continue to speak out against the attempts to villainise the Muslim faith, but this does not stop me from responding in a simple human way to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's call to bring an end to the unbelievable cruelty she and her sisters around the world have suffered, all couched in the name of religion. If I didn't support her call that would make me a hypocrite, and a callous one at that.

I don't subscribe to Ayaan's political leanings, but i unhesitatingly admire her rare degree of strength and courage. She's a true heroine and i hope she succeeds in her campaign to free women from this torture.

In "Infidel" Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells her story honestly.
The Dutch Documentary was made before the book came out.
The facts that are mentioned by Fanonite/m.idrees are all in the book.


1)her mother cleaning house in Aden (page 10)

2) how she lied to get into Holland (page 183 onward)

3)her name change from her family name Magan.

4) she describes how she decided to escape an arranged marriage. i don't remember her suggesting her life was in danger.She says her father was against violence towards women .However she could see no way out of the arranged marriage."nobody tied me up.i was not shackled.i was not forced at gunpoint.but i had no realistic way out".Her father arranged the marriage to Osman Moussa.(around page 175)Ayaan refused to go to the nikah,(the legal ceremony) and her father said that was Ok ,that the wedding ceremony & consummation could wait until she went to join Osman Moussa where he lived in Canada.She then fled en route to Canada and took refuge in Holland.
In the Dutch video (available on the Fanonite website) Mahad,her brother, says that Ayaan was present at the nikah but he hesitates in that reply,which suggests he cannot really recall.
That is the only detail that is different from the book.And i think Ayaan's recall is better than Mahad's.

5) However further on in the book she does talk about the fact that "honour" (her choice of word) killings in immigrant families in Holland were high,and that the lives of women who tried to avoid arranged marriages were in danger.On page 309 she states that following her own campaign it was discovered that in 2 regions of Holland between Oct 2004 and May 2005 11 muslim girls were killed by their families.There are 25 regions in Holland,so these figures shocked the Dutch.

6)Elsewhere in comment 6 "Lifting the Veil on Ayaan Hirsi Ali" Fanonite talks of the disturbing story of Haweya ,Ayaan's sister.What has to be remembered here is that Haweya had a very traumatic Female Genital Mutilation(Page33).Haweya was never the same afterward....My once cheerful playful little sister changed"."Though she was the youngest-she was four...Haweya must have struggled more than ...i did......because the man made some bad cuts on Haweya's thighs.She carried the scars of them her whole life"Clearly she suffered psychological trauma that eventually led to psychosis.This is what Ayaan says "female Genital mutilation predates Islam.Not all Muslims do this,and a few of the peoples who do are not Islamic.But in Somalia where virtually every girl is excised,the practice is always justified in the name of Islam.....Many girls die during or after their excision,from infection". & ""After the girl's clitoris and labia are carved out,scraped off,or,in more compassionate areas,merely cut or pricked,the whole area is often sewn up,so that a thick band of tissue forms a chastity belt made of the girl's own scarred flesh."
This confirms what has been written elsewhere about the practice.Complications set in often because the hole left for peeing and menstrual flow is so tiny that fluids back up in the body.
In comments on The Fanonite website one comment suggests "At least i know that Hirsi Ali's clitoris is about as real as the WMDs the American Enterprise Institute promised we'd find in Iraq." It is very unlikely that Ayaan fabricated this in her book "Infidel" .Her father was a very modern thinking man who was against FMG but the grandmother had it done to the girls when the parents were away.In Somalia more than 90% of all girls are infibulated.
(meaning the total excision of clitoris and labia) These are UNICEF figures.Other estimates are higher,so the odds against Ayaan being mutilated in this way are very high.
UNICEF estimate 100 million women worldwide have had FGM & 500,000 in Europe.
Consequences as listed by Amnesty include
heavy blood loss
shock
tetanus
loss of sexual feeling
injuries to bladder,urethra
with infibulation the death rate is 30%
urine retention
blood poisoning
psycholigical damage
abscesses & cysts in adult life
infertility

6a) Incidentally i'm told theres no mention of FGM in the Quran,and i'm told that the Prophet did not have his daughters excised.As Ayaan says FGM predates Islam.

7) The book is a good book because it is very well written.It covers such a broad sweep of life from rural Somalia to industrial Holland,and her journey from moderate Islam to more radical Islam in the Muslim Brotherhood and thence to apostacy.(Its better vwritten for example than Pervez Mussharraf's "In the line of Fire" or Hilary Clinton's,both of which i also read last year)

8)In the book Ayaan Hirsi Ali does not present herself as the lifelong victim of fanatical Muslims.Indeed she's unwilling at first in Holland to believe she's in any danger.people keep telling her she is,but it takes along time before she accepts that.i have no idea how she has presented herself since the book but it is the book that i and the comment "Great Fiction" are talking about.

9)Yes it would be good if Ayaan condemned (for example) Guantanamo as well as (for example)Female Genital Mutilation and the killing of women running from Unwanted arranged marriages.Equally its to be hoped that Margaret Kimberley and Fanonite do already condemn (for example) FGM as well as (for example) Guantanamo.

saddened sister writes: "I don't subscribe to Ayaan's political leanings, but i unhesitatingly admire her rare degree of strength and courage." She forgot to add 'imagination'.

She also wishes Hirsi Ali well in her struggle to liberate women from torture. Hirsi Ali as a matter of fact is a major supporter of the Iraq war which, if you recall, had for one of its aims the liberation of Iraqi women. saddened sister would be saddened to know that nearly a million Iraqis have been killed since, and half of them women. But maybe she was being philosophical. Maybe like Bush and Hirsi Ali, she wanted to liberate those women from the torture of existence.

simon:

Here is an opportunity for you to prove that your tortuous attempt at excusing Hirsi Ali's fabrications is not meant to up your own latent racism. Lets say things in Somalia are as bad as she says they are. Lets accept that Europe and US are a paradise for women. Lets also accept that Hirsi Ali's fabrications are innocent, merely a means of getting her asylum in Netherlands. It would be fair to assume, then, that a fearless warrior for women's liberation would seek to offer the freedoms of the 'West' to all those women oppressed by Islam? Can you explain, then, why she joined forces with the Dutch Right to deny the same opportunity to other women in her circumstances (not to mention those facing real horrors, such as those being 'liberated' in Iraq) who may have sought similar escape by running on an anti-Immigrant agenda?

As I had written elsewhere: ( http://fanonite.org/2007/03/07/the-politics-of-womens-rights/)

"Pandering to the racist prejudices of Western liberals through generalized, stereotypical characterizations of Islamic societies wins these native informers instant acceptance — there are many who pine for a civilizing role. By patronizing the representative lesser beings, they can assume their former colonial role without experiencing any of the guilt. Just like George Bush, they can project their own values onto the benighted Other, while at the same time issuing ritual denunciations of Imperialism. In fact, this cultural supremacism has always worked in dialectical unity with Imperialism; it is an enabler of Empire.

In The Rise and Rise of Human Rights, Kirsten Sellars shows in splendid detail that since WWII, “human rights” has served as a pretext for internvention wherever other ideological justifications have been exhausted or proven insufficient. The merit in this approach is that it neutralizes progressive opposition. It is well known, for instance, that Amnesty International enabled the 1991 Gulf War by producing a bogus report on Iraqi soldier’s stealing incubators from a Kuwaiti hospital after throwing the babies out of them. [1]

Women’s Rights has played a similar, though understudied, role in recent years. Shortly before the invasion of Afghanistan, liberals in California suddenly discovered that the women there were oppressed (Senator Barbara Boxer’s office was calling muslim organizations to borrow a Burqa for presentation at press conferences). Nevermind that millions — men and women alike — had been suffering for more than two decades, and the right to a life not threatened by guns, daisy cutters, cluster bombs and mines was perhaps higher on every Afghani’s agenda. But the Western feminist had a different idea of salvation: why starve with a Burqa on when you can do the same without one? You may as well get a belly-ring before you die.

Afghanistan was invaded. Women are still oppressed. Barbara Boxer has better things to do.

It is a sad indictment of deeply rooted Western racism that claims which would be considered incredible or ridiculously improbable receive an eager audience when they are uttered in the context of Muslims.

At times the overzealous feminist messianism has done more damage than good."
 http://www.counterpunch.org/iman05152003.html

Unless all this bristling at the plight of Somali women is a cover for your own racism, here are some cases closer to home, that you may actually be able to do something about:
 http://fanonite.org/2007/03/19/a-new-project-for-hirsi-ali/
 http://fanonite.org/2007/03/08/the-oppressed-women-in-iraq/

mohammed,
you suggest i may be able to do more about two issues than i am about Female Genital Mutilation.(assuming you are addressing this to Simon) & those two issues are sex trafficking slavery and the abuse of women soldiers by male soldiers within the army in Iraq.
These issues you call "closer to home" than FGM.
My understanding is that the UK Government is opposed to foreign(often East European)gangs who traffick women into UK sex slavery.Additionally the police are actively seeking prosecutions.This seems to be a good response.
As to Iraq i suppose i could publicise the abuse of women soldiers as this might help to dissuade people from joining the army.
The thing about FGM is that it is close to home.10,000 children are thought to be at risk of having the mutilation performed on them.It is illegal here in the UK under the 2003 Act but there has been no prosecution here,although the Met Police do offer a £20000 reward for information leading to a conviction.Additionally at present the threat of FGM is not grounds for seeking asylum in the UK.i think theres a good case for it to be so .
However i have not done any demonstrating against FGM.(i might consider making a donation but thats about it).i cannot speak for my actions in 2008 but in 2007 the time i gave to demonstrating included the arms trade,climate change,and Faslane .

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's policies On Immigration
Ayaan Hirsi Ali did not run on an anti-immigration agenda and she would not have regarded her policies as being anti-immigrant.On the contrary she regarded her policies as being positively for the integration of immigrants into Dutch society. This is how it is stated in her book "Infidel".For a list of her policies please see hidden comment "dialecticalities".(not quite sure why it is hidden.Maybe i pressed the wrong button or Indymedia hid it).


3 Fanonite Allegations.

1)The title of The Fanonite's last post "Oh Simon,you saddened sister" suggests that i am "saddened sister" a previous contributor ("Whatever Happened To Women's Liberation").
i am not.But its perfectly understandable that such a thought crossed your mind.Given that contributors just give names i might have been ,but i'm not.


2)You (the Fanonite)suggest that i am latently racist because i explored the statements you made about the contents of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book "Infidel".In relation to those issues which you raised i think i have shown that Infidel is not fiction.[perhaps you have other issues with the book ]

3)You also suggest that "bristling at the plight of Somali women" may be racist ,and you address this to me.As Waris Dirie says, FGM is not excusable on cultural grounds.

i think these 3 accusations are empty,but i didn't regard it as a big deal,so i responded as i thought in a poetic,humourous and low key way,so was surprised to find it hidden(there was no malicious intent).i do not understand the phrase you use "dialectical unity" but i do know that "dialectic(s)" means the "art of investigating the truth of opinions".

Your write: "You (the Fanonite)suggest that i am latently racist because i explored the statements you made about the contents of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book "Infidel".In relation to those issues which you raised i think i have shown that Infidel is not fiction."

Nope, I said you are a racist because your clearly interested in the implications of Hirsi Ali's positions rather than their veracity. In simpler words, she bring Uncle Tom legitimacy to your hostility towards Muslims hence you are persistent willingness to overlook her lies, of which you tell us, even now, there aren't any (even though her defenders at The Economist, Newseek and Times concede that much). Through sheer power of affirmation you want us to think otherwise. She lied about her origins, lied about her reasons for seeking asylum, lied about her sister. And then takes a subsaharan cultural practice and sells it as a grounds for making rounds of neocon media and think-tanks denouncing Islam.

But the proof of your racism is you last post. So now we are even to overlook Hirsi Ali's anti-immgrant position
(others can read one report on her lies and positions here:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1775563,00.html), because she says it was for 'better integration'? Bush invaded Iraq for bringing democracy there - if he hasn't said that enough times already, he is certainly going to say so in his book - so have we all been wrong about the shrub? Perhaps after reading Bush's memoir you could return and tell us why the Iraq war (also supported by Hirsi Magan) was a fabulous thing.

Fanonite wrote:

"She lied about her origins, lied about her reasons for seeking asylum, lied about her sister."

If you had read her book, you would know that she was open about the fact that she lied when seeking asylum, and clearly gave her reasons for doing so. Ironically you seem to be using some rather right-wing fallacious argument which could so easily have come from the white middle class suburbs that because she lied on her immigration papers she must therfore have lied about everything else in her book.

To be honest i don't think you have any more grounds to know what is true than does Simon in the above post or any of the rest of us (that's right, i am no more Simon than he is Saddened Sister) . The truth is, none of us knows the complete truth here. We can make suppositions, we can make intelligent deductions, but to make the kind of sweeping claims as you do that everything Hirsi Ali says is a lie belies your intelligence.

i really think you should read her book, then perhaps we can have a reasoned discussion.

Although Ayaan Hirsi Ali has raised the issue of female Genital Mutilation in her book Infidel perhaps you might be more inclined to believe the UN Special Ambassador against FGM Waris Dirie who has written about it in three good books Desert Dawn,Desert Flower,and Desert Children.Worldwide there are over 100 million women living who have suffered FGM.
There are 500,000 in Europe and 70,000 in the UK.10,000 are at risk.It takes place in 25 countries mainly in Africa it is true but also in Malaysia,Indonesia,and Kurdish Iraq.But now it takes place in European countries as well.
Waris Dirie has a 15 goal manifesto on FGM.Amongst them

*all European countries to regard genital mutilation as equal to political persecution and as grounds for asylum.

*everyone to be enlightened about the status of gental mutilation;not culture but torture

*every religious community to take a clear stand against the practice of genital mutilation

Although FGM is practised by Ethiopian Jews and was practised until recently by the Christian Coptic Church in Egypt the majoirity of the countries (outside of Europe) where
FGM is practised are Muslim.Although the Quran mentions not a word about FGM and although the Prophet never excised his children there are misconceptions in many countries that the practise is sanctioned by the Quran.Yes FGM predates Islam but nearly all the countries where it is practised became Muslim later.This is what Waris Dirie says in Desert Dawn (p74)
"my mother,s intention was not to harm me.it was something my mother and her sisters and her mother went through themselves.They honestly felt it had to be done in order for me to be pure.They believed it was specifically ordered in the Koran.i know better now,this ritual practice is not even mentione in the Koran but that is what they were told by the Wadaddo-the religious people.Nobody could read the Koran or the Hadith.My mother listened to the sheiks.She didn't question what she was told"

Waris Dirie also,like Ayaan Magan,comes from Somalia.Waris wanted to get religious advice so she went to see a respected Islamic expert,Professor Noibi of MAN Mosque in Brixton.He confirmed that it (FGM) is not in the Koran but is in three weak Hadith.He then said "After the death of the Prophet four schools of Islamic thought quickly emerged....naturally adapted the teachings slightly to fit in with the circumstances and the customs of the regions they were living and studying in.One of these schools recommends the circumcision of women.The school of teaching is followed in large parts of Africa and also in Asia,particularly in Malaysia and Indonesia"

It is a much bigger subject than we might imagine which is why another of Waris' goals is that

*FGM should be a subject that people can and will openly discuss"

Since 2002 imams in Tanzania,Chad and Senegal have spoken out against the practice.At the Nairobi conference against FGM in 2004 the Kenyan delegate Hassan De Nadoo said "Imams should preach against FGM with great conviction in their mosques" Waris Dirie says "All imams in the world should follow this advice.Then the problem would cease to exist."

i haven't time to answer the rest of your points tonight however i will within a day or two

Fanonite
1)Reading memoirs does give one insights into those people one reads about and may lead to them going up in one's estimation its true.But it isn't necessarily so.Although both Pervez Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto (whose i read 5 years back) did go up in my estimation,Hilary Clinton,Ian Botham and Boris Yeltsin did not (for example).Ayaan Hirsi Ali i knew little about before reading her book.i don't have any desire to read Bush or Blair thanks.Thanks for the post about Fatima Bhutto on your site.

2)"Uncle Tom Legitimacy"
Suppose an Irish boy comes forward to say he's been sexually abused by a Roman Catholic priest.Is he being disloyal to the R.C. Church ? Is he being unpatriotic to Ireland ? And are we being racist if we call on the Roman Catholic Church to clean up its act ? a hundred years ago the boy might not have dared speak up.seventy years ago he'd have got a 'clip round the ear'ole' if he said something.Fifty years ago he might still have been told that he shouldn't say such things about the holy father for isn't he appointed by the Pope who's appointed by Jesus his very self.Today we know that abuse by Roman Catholic priests is nothing to do with Jesus or his philosophy.But suppose this boy received death threats for speaking out and filled with emnity he called out for the killing of the Pope and the bombing of the Vatican.Those with a mind like myself would probably understand but totally oppose such a violent reaction and continue only to insist the R.C. Church clean up its act.But if other forces already intent on aggression attacked the Vatican ,who would truely lay the blame at the boy's door.

3) i never said that Ayaan Hirsi Ali told no lies.i said,as Saddened Sister has also said ,that the truth about her immigration (as you described it)is in the book, that the bit about her mother and Aden is in the book ,and that you are wrong to suggest that in the book she makes herself out to be a lifelong victim of fanatical Muslims .she doesn't. It is true that i cannot say 100% that Ayaan Hirsi Ali was not at her own wedding but the account in the book rings true (while Mahad even in the video on your website doesn't).i suppose i cannot 100% guarantee that she has been infibulated but given that UNICEF say more than 90% of Somalian women have been,and given that Waris Dirie says the number is even higher,and given Ayaan's own account,it is very very likely.What is a little odd of course is that you do not make any itemised refutations of her statements (and quotes)about Islam itself..

4)My position on Ayaan Hirsi Ali
a) hers is a life of sweeping changes in environment,employment,and religion and she writes well about it

b) i applaud her for escaping an arranged marriage she did not want.In general however,having discussed this with people, i would guess that arranged marriages that are agreed to probably have a greater chance of success than boy meets girl marriages,but that forced marriages come last .According to Zakir Naik forced marriages are not Koranic.
(two Hadiths in Sahir Bukhari Vol 7 Book 62 Number 69 & Ibn-e-Humbal No 2469)

c)i applaud her for breaking the taboo on not talikng about FGM and speaking out about her own infibulation.

d) On the whole i support her policies for integration of immigrants in Holland.An amnesty for all illegal immigrants is a good thing as was her proposal to give independent legal status to women coming to marry legal migrants already in Holland.i don't think i support her view on getting rid of the minimum wage although i know there is an argument that cutting benefits allows more money to exist to set up more business.i support her desire to put FGM and Honour Killings higher up the agenda .These killings have been at a much higher level in Holland than the UK where they are at 12% of all women killed in Domestic Violence.But of course these killings do not include women taken abroad to be killed.(perpetrators are Sikh as well as Muslim & anyway its against the Koran)

e) i don't support her position on Iraq or Iran.As far as Israel/Palestine is concerned its my view that as the Holocaust took place in Germany , Israel should have been set up there; but 60 years down the roadmap (ha ha) its not a very helpful observation.As far as Ayaan's comments that Israeli society seems more equitable of the sexes and together its probably true.It is however irrelevant and secondary beside their right to a state (and 60 years in their conditions is hardly condusive to being together.