Islamic terrorism cannot be understood without an examination of Islam, said Ayaan Hirsi Ali in a Tuesday-published interview with Dave Rubin for his eponymous show.
Contrary to narratives pushed by Democrats and their left-wing ideological allies of Islamic terrorism as somehow divorced from Islam, Ali maintains that Islamic terrorism is rooted in the legacy of Muhammed and the Quran.
Understanding the draw of Muslims to Islamic terrorism requires an understanding of Muhammed and the Quran, said Ali:
With Islam, I find that very often we talk about symptoms, we talk about the environment, we talk about disenfranchised young men, we talk about countries that feel that because they have autocratic dictatorships that maybe the populations are acting out, but we hardly ever talk about the core of the issue, and as far as I’m concerned, if we want to defeat what it is that makes ISIS — Islamic State of Iraq and Syria — so attractive, and al-Qaeda and all these other groups so attractive, we will no be able to do that without learning something about the life and legacy of Muhammed, the founder of Islam, [and the Quran].
Ali’s statements are at odds with false narratives pushed by Democrats and the broader left regarding Islamic terrorism. As president, Barack Obama said “ISIS is not Islamic,” later accusing then-presidential candidate Donald Trump of “doing ISIL’s work.”
Obama also described ongoing war in the failed Muslim-majority state of Syria as driven by “climate change,” neglecting to identify its connections to Islam and Muslims. Various leftists have parroted this narrative, including Hillary Clinton, Bill Nye, Prince Charles, Bill Maher and Bernie Sanders. TIME also connected mass murder Islamic terrorist attacks in France to “climate change.”
Democrats and the broader left regularly deny any overlap between Islamic terrorism, Islam, and Muslims. Left-wing and Democrat-aligned news media outlets such as CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NPR regularly ignore or deny Islamic terrorism’s connections to Islamic theology and doctrines.
“Islamization,” said Ali, is the process of pushing societies toward fusion of politics with Islamic doctrine. Islamist states such as Saudi Arabia fund such operations. Islamist heads of state such as Turkish President Recep Erdogan, she noted, encourage Muslims to move to the West, raise large families, and reject assimilation.
Now living in America, Ali expressed her love of the homeland’s freedom, describing it as paradisiacal in its ethos of liberty to pursue happiness.
The West is failing in its defense of its own identity of freedom, said Ali, warning Westerners against taking freedom for granted:
We in the West, we have failed to sell [the values of freedom]. I think part of it is because the people, present-day Westerners, didn’t do the fighting. They were not the young, hungry, scrappy men that made this country. They were the ones who inherited it after several generations.
Western decadence has disconnected the current generations from the struggles overcome to secure their inheritance, said Ali: “[Lots of Westerners] don’t know what is not to be free.”
Rubin’s interview with Ali was filmed in an undisclosed location for security reasons.
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