Hirsi Ali is not just anti-Muslim, she’s anti-Christian

Paul Belien at The Brussels Journal is a kindred spirit to VFR, noting with some bemusement that Hirsi Ali, the Somalian immigrant, Dutch Parliamentarian, and crusader for women’s and homosexual rights, has been named European of the Year by the Reader’s Digest. While Belien respects Ali for her advocacy of reforming Islam and her courage in the face of continual death threats from Muslims in the Netherlands, he draws a line when she attacks religion in general. Like me, Belien understands that many Western secularists see the fight against Islam as an opportunity to advance their own agenda, which is not just to protect Western society from Muslim oppression, but to suppress all religions, particularly Christianity. This is something Belien won’t stand for, even if the person doing it is a brave individual like Hirsi Ali (and even if Ali’s main focus remains combatting Islam, not combatting Christianity).

It would be hard to sum up Belien’s points so I’ll provide extended quotes from his article instead.

Last September a Dutch court prohibited the Dutch government from subsidizing the Reformed Political Party (SGP), a small so-called “fundamentalist” Christian party, opposed to abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage and trio-marriages. While the Dutch state subsidizes all other political parties, the courts have ruled that the SGP should be deprived of government subsidies because it is said to violate women’s rights by not putting forward women candidates for elections. The Dutch government decided to appeal the verdict, but Hirsi Ali, as we reported at the time, applauded it, saying that any political party discriminating against women or homosexuals should be deprived of funding and, hence, effectively banned. Are these “the values of tolerance and justice” that Reader’s Digest wants “a young woman born outside Europe” to “show Europeans”?…

But the question must be asked whether, by fighting religion in general through state imposed “measures,” she and other liberal European secularist religion-haters, are not undermining Europe’s capacity to counter Muslim extremism from a healthy Christian foundation.

“She believes that she can help change the lives of Muslim women and, ultimately, the climate that breeds extremism,” RD writes. It is, however, the religious vacuum created by the secularist iconoclasts of Europe’s Christian civilisation, that provides the breeding ground for Muslim radicals. Europe has almost ceased to be Christian. Perhaps, as an inevitable consequence of this, Europe will become Muslim because a religious vacuum will inevitably be filled by a religion – no matter how hard secularists like Hirsi Ali may try to prevent it.

We always thought RD was a conservative publication, in line with the values of the Christian American heartland. Apparently, we were wrong….

Two observationns about the above. First, the very presence of Muslims in a Western society inevitably necessitates restrictions on Islam, because Islam is so dangerous, but this leads to attempts to secularize the entire society, and thus to restrict Christianity as well as Islam. The power of the secularizing dynamic that arises in response to the large-scale presence of Muslims in any given society is shown by the fact that a secularizer like Ali is being endorsed by the once-conservative Reader’s Digest, proving again my point that under Bush and post 9/11, conservatism has shifted massively to the left. There are only two ways to avoid the further radical secularizing of society: either not to have any Muslims in the West, period, or to classify Islam as a political expansionist movement seeking power over society, and therefore not deserving of ordinary religious freedoms.

I also note a disturbing fact that Belien mentions in passing, that in Netherlands political parties are subsidized by the state, and are either approved or rejected for funding based on their beliefs. Nothing could better illustrate Europe’s profound political differences from the United States. A country in which political parties are creatures of the state is not a free country; its people must have at least partially a slave mentality.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 06, 2006 02:00 AM | Send