So it's like with injured horses and Jell-O! Anyway, I know suicide bombers don't write notes, maybe because a good carnage photo speaks a thousand words as they say, but here is what I imagine one of them might have written:

Dear Allah,
Go to Hell.
If you existed I would ask to be reincarnated as the lesbian test tube spawn of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Pamela Geller.

Or maybe:

Dear Allah,
And maybe bring back Lynndie England to guard my husband's cell.

Or:

Dear Allah,
I just don't see why the Sunnis and the Shiites can't come together to celebrate all the beliefs they share, such as the one about how women who have sex before marriage need to be killed. Come to think of it, a lot of religions commit "honor killings," right? How come no one ever stops and thinks about how much we all have in common?

Dear Allah,
Because then people would stop killing each other so much and spend all their time fucking. I get it.

Dear Allah,
If you pack our torsos with explosives, do we not bleed?
Rhetorical question.

Love, Blackmail and Rape: How Al Qaeda Grooms Women As "Perfect Weapons" [Times]
Muslim Extremist Women Fight For Right To Join Al Qaeda [CBS 13]
Why Women Become Suicide Bombers [Newsweek]

Photo via Photobucket

That November, she attended a public debate on the subject "The West or Islam: Who Needs a Voltaire?" The first three speakers called for a new Voltaire in the West, a rational reformer to counter Western arrogance and neocolonialism and consumerist decadence. Only the last speaker, a refugee from Iran who taught law at Amsterdam University, spoke up for the "critical renewal" of Islam.



During the question and answer period, comment was heavily supportive of the first view. Finally Hirsi Ali raised her hand. Here is what she said as she recalled it in her 2007 memoir, Infidel: Look at how many Voltaires the West has. Don't deny us the right to have our Voltaire, too. Look at our women, and look at our countries. Look at how we are all fleeing and asking for refuge here, and how people are now flying planes into buildings in their madness. Allow us a Voltaire, because we are truly living in the Dark Ages.

And speaking of said Dark Ages: In a gesture that Hirsi Ali will appreciate—she considers the date of her escape to freedom her "real birthday"—Frederick Douglass marked the tenth anniversary of his escape in a special way. He published in the North Star an open letter to his former owner, Thomas Auld, one of the slaveholders whose religious profession he deemed a travesty. It is a most unusual and highly charged communication, and this is how it ends:

I will now bring this letter to a close; you shall hear from me again unless you let me hear from you. I intend to make use of you as a weapon with which to assail the system of slavery—as a means of concentrating public attention on the system, and deepening the horror of trafficking in the souls and bodies of men. I shall make use of you as a means of exposing the character of the American church and clergy—and as a means of bringing this guilty nation, with yourself, to repentance. In doing this, I entertain no malice toward you personally. There is no roof under which you would be more safe than mine, and there is nothing in my house which you might need for your comfort, which I would not readily grant. Indeed, I should esteem it a privilege to set you an example as to how mankind ought to treat each other.

I am your fellow-man, but not your slave.

Hirsi Ali, for her part, blames Islam — and not a lunatic fringe — for 9/11 and would like everyone to renounce this idea there is a fucking God already. Hirsi Ali, from our previous readings, would seem to be kind of high on her own awesome Powers of Intellect, and irritatingly self-promotional about it, but this strikes at the heart of the division between the two women's worldviews.

The writer Paul Berman suggests that the difference between them may be due to the fact that Ms. Manji was raised in the warm, liberal, welcoming precincts of British Columbia, where religion could be a comfort rather than a burden, where pluralism was an assumption, a fact of life. (Ms. Manji was kicked out of her Islamic religious school for asking too many questions, but before that she had been cared for at a Baptist church, and at age 8 even won its Most Promising Christian of the Year award.) Ms. Hirsi Ali's early years, by contrast, consisted of dictatorship, war, patriarchy, genital cutting, confinement and beatings so severe that she once ended up in a hospital with a fractured skull. Ms. Manji offers her own support for Mr. Berman's conjecture: "Had I grown up in a Muslim country, I'd probably be an atheist in my heart."

Muslim Rebel Sisters: At Odds With Islam And Each Other [NY Times]
In Good Faith [NY Times]

People seem to feel in Europe about Ayaan Hirsi Ali the way they do in America about Tyra, as the Washington Post explains in a profile that begins thusly:

People come along every now and then, idiosyncratic, opinionated, talented, flawed, impossible.

You're telling us! Dave Chappelle. Mary-Kate. Mel. Rachel Ray! Rachel Zoe! Jennifer Weiner! That guy who wrote that Vanity Fair piece claiming women aren't funny...

Anyway, Hirsi Ali is a bestselling memoirist and former member of Dutch Parliament who seems to have made a name for herself condemning Islam. We find this a bit disturbing, because she has also obviously made a name for herself being smoking hot, and being the World's Sexiest Victim of Islam is sort of like being the World's Sexiest Victim of Wal-Mart a la Julie Roehm, the hot blonde self-marketing whiz Wal-Mart fired for being too edgy (and also taking free shit and maybe fucking a subordinate). Anyway, the point is, being a sexy victim is one thing, but marketing oneself as the sexiest victim is kind of tacky when there are like, literally billions of victims, and we have yet to read Ali's completely-sold-out-everywhere Infidel, so we read the Post piece in hopes of forming an only mostly-uneducated opinion to pass on to you.

After the jump, find out whether there's more to Hirsi Ali than raging cheekbones and a fatwa!

True Unbeliever [Washington Post]

She's got true victim cred — though not as much as the dead director of her movie:

She scripted an 11-miute film about the Koran and domestic abuse of women that resulted in the throat-slitting assassination of its director, Theo van Gogh, by a Muslim fanatic. The killer stabbed a note into the dying man's chest. It was addressed to her.

It promised death.

She's Just Like Us!

"All we talked about was manicures and clothes," says Martha Levin, executive vice president and publisher at Free Press, her American publishing house.

She's sincere.

"It may be naïve, stupid, irrational, but I'm doing this because I think that if I do, there'll me less honor killings, fewer little girls undergoing female genital mutilation like I did."

She sincerely believes she's smarter than everyone.

[The movie] screening was filmed for television, and when one of the women stressed her objections, Ian Buruma writes, Hirsi Ali dismissed her with a wave of her hand and said, "So long, then."

"It was this wave, this gentle gesture of disdain, this almost aristocratic dismissal of a noisome inferior, that upset her critics more than anything."

She sincerely believes she's smarter than everyone alive right now.

Hirsi Ali sees herself standing in the long light cast by the Western Enlightenment thinkers: Voltaire, John Locke, John Stuart Mill and maybe Thomas Jefferson.

She's sort of a neocon.

The attacks on the Trade Center were not by a "lunatic fringe," she said, but by the very center of the faith: "this was not just Islam, this was the core of Islam...[this was] not frustration, poverty, colonialism, or Israel: it was about religious belief, a one-way ticket to Heaven." ...She stood for office on the Liberal ticket, one of a slate of candidates, and made it into parliament - and immigrant elected on a current of anti-immigrant sentiment.

She's reducing the poor writer to snark:

During the uproar that followed filmmaker van Gogh's murder, there was a television documentary that showed people, including her ex-husband, saying much of what she had said about her arranged marriage was false. It became public knowledge that she had lied on her immigration application..The government, furious, announced she would be stripped of citizenship. That set off another uproar that toppled the ruling coalition of parties, but saved her Dutch nationality.

What's left, after such an ordeal?

The United States, of course.