Hogging all the Voltaires

Girls born in the Islamic protectorate of Mogadishu these days will be genitally mutilated, if they live long enough. They will be placed in an Islamic arranged marriage and will check the box on the marriage form that says “virgin.” Their parents, and later their spouse, will beat them. They will submit to Allah. Boys will study the Koran. They will be taught to hate Jews and apostates. If they don’t submit they will face Islamic punishment. This, like everything in lawless Somalia, is all about Islam.

Or is it? “This is all about the money,” NY Times’ Jeffrey Gettleman said about Somali piracy. “And I’ve interviewed a number of pirates, and they’ve told me that straightforwardly. They said this isn’t about politics, this isn’t about religion, this isn’t about any ‘beef’ that we have with anybody out there. This is about money. This is a way to earn income in a state where the economy is in complete tatters.”

Keep moving folks, no jihad to see here. Just a few entrepreneurs with AK47s. Let Gettleman explain: “That’s just what you see on the surface. But behind that are pretty sophisticated, pretty intelligent people, that have figured out a way to exploit the anarchic system to make money, and make a lot of money.”

Maybe I’ve become too idealistic in my post-graduate day, but don’t Somalis deserve more than Gettleman’s platitudes? Behind the chaos there are pitifully few sophisticated and intelligent people. Behind the screams there is Islam. By making excuses for Islamist society, Gettleman helps perpetuate it. Somalis don’t need that. The best humanitarian aid we can offer disasters like Somalia is our support for Enlightenment values.

Somali refugee Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of Infidel, has articulated support for an Islamic Enlightenment, but has been jeered by multiculturalists in Gettleman-esque denial. Hirsi Ali fled an arranged marriage in Somalia, took Dutch citizenship, and became a women’s rights advocate as a Dutch parliamentarian. Most memorably, she co-created a short film in 2004 about the subjugation of women in Islam. A terrorist shot her co-creator off his bike in public, nearly decapitaded him, and stabbed a jihad note in his chest warning Hirsi Ali would be next. She has had to live with bodyguards ever since.

Hirsi Ali’s case against Somalia’s Islamic culture goes beyond its inherent injustices, such as husbands whipping their wives for disobedience. It breeds poverty, she argues. “Allah predestines all, and life on earth is simply a waiting room for the Hereafter. Does that belief have no link to the fatalism that so often reinforces poverty?”

Indeed, it would be a surprise if a society mesmerized by the life of an illiterate warlord who fell in love with his friend’s six year-old daughter would be prosperous. Hirsi Ali calls the Koran – the focus of Somali life – a “historical record, written by humans…And it is a very tribal and Arab version of events. It spreads a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war.” Somalis don’t “exploit” this “system,” as Gettleman puts it. It exploits them.

So what is the alternative? Hirsi Ali is sounds remarkably like Thomas Paine in her support for individual rights, instead of submission to the traditions of the dead or the demands of the eternal. Western society works better because “life on earth is valued in the here and now, and individuals enjoy rights and freedoms that are recognized and protected by the state.” Paine would agree: “Submission is wholly a vassalage term, repugnant to the dignity of freedom, and an echo of the language used at the [Norman] Conquest…And as Government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.”

Those that would deny Somalia the chance for Enlightenment call Hirsi Ali racist and Islamophobic. “Tell me,” she replies, “is freedom then only for white people?” As Paine said, just because one generation is “disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free.”

It’s so easy to spit on Enlightenment values when we’ve come to take them for granted. But how dare we deny them to those living in submission to the tyrannical infallibility of the Prophet? asks Hirsi Ali:

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 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.

The West broke free from the backward superstitions of the Catholic Church. The Japanese “leapfrogged” the Enlightenment. Is it compassion to deny this to Muslims?

A German soldier taken prisoner in the Revolutionary War told Paine “Ah! America is a fine free country, it is worth the people’s fighting for; I know the difference by knowing my own; in my country, if the prince says eat straw, we eat straw.” Perhaps the fundamental difference between Somalia and America eludes Gettleman, but Hirsi Ali knows it all too well.