Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Plan to Change the Islamic World

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Muslim apostate turned Dutch politician turned American intellectual, is the author of a recent book entitled Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now. Michael Totten writes in his review:

[U]p until a few years ago, Hirsi Ali thought Islam was unreformable. And something of an intellectual industry has sprouted up in the West for making that case. Somewhat surprisingly, however, she claims that the Arab Spring—botched as it was—proved her wrong. While it facilitated the rise of some Islamist and jihadist movements, it also gave millions of Muslims an opportunity to renounce them. Islamists came to power in Tunisia and Egypt, for example, but were quickly removed in spasms of buyer’s remorse. Hirsi Ali cites a 2014 Pew Research Center poll surveying 14,000 Muslims worldwide showing that huge majorities, almost everywhere, fear the [Islamists]—92 percent of Lebanese, 80 percent of Tunisians, and even 75 percent of Egyptians. It remains to be seen whether or not those majorities become the catalysts of a reformation.

In the meantime . . . Islamic State controls vast swaths of Syria and Iraq, and is expanding into Libya and Yemen. Bombs rip through markets in Baghdad. Foreign oil workers are beheaded in Libya. Cartoonists and Jewish citizens are assassinated in Paris; café patrons are taken hostage in Sydney. The majority of the world’s Muslims may stand aghast, but the perpetrators are adherents of Islam—no matter who admits it.

Most Muslims are still in denial because the ramifications of recognizing these monsters as their co-religionists are staggering. But, as Hirsi Ali notes, they’ll eventually have to face the truth. What’s more, the rest of us have a part to play in pressing the issue. “If Muslims simply refuse to renounce jihad completely,” she writes, “then the next best thing would be to call their bluff about Islam being a religion of peace.”

Read more at Commentary

More about: Arab Spring, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Islam, Islamism, Moderate Islam, Politics & Current Affairs, Religion

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF