Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and founder of the AHA Foundation. She served as a member of the Dutch parliament from 2003-2006.

Saturday

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Christmas II: Andrews Watts, Marcus Walker, Ali Kefford, Roger Lewis, Ayaan Hirsh Ali and Christopher Howse

From our UK edition

48 min listen

On this week’s Christmas Out Loud - part two: Andrew Watts goes to santa school (1:11); Marcus Walker reads his priest’s notebook (7:20); Ali Kefford spends Christmas on patrol with submariners (12:34); Roger Lewis says good riddance to 2024, voiced by the actor Robert Bathurst (20:57); Ayaan Hirsh Ali argues that there is a Christian revival under way (32:41); and Christopher Howse reveals the weirdness behind Christmas carols (38:34).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

A Christian revival is under way

From our UK edition

This is my second Christmas as a Christian. As an atheist, I had dismissed the bright lights and customs of Christmas as traditions that had evolved to keep our spirits up as the cold of winter creeps in. But the more I learn about, and participate in, the rituals of my adopted faith, the less Grinch-like I become. Christmas isn’t just crass commercialism, it’s vital to a western revival. Celebrating it is more important than ever. The date of 25 December was significant before the birth of Christ of course. It coincided with the Ancient Roman celebration of Winter Solstice, just as 25 March was the Spring Equinox.

Thursday

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The death of free speech in Britain

From our UK edition

In Michel Houellebecq’s satirical novel Soumission, the French elite submits to Islamic rule rather than accept a National Front government. Nine years after its publication, submission seems more imminent on this side of the English Channel. My American friends are surprised to learn there’s no equivalent to the First Amendment in Britain. They have forgotten a free press was one of the things their ancestors rebelled to establish in the US. Free speech is a much more recent thing in the UK. If it was born in the 1960s, it seems to be dying in the 2020s. If free speech in the UK was born in the 1960s, it seems to be dying in the 2020s After the recent riots, people were given prison sentences for posting words and images on social media.

Friday

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The Republicans must dump Trump and opt for Ron DeSantis

From our UK edition

When I arrived in Washington, DC in 2006 to learn about US politics, someone told me that in America, there are two main parties: the party of power and the party of stupid. The latter denoted, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Republican party. And so it continues to prove. The failure of the much-hyped red wave to materialise in the 2022 midterms shows that the GOP has not lost its knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Consider: a day before the election, Biden’s approval rating was 39 per cent. This was a reflection of his poor performance (inflation, gas prices and immigration are just a few of the issues on which his administration has shown stunning incompetence).

Sunday

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

She was the Queen of the West

For much of my life, I confess I didn’t pay much attention to Queen Elizabeth II. My Muslim upbringing in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Saudi Arabia meant that the idea of a female figurehead was utterly foreign to me. How could a woman be the head of a church or the leader or embodiment of a nation? This was not what my god taught. Allah, for me, was the ultimate patriarchal ruler. He would certainly not countenance a figure like the Queen. But once I left Islam and became a convert to the ideals of the West, I came to appreciate her. The massive crowds following her coffin as it wound its way down from Balmoral, through Edinburgh, to London and finally to Windsor show that I am far from alone. The Queen was beloved.

queen

Monday

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

It’s time for feminists to say #MenToo

From our UK edition

Let me be clear: I am a committed feminist and a passionate supporter of the Enlightenment and its ideals. Indeed, I have been the beneficiary of those ideals in ways unimaginable to most people in the western world. I travelled from a genuinely patriarchal society poisoned by Islamism to a free, secular society where women, whatever issues we might still have, were equal to men under the law and able to pursue opportunities I could scarcely have dreamed of growing up. As I have written before, however imperfect western civilisation might be, we haven’t seen anything like it anywhere else in human history. The progress we have made is dizzying. One of western civilisation’s greatest achievements is the emancipation of women.

Sunday

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Energy is the most important issue in the world

One issue more than any other will dominate airtime and influence policy in 2022: energy. Americans are seeing the highest prices at the pump in seven years. Since Biden took office, average gas prices are up by more than $1 a gallon. In November, gas prices in Mono County, California hit more than $6 per gallon, forcing some residents to drive to Nevada (where gas taxes are lower) to buy fuel. The price of natural gas in the US is at its highest in seven years, and up more than 180 percent in the last year alone. In Europe, the situation is even worse. Europe’s gas reserves are at record lows. In Germany, which already had the EU’s highest energy prices, bills are up 30 percent in a year.

energy
migrants
Ayaan Hirsi Ali

When migrants come, their culture does too

The challenge of integrating immigrants from the non-western world is not new to Europe. But a large influx of new migrants over the last decade, and a significant increase in harassment and sexual assault against women across multiple European countries, make it one that Europe can no longer avoid addressing. This story has its origins in the decades of economic recovery after World War Two, when many European countries faced a growing worker shortage for industry work. ‘Guest worker’ programs were created, notably in Germany, on the assumption that such workers would return home. But many workers preferred to stay in Europe and pursued family reunification. Jobs and welfare entitlements made Germany preferable to Turkey, France preferable to Algeria.

Thursday

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Wokeness is the return of white supremacy

There are white people in this country and elsewhere who rank human beings by race, with the whites at the top, blacks at the bottom and everyone else in between. They are convinced that whites have a divine or natural right to rule, and they abhor racial intermarriage. They are a minuscule minority, here and elsewhere. White supremacists hold no government power. Their resources are negligible. They gather in obscure places, online as in person, and their conventions are ridiculous spectacles in which the costumes are as odious as the fantasies are pathetic. It wasn’t always like this. From about the sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, the world was theirs to exploit. Western politicians, thinkers and scientists theorized freely about racial hierarchy.

white supremacy

Friday

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: I Call It Criminal Race Theory

From our UK edition

21 min listen

In this week’s edition of The Green Room, Deputy Editor of The Spectator World edition Dominic Green meets human rights activist, campaigner for classical liberal values, research fellow, founder of the AHA foundation and prolific author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for a chat about her article in the new edition of The Spectator World edition. In it, she examines the perceived flaws in Western civilisation today, the toxic creep of those who push for a totalitarian ‘woke’ agenda and reflects on how tertiary education in the US is in danger of smothering students with critical race theory. ‘You have to drill down on what it is the woke want. They want to dictate what you eat and don’t eat.

Wednesday

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Why the West is best

‘Western civilization would be a good idea,’ joked Mahatma Gandhi, one of its most successful pupils. We are accustomed to hearing what is wrong with Western civilization: racism, sexism, colonialism and (gasp) capitalism. The world would be a kind of utopia, we are told, if only we could purge these sins from our societies. But if Western civilization is evil, what is the alternative? Four other -isms vie for our attention. The first is socialism. Its proponents include some old-fashioned Marxists, faithful to the old egalitarian nostrums, but most are pseudo- or neo-Marxists. The ‘woke’ activists fundamentally oppose capitalism and are aggressively committed to intersectionality, but they are vague on the alternatives. We can assume that they will not end in utopia.

western

Thursday

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Britain must investigate its Islamist ‘dawa’ networks

From our UK edition

A few months ago, William Shawcross was asked by the government to lead an independent review into its anti-terrorism strategy, Prevent, and to ‘consider the UK’s strategy for protecting people vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism’. Ever since his appointment was announced, Shawcross has been attacked by an array of activists who want to minimise any scrutiny of Islamist organisations. The campaign against him has been vicious but it has also been deeply instructive. The opposition has been so intense that it has led some to believe that the UK Muslim ‘community’ is outraged by the independent review. There is a significant difference, however, between Muslims and Islamists. Shawcross is an exceptionally talented man whom I know well.

Thursday

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Can Macron stem the tide of Islamism in France?

From our UK edition

Just over a week ago, Emanuel Macron said he wanted to end ‘Islamist separatism’ in France because a minority of the country’s estimated six million Muslims risk forming a ‘counter-society’. On Friday, we saw yet another example of this when a  history teacher was decapitated in the street on his way home in a Paris suburb. Samuel Paty had discussed the free speech in the classroom and shown cartoons of Mohammed. Some parents had protested, leading to a wider fuss - and, eventually, his murder. M Paty was murdered, Macron said, ‘because he taught the freedom of expression, the freedom to believe or not believe.’ The president is now positioning himself as the defender of French values, determined to drain the Islamist swamp.