Bernhard: An Enlightenment Fundamentalist
Charles Johnson
Wed May 3, 2006 at 6:52 pm PDT • Views: 291
Atlas has the text of Brendan Bernhard’s excellent piece for the New York Sun, on Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s recent interview at the New York Public Library as part of PEN World Voices: The New York Festival of International Literature: The liberal betrayal of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
“My criticism of the West, especially of liberals, is that they do take freedom for granted,” Ms. Ali responded. She noted that Western Europeans born after World War II are unused to conflict. “They have lost the instinct to recognize that there can be such a thing as an enemy or a threat to freedom, and that’s what I’m witnessing in Europe now,” she stated. “[There is] a pacifist ideology that violence should never be used in any circumstances, and so we should talk and talk and talk. Even when your opponent tells you, ‘I don’t want to talk to you, I want to destroy you,’ the reaction is, ‘Please, let’s talk about the fact that you want to destroy me!’” [That sums up the American left - Atlas]
At this, the audience, which included a female student wearing a Little Green Footballs T-shirt, a reference to the pro-Iraq war Web site, burst into laughter. At the end of the interview, the Dutch politician and author was given rousing applause, and it became clear that whatever cognitive dissonance had been in the room belonged less to those who had paid to listen to her than to those who had invited her to speak.
Frank says: