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The West is duly terrified. But it should not be surprised.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: November 13
Activist
Author
Feminist
Journalist
Politician
Scientist
Screenwriter
Xamar
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Terrified
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More quotes by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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Americans have always welcomed people of all backgrounds, religions, and races. It's a spirit of tolerance, now energized and amplified by the cult of multiculturalism.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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I don't believe in hell and heaven anymore. Or angels. I think Islam is a superstition like every other superstition. But now because it's a superstition, unlike Christianity, that hasn't been tested and hasn't gone through a process of enlightenment, I think it's a dangerous superstition.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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Reality is not easy, but all this make-believe doesn't make it easier.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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I don't believe there is such a thing as 'moderate Islam.' I think it's better to talk about degrees of belief and degrees of practice.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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I call myself a liberal - a classical liberal as in John Stuart Mill.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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You'll be pleased to hear, Christopher, that I am no longer a Muslim liberal but an atheist [....] I find that it obviates the necessity for any cognitive dissonance.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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The mistake that the Bush administration should admit to is not so much that they made the wrong choices. They made the right analysis they made the right choices. But what they did wrong was the execution of those choices. That was wrong.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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There is one Islam, unreformed, but three sets of Muslims. Medina, Mecca, and. Dissidents, reformers, whatever you want to call them. The first group are the extremists and fundamentalists, the second the great mass of Muslims who just want to live their lives in peace, and the third are reformers.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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The demand that Islam makes of women is to not attract attention to yourself, and if you are in a secular society, that attire does exactly that, and it is a political symbol, no longer religious.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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Avoiding offense means that we don't accept each other as equals.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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The people who believe themselves to be on the left, and who defend the agents of Islam in the name of tolerance and culture, are being rightwing. Not just rightwing. Extreme rightwing. I don't understand how you can be so upset about the Christian right and just ignore the Islamic right. I'm talking about equality.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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I do not believe in God, angels and the hereafter.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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In 1985 as a teenager in Kenya, I was an adamant member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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Muslim leaders should ask themselves what exactly their relationship is to a political movement that encourages young men to kill and maim on religious grounds.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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Most unmarried Somali girls who got pregnant committed suicide. I knew of one girl in Mogadishu who poured a can of gasoline over herself in the living room, with everyone there, and burned herself alive. Of course, if she hadn't done this, her father and brothers would probably have killed her anyway.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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Many people in Europe and the U.S. dispute the thesis that we are living through a clash of civilisations between Islam and the west. But a radical minority of Muslims firmly believes that Islam is under siege, and is committed to winning the holy war it has declared against the West.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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Every time you take a train, step into your car, walk into the shopping mall, go to the airport - every single time, something could happen. That's how terrorism works.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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You have to let individuals make their own choices and respect that, even if it's your own child. And that's what was taken away from me. My father passed away thinking I still had to go back to his way of believing.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali