Ayaan Hirsi Ali to LATimes: ‘Big problem is to define the protection of women’s rights as the problem of the 21st century’
This article has been published on the 17th October 2009 in Los Angeles Times.
The interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in a Somali Muslim family, refugee in Netherlands, author of the screenplay for a film about women’s treatment under Islam – the film that was the reason for the assasination of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh and the need for her constant lifeguard due to the thread for her own security.
Ali was the the member of Netherlands parliament, resigned in 2006, moved to USA, where she now works in American Enterprise Institute in Washington. She is also writer and founder of AHA foundation created with the aim to ‘defend the rights of women in the West against militant Islam’.
Some of Ali’s thoughts from the LATimes intervieware cited below:
West vs. Islam
There is too much apologizing for what freedom means. In Africa, you’re told, “Oh, this is our custom — polygamy is our custom, female genital mutilation is our custom, these are our values.” Then you have the Americans and the Europeans being very shy and saying, “Oh, I’m really sorry, it’s your custom.”
Will any country ever go to war for rights and women’s safety?
It looks like it will not happen. But I am very, very optimistic — not about going to war but about human beings changing their minds. You’ll remember how communism was stigmatized. The big problem is [how] to define the protection of women’s rights as the problem of the 21st century. If the world does that, [women's inequality] will become like the eradication of apartheid — people will insist that it’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong, and that’s when change happens.
Why are women’s rights always the ones up for negotiation?
Yes, isn’t that interesting? Women are mainly oppressed by their own fathers, their own brothers, their own mothers-in-law, their grandmothers, so it’s the most intimate kind of oppression. Another thing: Western feminism still defines the white man as the oppressor, but right now it’s the brown man, the black man, the yellow man. When you tell them, “Stop oppressing your women,” they’ll tell you, “Don’t impose your culture on me.”
~~This interview was so powerful, so insightful., so lifechanging.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is my hero!!
I especially agree when she commented about “CHANGING THE WAY PEOPLE THINK….I mean, nothing will change unless how one thinks changes, one’s perspective.
Laws can change. Politicians can change. But if the “old ways & thinking” remain….it doesn’t matter a damn. Fabulous article.