Outstanding essay that your lived experience makes particularly on point. Folks raised in the USA don’t truly grasp the looming threat of Islamist expansionism the way Europeans do intuitively (or at least used to). I’ve traveled overseas more extensively than most Americans so I’m not bribed or blinded. What’s happening in Britain’s polity is saddening but I’m far from that madding crowd. But I’m not as far from Dearborn, Michigan and owned a condo in the Galleria area of Houston where I watched in horror as the Islamist element took over the condo board (we were about ten minutes from the Houston Islam Center on Voss if any readers know H town). True story: I objected to something and the new condo chair tried to block me into my parking space. Watching the women taking their nightly walk ten paces behind the men was enough for me. After Hurricane Harvey I sold it then bought four acres in the country and got the hell out before the whole area descended into further sharia control. Keep up the good fight.
That was my area of town growing up. Your description has truly shocked and disgusted me…I still have a difficult time understanding why we, as freedom loving Americans, are allowing this to happen.
This is incredibly perceptive and intellectually and morally honest. Thank you, Ayaan. Would that the weak-kneed powers at be on both sides of the Atlantic read every word of this and acted accordingly. That is, put short-term tactical politics aside, thought about the long term, and led for a change. Our public discourse is being corrupted before our eyes through the cynical weaponization of language: “far right” is a blanket term that well-meaning people avoid being described as, when all it could mean in the present context is anything from the very moderate to the very extreme that opposes the smuggling in of values and actions of radical Islam into western democratic society. More and more of us need to wake up to the process Ayaan is analyzing.
100%. In re-defining extremism to encompass anything from the political center on rightward, the left hasn’t just moved the goal posts downfield- They’ve tossed the goal posts over the far bleachers and wholly out of the stadium!
Every time I read your pieces I’m at awe at the clarity, the honesty and the integrity behind it, and an eloquence seldomly seen. Thank you so much, Ayaan.
There are so many important and well written words in your pieces and I’ll ‘come back’ to them sometime (I have quite a sample of thoughts on your pieces amassed over time, but they really need to be sorted out and elaborated on). But this
“They need to find both the intellectual courage to look at terrorism objectively, and the moral courage to do something about its real sources. Please, I pray, let them do so soon.”
Amein. (And then I’ll pray that some of the people in Denmark who still care about freedom will read this and reflect too.)
A courageous essay that points out issues that are unmentionable in today's universities.
Many of these points, like the unchecked immigration from distinctly non-Western cultures, the lack of integration and the formation of ethnic political power centers, was described accurately in Enoch Powell's 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech.
That speech was marred by overt racial terms but its core idea, that Western societies are destroying themselves by bringing in large numbers who abhor its values, is validated by what we see today. Something that could have been learned after the Roman Empire offered asylum within its borders to bands of Goths who then turned against it.
Hi Yael You wouldn’t recognize that area now, particularly Westheimer. They renamed Lee High School (of course), Halal food trucks line the area near where Voss becomes Hillcroft, and hijab covered women swarm the sidewalks. I grew up in Corpus but met a bunch of UT friends who went to St Thomas, Westchester, etc so I’m “grandfathered in” as they say. I also wrote a blurb once about Club No Minors for Zagat that called it “a vortex to another universe” that earned me a free book. You have to hunt down old school H town but some elements remain, but I usually need my old school friends to tell me where
Outstanding essay that your lived experience makes particularly on point. Folks raised in the USA don’t truly grasp the looming threat of Islamist expansionism the way Europeans do intuitively (or at least used to). I’ve traveled overseas more extensively than most Americans so I’m not bribed or blinded. What’s happening in Britain’s polity is saddening but I’m far from that madding crowd. But I’m not as far from Dearborn, Michigan and owned a condo in the Galleria area of Houston where I watched in horror as the Islamist element took over the condo board (we were about ten minutes from the Houston Islam Center on Voss if any readers know H town). True story: I objected to something and the new condo chair tried to block me into my parking space. Watching the women taking their nightly walk ten paces behind the men was enough for me. After Hurricane Harvey I sold it then bought four acres in the country and got the hell out before the whole area descended into further sharia control. Keep up the good fight.
That was my area of town growing up. Your description has truly shocked and disgusted me…I still have a difficult time understanding why we, as freedom loving Americans, are allowing this to happen.
This is incredibly perceptive and intellectually and morally honest. Thank you, Ayaan. Would that the weak-kneed powers at be on both sides of the Atlantic read every word of this and acted accordingly. That is, put short-term tactical politics aside, thought about the long term, and led for a change. Our public discourse is being corrupted before our eyes through the cynical weaponization of language: “far right” is a blanket term that well-meaning people avoid being described as, when all it could mean in the present context is anything from the very moderate to the very extreme that opposes the smuggling in of values and actions of radical Islam into western democratic society. More and more of us need to wake up to the process Ayaan is analyzing.
100%. In re-defining extremism to encompass anything from the political center on rightward, the left hasn’t just moved the goal posts downfield- They’ve tossed the goal posts over the far bleachers and wholly out of the stadium!
Every time I read your pieces I’m at awe at the clarity, the honesty and the integrity behind it, and an eloquence seldomly seen. Thank you so much, Ayaan.
There are so many important and well written words in your pieces and I’ll ‘come back’ to them sometime (I have quite a sample of thoughts on your pieces amassed over time, but they really need to be sorted out and elaborated on). But this
“They need to find both the intellectual courage to look at terrorism objectively, and the moral courage to do something about its real sources. Please, I pray, let them do so soon.”
Amein. (And then I’ll pray that some of the people in Denmark who still care about freedom will read this and reflect too.)
A courageous essay that points out issues that are unmentionable in today's universities.
Many of these points, like the unchecked immigration from distinctly non-Western cultures, the lack of integration and the formation of ethnic political power centers, was described accurately in Enoch Powell's 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech.
That speech was marred by overt racial terms but its core idea, that Western societies are destroying themselves by bringing in large numbers who abhor its values, is validated by what we see today. Something that could have been learned after the Roman Empire offered asylum within its borders to bands of Goths who then turned against it.
Hi Yael You wouldn’t recognize that area now, particularly Westheimer. They renamed Lee High School (of course), Halal food trucks line the area near where Voss becomes Hillcroft, and hijab covered women swarm the sidewalks. I grew up in Corpus but met a bunch of UT friends who went to St Thomas, Westchester, etc so I’m “grandfathered in” as they say. I also wrote a blurb once about Club No Minors for Zagat that called it “a vortex to another universe” that earned me a free book. You have to hunt down old school H town but some elements remain, but I usually need my old school friends to tell me where