No doubt Deborah Scroggins believes she just published a dual biography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former Dutch parliament member, and Aafia Siddiqui, jailed al Qaeda terrorist, and so she did. What may surprise the biographer, however, is that she also provided a third study: post-9/11 moral equivalence.
This begins with Scroggins’ outre decision to pair a peaceable writer and politician with a violent al Qaeda scientist who married Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s nephew and co-plotter after 9/11 as the “Wanted Women” of the book’s title.
How to knit the two together? Scroggins writes: “Like the bikini and the burqa or the virgin and the whore, you couldn’t understand one without understanding the other.”
It’s difficult not to read this as a smear of Hirsi Ali, no less visceral for its flippancy. But it’s more than a noxious personal barb. Scroggins’ binary vision offers a new look at an old kink: moral equivalence among the intellectuals via perverse ying-yang fantasy.
This requires an effort to even the score with Hirsi Ali. As the debate over Islam and Islamic terror erupted in Holland, Scroggins writes: “Some Dutch” — sounds like the author chatting up “some Dutch” — spoke of ‘the Ayaan effect,’ a spirit of fear and rancor that seemed to have bewitched the country.”
Get it? It’s not the jihad, stupid, it’s “the Ayaan effect.” By bizarre contrast, Scroggins regards Siddiqui’s jihad with empathy-nurturing neutrality. The result isn’t so much “Islam, the West, what’s the difference?” — the trope of moral equivalence during the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Cold War.
It’s more: Islam, the West, who is responsible for the violence? Who is reacting to whom? Who is putting on the burqa to fend off the bikini? What virgin wouldn’t hate a whore? One more time, it’s all our fault.
Or, in this case, Hirsi Ali’s fault.
Her offense? Hirsi Ali failed to submit to the never-never cant that “moderation” is a hallmark of Islam (no sacred Islamic texts support it), while she publicly flays its teachings of conquest and supremacism.
Scroggins invokes supposed Islamic reformers — including Mahmoud Mohammed Taha and Benazir Bhutto (one of three heads of state to recognize the Taliban), key examples of whose rhetoric reflect anything but moderation — to try to portray Hirsi Ali as “simplistic.”
But it was Hirsi Ali’s failure to kneel in appeasement of Islam, even in her early days of quasi-media-darlinghood, that bothers Scroggins no end — far more, it seems, than anything Siddiqui ever did, up to including weapons of mass destruction tinkering on al Qaeda’s behalf.
Scroggins reports disinterest, outrage, too, from Islamic women in the Netherlands regarding Hirsi Ali’s erstwhile efforts to emancipate them from Islam’s law. Such attitudes reveal unplumbed depths in the chasm between Islamic and Western cultures.
In this signal example, Islamic women in a Western country see themselves as Shariah-compliant Muslims, not repressed women yearning for Western liberty. To Scroggins, long interested in the “the treatment of women in Islam,” this almost seems personally liberating.
She used to think “the control of women was as fundamental to radical Islam as racism was the old American South or anti-Semitism was to Nazi Germany,” she writes. She still does.
“But” — and here’s where we perhaps approach an evolving mainstream consensus on Shariah and other Islamiana — “I also learned that Westerners who want to keep the Muslim world under Western rule also have used Islamic attitudes toward women not so much to help free Muslim women as to justify the West’s continued domination of Muslim men.”
Huh? Women-centric worldview aside, I think what Scroggins is saying is that honesty about Islam is the New Western Imperialism. No wonder Ayaan Hirsi Ali became Public Enemy No. 1.
Examiner Columnist Diana West is syndicated nationally by United Media and is the author of “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.”
