Simple messages are powerful. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a heroine of our times (and an old friend), offered one at the Heritage Foundation this past week. Delivering the annual Russell Kirk Lecture, she urged the great and good majority to “take courage.”
In her talk, titled, “Defining Civilization Down,” Hirsi Ali said unflinchingly that the traditional civilization of America and the wider West is “superior” to the one being foisted upon it by the Left. And she rightly argued that it must be saved by people refusing to be brow-beaten into silence, and instead speaking up without equivocation in defense of its history and precepts.
Hirsi Ali embodies the courage she calls on others to find within themselves. She has lived for decades under death threats from Muslim murderers for her apostasy from Islam and for her advocacy of enlightened tolerance in books with such titles as Infidel and Heretic.
Her talk was a resonant echo of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s essay “Defining Deviancy Down,” which warned against normalizing previously unacceptable behaviors, which has led to the acceptance of mental pathology, broken families, and crime. Hirsi Ali coupled this with Charles Krauthammer’s response that we are defining deviancy down and excusing it only among favored classes, causes, and races. It is, in contrast, being defined ever upward for the overwhelmingly white and Christian middle class, whose normal behavior and beliefs are anathematized and criminalized.
These trends mean that “we chose to hold ourselves to impossible standards while allowing others to come to the table seemingly without scrutiny.”
Hirsi Ali is right. It is why China, because it is our enemy and the leader of international socialism, escapes criticism while building a new coal-fired power station each week, while our eco-warriors block traffic over bridges into New York City or take hammers in London to Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus. Normalizing attacks on our own society encourages further outrages.
Increasingly, enraged commuters physically assault or drive through the bleating greenies — who can blame them? — and cultured people call in disgust and only half in jest for capital punishment for the despoilers of great art. Official and public courage to punish violent action, which is not political speech as claimed, can help “save our civilization from descending into tribal war.”
The same civilization-destroying double standards excuse rape, torture, terrorism, and murder as forms of legitimate resistance when perpetrated by Islamist Palestinians, while Israelis are excoriated for defending themselves and refusing to live (and die) tolerating the close proximity of an explicitly genocidal organization, Hamas.
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“We must not frustrate or sabotage Israel’s effort to achieve the full destruction of Hamas,” Hirsi Ali said, and “we must do this not only for Israel but also as an act of charity to the Arabs. For there is little more dehumanizing than being told that some good and moral standards apply to us but that you don’t need to bother because we have a lower standard for your kind.”
Hirsi Ali’s speech was a ringing endorsement of moral clarity and a timely demand that we in the great civilization of what was once Christendom end our appeasement and find the stamina to wage a long fight for what is good and what is true.
