Freedom Women’s Rights Restoring the West

Exclusive Donor Edition

June 2026

Conversations

with

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Inspired by Ayaan’s Most Infuential Essays and Lectures

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FOREWORD FROM THE PRESIDENT

Restoring WESTERN SOCIETY

STANDING UP FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS

CONFRONTING Radical Islamism

DEFENDING Freedom of Speech

FIGHTING Antisemitism

PATH FORWARD

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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If you wonder why I—a woman of color, an African, a former Muslim, a former asylum seeker, and an immigrant—look at the antics of today’s anti-Israel, anti-American

protesters with such fear and trembling,

allow me to explain.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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Dear Friend,

This volume is a gift to you—a token of deep gratitude for your unwavering support and belief in our mission.

Because of you, AHA Foundation is not merely surviving—it is advancing. Every day, we confront forces that seek to silence truth, strip away freedoms, and harm the most vulnerable. And every day, your continued generosity over time ensures we can meet those challenges head-on.

For more than two decades, our founder, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has been one of the bravest voices speaking out against threats that many in the U.S. and, more broadly, in the West did not yet recognize—and on issues that, even when known, too many chose to ignore. When others looked away, she stepped forward, taking risks few would dare, and calling the world’s attention to dangers that undermine liberty, women’s rights, and the very foundations of open society.

At AHA Foundation, we turn Ayaan’s ideas into action—transforming her vision into programs, advocacy, and victories that protect the freedoms we hold dear.

From

Trey Dimsdale, AHA Foundation President

Trey Dimsdale with Ayaan at AHA event in Florida

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The volume you now hold—Conversations with Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Inspired by Her Best Essays and Lectures, Exclusive Donor Edition—was curated especially for you. It is a creative reconstruction of some of the best works by Ayaan Hirsi Ali—in the form of intimate “conversations with Ayaan” on the causes we advance together:

Restoring Western society

Defending freedom of speech

Standing up for women’s rights

Confronting radical Islamism and antisemitism

This book is not available to the public. The answers attributed to Ayaan in this interview are quoted, adapted, or reorganized from her original text so that you may experience her ideas in a unique interview format. Each answer is a window into the urgency of our work—and a reminder that your support fuels every word, every appearance, every life changed.

This is your story, too. It is a chronicle of battles fought in the public square, of truths spoken when it was neither easy nor safe, and of progress made possible because people like you refused to look away.

From all of us at AHA Foundation, thank you for standing with us—not just in moments of triumph, but in the long, hard work between them. We hope these pages inspire you as much as your partnership inspires us.

And with that, we begin our conversation….

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Restoring THE West

“I escaped from tribalism, I left Islamism, and I have avoided authoritarianism and wokeism—so far! Western civilization may not be perfect, but we haven’t seen anything like it anywhere else in human history. Before we heap more opprobrium on it, I would suggest weighing the alternatives carefully. As Churchill said, ‘Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

—Ayaan Hirsi Ali,

Why the West is Best, Spectator World, June 2021

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Having spent her formative years in politically unstable, autocratic, and violence-prone societies, Ayaan Hirsi Ali understands better than most that freedom, democracy, and the rule of law are fragile gifts, not historical certain- ties. When she first arrived in the Netherlands in 1992, she was struck by a society that radiated prosperity and liberty from every corner. However, as she traveled across Europe and eventually moved to the U.S., she witnessed a troubling transformation: the societies she had grown to love were succumbing to internal subversion.

The West that Ayaan experienced in the 1990s and early 2000s has increasingly become her “world of yesterday.” She argues that the foundational strengths of Western civilization are being lost to a combination of socialist ideology, rising tribalism, and a profound decline in traditional family values. In her view, uncontrolled immi- gration and a growing moral confusion have left the West vulnerable and “demoralized.”

True to her character, Ayaan refused to remain a si- lent witness to this collapse. In 2024, she placed the “Restoration” of the West at the forefront of her intel- lectual work. Through this mission, she advocates for a return to national sovereignty and a shared cultural creed. Her work serves as a clarion call to rediscover the Judeo-Christian roots and classical liberal principles that once made the West a beacon of hope, arguing that these values can survive only if they are actively de- fended within defined borders and a confident national identity.

“When my sister Haweya asked me for photos of myself in 1993, I put on this embroidered loose dress, a thaub , and a headscarf to make my family happy.”

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Trey: Ayaan, let’s begin with the diagnosis. You have spoken extensively about this ‘sub- version’ of the West. But to understand your perspective, I think we need to go back to where your story begins. How did your early life in Somalia shape your understanding of how societies are dismantled?”

Ayaan : I was born in Somalia in 1969. The country had achieved independence nine years before. But less than a month before I was born, on October 21, 1969, a junior member of the brand-new Somali armed forces seized power with the help of the Soviet Union. The first two decades of my life were shaped by the upheaval that followed that coup.

The Somalia that gained its independence was a young, optimistic society full of national pride. We had such hope for growth, political stability, prosperity, and peace. But, in a story sadly familiar to many of my fellow Afri- cans, those hopes were dashed.

What followed was a nightmare.

For me, it is all captured in the earliest memories of my youth: statues of Mohamed Siad Barre, our dictator, sprang up across Mogadishu, flanked by a trio of dark seraphim: Marx, Lenin, and Engels. This particular communist experiment plunged Somalia into bloodshed, mass starvation, and 20 years of suffocating tyranny. I recall my grandmother and mother smuggling food into our house. I also remember the whispering: we felt the state was omnipresent. It could hear everything.

My father was thrown into prison. His friends—those other pioneers in pursuit of a democracy modeled on

America—were either jailed like him or, in many cases, executed.

By the time I was eight, my family knew we needed to escape. We left in 1977. By 1990, the country had descended into a civil war from which it has never fully recovered.

I never stopped longing for the kind of freedom my father had taught me about. And at the age of 22, I fled to the Netherlands in search of it. There—and later, in America—I discovered what we’ve come to call “West- ern” values.

Trey: You fled the chaos of Somalia, eventual- ly finding refuge in the Netherlands and then America. In your view, what are the specific principles that make the West unique—and why do you feel they are currently imperiled?

Ayaan : The West’s inheritance springs from a peculiar confluence of habits and customs that had been practiced for centuries before anyone branded them as “ideas.” But they are principles—radical ones—that have given us the most tolerant, free, and flourishing societies in all of human history.

Among these principles are the rule of law, a tradition of liberty, personal responsibility, a system of representative government, a toleration of difference, and a commit- ment to pluralism. Each of these ideas might have been extinguished in its infancy but for the grace of God and the force of its appeal.

Perhaps it is because I was born into a part of the world where these principles were nonexistent that I feel a

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particular love for them—and an instinct for when they are in danger.

Right now, so many Western nations are under grave threat from the twin forces of cultural Marxism and an expansionist political Islam familiar to me from my youth.

For a time, many refused to believe that anything was actually wrong. The tide of populism, they insisted, was a momentary manifestation of frustration. The decline of each of our institutions was viewed in isolation, as a problem of poorly selected leadership, which could be corrected after the next election or with a changing of the guard. The sense of hopelessness that people felt was explained away as the temporary consequence of the rapid transition away from industrialism and the usher- ing in of the digital age.

In this light, though there were problems, they were distinct and would be corrected in time.

Can any serious person believe this now?

Trey : The decline you describe is felt by many, yet there is little consensus on its cause. How do you make sense of the confusion—the con- flicting explanations—that seem to paralyze our public discourse?

Ayaan : People are encountering our current crisis in dif- ferent ways, though a compelling explanation, let alone a solution, remains elusive. I am reminded of the Buddhist parable of the blind men and the elephant. The story goes that a group of blind men, who have never encoun- tered an elephant before, hear that one has been brought to their town. They go to touch the elephant to work out what it might look like.

One man touches the elephant’s trunk and thinks it must be like a large snake. Another touches its leg and likens it to a tree. A third who grasps the elephant’s tail says it feels like a rope. A fourth presses its sides, and when it does not budge, compares it to a wall. The fifth touches its tusk and thinks it is like a spear.

Each of the blind men touches the same elephant and comes up with a different interpretation. Although there is truth in each of their assessments, none is able to fully

comprehend the elephant in its totality fully. Those who feel the decline in Western society are like these blind men, encountering the elephant in their own ways and grasping at explanations in the half-light of dusk.

When the omni-breakdown burst forth in 2020 with the crises of the Covid-19 pandemic, the draconian controls that governments imposed, and the George Floyd riots, most of us awoke from our slumbers and behaved like the blind men, ping-ponging around theories with the tremulous (sometimes furious) chatter that heralds the turning of an age.

As one of those blind men—and surely I, too, am en- countering only part of the elephant—my perception is that we are a society subverted. By this, I do not mean that we are subverted in the sense that a few spies and saboteurs are conducting covert operations, blowing up a bridge or an airfield. I mean, we are subverted in a more systematic and totalizing way.

Trey : You use a specific term to describe this condition: “subversion.” It’s a word loaded with Cold War connotations. What exactly do you mean by it in the context of the 21st-cen- tury West?

Ayaan : Before I explain who might be subverting and why, let me first explain what I mean by ‘subverting.’ The best description comes from Yuri Bezmenov, who says that this form of subversion is very gradual, but ultimate- ly transformational.

Bezmenov had been a KGB agent promoting foreign subversion when he grew disillusioned with the Soviet system. In 1970, he defected to the West—to Greece, then Canada. The rest of his life was dedicated to expos- ing the secret Soviet apparatus of subversion in the West.

In 1983, while living in the West, Bezmenov gave a lec- ture titled “Psychological Warfare, Subversion, and the Control of Society.” It begins:

Subversion refers to a process by which the values and principles of an established system are contradicted or reversed in an attempt to sabotage the existing social order and its structures of power, authority, tradition, hierarchy, and social norms. It involves a sys- tematic attempt to overthrow or undermine a government or political system, often carried out by persons working secretly from within.

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Subversion is used as a tool to achieve political goals because it gen- erally carries less risk, cost, and difficulty as opposed to open bellig- erency. The act of subversion can lead to the destruction or damage of an established system or government. In the context of ideological subversion, it aims to gradually change a society’s perceptions and values, ultimately undermining its existing systems and beliefs.

This kind of subversion is familiar to me because of my background. Somalia wasn’t the only African country subverted by the USSR. And those that were warped by Soviet infiltration—such as Ethiopia and Angola—bear the scars to this day.

One of the key insights Bezmenov expresses about a sub- verted society is that, for a while, there is only a passing sense that something is wrong. It’s a mood—a vibe.

The pressure makes society rumble like a volcano, quiet one minute and flaring the next. Then, finally—and seemingly suddenly—the revolution bursts into view.

When I looked at the protests that erupted in the after- math of October 7th [the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war] at Columbia or Yale or UCLA or Harvard or Stan- ford—students tearing down American flags and raising Palestinian ones; or chanting in Arabic “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—it was hard not to see the fruit of this long process. I heard the same when, week after week, the streets of London, Amsterdam,

Brussels, and Hamburg ring with cries of “intifada” or open demands for a caliphate or Sharia law in the heart of Europe.

Trey: You describe this not as a sudden event, but a gradual psychological process. How exactly does this mechanism of subversion unfold? What are the stages?

Ayaan : Bezmenov described the subversion process as a complex model with four successive stages. These are, in order: demoralization , destabilization , crisis , and finally, normalization .

Demoralization is the first stage and requires the subvert- ers’ greatest investment of time and resources. Bezmenov claims the process of demoralization can take between 10 and 30 years, because that is the amount of time it takes to educate a new generation.

“Too many of the institutions that once defended Western civilization have failed or been captured. The task of restoration falls to us—to those who understand what’s at stake and refuse to surrender what generations before us built and bled for.”

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The demoralization process targets three areas of soci- ety: ideas, structures, and social institutions. The target- ed institutions include religion, education, media, and culture. In each realm,, the old ways of thinking and the old heroes are discredited. Those who believed in them come to doubt themselves and their ability to discern reality itself.

Think of the cynicism and selective truth-telling young Americans encounter in most classrooms. You know Jefferson owned slaves, right? You know, Columbus killed millions? Again, never mind that Jefferson set us on the path to emancipation, or that Columbus knew nothing about epidemiology. A little learning, as the saying goes, is a dangerous thing.

Once inside, it is very difficult to escape the mosh pit of civilizational self-loathing. Maybe you can climb to the top for a while by being the white person who hates white people most loudly, or the straight person who goes to the most debauched parades. But most people give up.

The ultimate intended outcome is that the afflicted will- ingly embrace self-destructive behaviors and ideas. Thus, all moral constraints can be eschewed in the pursuit of “just” and “virtuous” causes.

“As a consequence, citizens lose confidence in the administration of justice, paving the way for untold social disorders, including legal nihilism, where people disregard the law en masse.”

In America in 2019, 14 unarmed black men were shot by police—most, apparently, in self-defense. And yet, when polled, most Americans who described themselves as “very liberal” estimated the number at 1,000 or more. A fifth thought 10,000 or more. Were the Black Lives Matter riots, then, any surprise?

To be sure, this isn’t just a progressive problem. Repub- licans also demonized the Justice Department, the FBI, and members of the judiciary when it suited them. Con- servatives have also lost their confidence in law enforce- ment, in part because of what they see as the lax enforce- ment of the law as applied toward groups like antifa, Black Lives Matter, and pro-Hamas demonstrators.

The subversion here appears to be working, with both sides agreeing: there is a two-tiered police and justice system—one set of rules for me, and another for thee.

Trey: We have discussed ideas and legal struc- tures. But Bezmenov identified a third, per- haps more intimate target: the sphere of ‘life.’ How is the process of demoralization reshap- ing the American family?

Ayaan : The third area—which Bezmenov called “life”—includes core social institutions such as family, health, race, population, and labor. Demoralization of the family is probably a familiar concept to us all. It involves promoting ideas that weaken family bonds, favoring narcissistic individualism over family unity, creating financial stressors that discourage family forma- tion, fostering acrimony between the sexes, and replacing parental authority with the state.

Thus, the retrograde practice of polygamy is rebranded as polyamory. The natural human urge to create and nurture new human life is treated derisively by “DINKS” with slightly more latte money, or, more seriously, as an irresponsible and selfish choice to make because of climate change. Meantime, parents are told at every turn that they don’t know what they’re doing—and that they should defer to the experts instead.

The result is that not only do individuals feel less attach- ment to family, the fundamental unit of a healthy civili- zation, but they even end up detached from society itself. As we now know, the breakdown of the family is strongly correlated with the epidemic of mental health crisis and the explosive rise in violent crime: 85 percent of Ameri- can youth in prison come from fatherless homes.

The goal of demoralization is to gradually degrade the foundations of a healthy society across all domains by erasing moral lines and exploiting preexisting discon- tents. What a society used to call abnormal and patho- logical, subversion normalizes. Just consider, for example, our culture’s attitude toward pedophiles, now rebranded as “minor-attracted persons.” By hijacking the legacy and language of the civil rights movement, nearly any “marginalized” group has a vehicle to try to “main- stream” deviant behavior. Consider the fact that across civilized societies, it is not just “wrong” to say that a man

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Trey: How do these “subverters” actually embed themselves within institutions like U.S. universities?

Ayaan : In the Soviet case, according to Bezmenov, a successful subverter could come to be employed by a major university and teach a class on communism. When professors, donors, and students raise eyebrows, they get labeled as cranks or retrograde. The subverter responds: “Who are you to decide what can’t be taught?” Meanwhile, the subverter works to indoctrinate more young, impressionable minds and secure positions for allies or useful ideologues. If you oppose this, you are asked: “What do you have against intellectual diversity?” Or “Do you oppose free thinking?” Thus, dissenters are silenced.

Over time, as the subverters come to dominate an institution, they apply institutional pressure. Curbs on academic freedom, the curriculum, and alterations to the hiring process inevitably follow. Think of the novel instruments to enforce uniformity of thought among ac- ademics: DEI statements, which became a requirement at universities across America in the 2010s.

Even in the cases where subversive activity is clearly illegal, such as with destruction and violence during the 2020 riots and at many anti-Israel protests today, crimes committed in service of some larger goal—like “decol- onization”—are presented as righteous. Decolonization is a word that’s become as common these days as social justice. But what does it mean?

Gal Beckerman of The Atlantic has written about the Marxist origins of this concept and its chief proponent, Frantz Fanon. Fanon, Beckerman writes, is “the patron saint of political violence,” and his “concepts have pro- vided intellectual ballast and moral justification for ac- tions that most people would simply describe as terror.” Listen to Fanon himself: “whatever may be the headings

used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.”

When young people say “resistance is justified,” many— if not most—of them believe they are simply standing up for the downtrodden. But the deeper implications of that statement are about justifying the morally reprehensible. How else to explain that at our most prestigious college campuses, students can be found glorifying Hamas ter- rorists and openly praising North Korea?

Trey: We have discussed the method. Now let’s discuss the architects. Beyond the historical Soviet example, who are the specific forces trying to unravel America and the West today?

Ayaan : Again, I am feeling only my part of the ele- phant, but I can discern at least three forces.

The first: American Marxists . This category includes old card-carrying communists, red-diaper baby socialists, antifa anarchists, and many of whom we now call woke. Though the Soviet Union collapsed decades ago, the Soviet worldview has found familiar proponents: young

cannot become a woman. It is thought to be cruel. So cruel that the Scots have made it illegal.

What’s striking about the demoralization process is that the law doesn’t typically change—at least not initially. Subversion abuses the tolerance of an open culture, forcing the host society to accomplish its aims like a virus attaches to a host.

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Americans and their professors. They are no longer advancing their cause merely through class struggle, but through the fusion of racial, class, and anticolonial struggles. Theirs is now a cultural communism; they lead subversion through the institutions with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the West.

The thundering socialists of the past (think of poor Bernie) seemed to care about the working class earnestly. Perhaps they did so naively, but at least they loved the poor. Does AOC? Rashida Tlaib? My former country- woman, Ilhan Omar?

The second force is the radical Islamists , who are rid- ing the coattails of the communists to power. A good ex- ample is the Muslim Brotherhood and its many tentacles. Of these tentacles, some are openly religious, like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Students Association, each with chapters in nearly every American university. Other organizations don a secular mask, like the so-called Students for Justice in Palestine. These groups have become increasingly confident in the aftermath of the October 7th attack.

The third force is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) . The most obvious avenues through which the CCP has spread subversion in America are through its numerous Confucius Institutes. These organizations have been vehicles for Chinese espionage within major Amer- ican academic institutions. What unites the enemies of the West, you might ask? On the surface, they have little in common. We all know what happens to “Queers for Palestine” in the Palestinian territories. Or Muslims in China. We all know what CCP mandarins think of Black Lives Matter activists. Or rather, what they would think, if they deigned to do so.

But they have wisely chosen the same common enemy: the West.

I am not saying that Bezmenov’s formulation explains all that we are seeing. It clearly does not address all the West’s problems. But once I immersed myself in his for- mulation, many of the topsy-turvy developments in our institutions fell into place.

The widespread acquisition of useless, aggressively ideological degrees in gender and race, or the claims of the possibility of an unlimited number of genders, or the total racialization and “decolonization” of our political

discourse, or the demands to defund the police, the top- pling of statues, the defacing of art, the “spontaneous” protests to dismantle our structures, and much else, I now understand as acts of subversion rather than mere expressions of discontent or youthful energy run amok.

It’s important to note that not all activism is subversive. My life would not be possible without the righteous activism of those who fought for women’s rights and civil rights.

Trey: With so many movements competing for attention, distinguishing between genuine advocacy and destructive subversion can be difficult. How can the average citizen tell the difference?

Ayaan : I regret to tell you that there is no easy way. One thing to pay attention to is your gut. Another is your mind: be discerning and skeptical of people recruiting you to their cause. Does their cause ask for tolerance of you or require compelled speech? Are you being recruit- ed to fight for a cause you know nothing about? Is that cause maximalist and uncompromising; does it glorify violence?

Regardless of whether you agree with my interpretation of events, subversion is a risk to all open societies. As Bezmenov says, subversion is a two-way street. A closed society is immune to subversion because it simply tells potential subverters to leave. Free and open societies cannot rely on this defense.

During the Cold War, the U.S. was able to forestall subversion because its institutions and people had the necessary antibodies to stave off subversive ideas. Doing so is easier when you have a visible peer as an enemy. But when the Cold War came to an end, and we declared victory, we mistakenly thought our enemies had laid down their arms, and that history had ended—so we let our guard down.

Orwell said that “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Everyone with eyes to see is now scrambling to do just that.

What is at stake in our ability to see plainly? Everything. What is at stake is nothing less than the preservation of our way of life.

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Trey: You have argued that the subversion of the West isn’t just external—it is happening from within. A critical place where Western civilization is being undermined is on our university campuses. Why do you believe this concept is being so ruthlessly castigated by academics today, and what are the conse- quences of ignoring its achievements?

Ayaan : In a university setting, students hone their crit- ical thinking skills so that they can discern what is true from what is false; what is of value from what is trivial; and what is moral from what is immoral.

All of this knowledge is built on a specific national heritage embedded in Western culture and civilization, distinct from those of other nations, cultures, and civili- zations. Ideas do not arise in a vacuum; ideas form in a certain context and have a genealogy, a history.

The concepts that university students should cherish— respect for the individual and his autonomy, the abolition of slavery, equality of citizens under the law, equality of men and women under the law, freedom of expression, religious tolerance, the separation between religious and political power—all of these are the products of Western civilization.

Some of these concepts were ideas that were forcefully argued with the written and spoken word, sometimes based on Christian scripture; others, such as the secu- larization of international relations, were the result of protracted military conflicts (in the case of the Treaties of Westphalia, the settlement of the Thirty Years’ War).

Some of these concepts arose to a certain degree in non-Western civilizations, but not as successfully and not as enduringly.

Today, in a turbulent and chaotic world, students need a solid background in the attributes of Western civilization to place events and ideas in context. Yet at a time when a rigorous formation is needed the most, the American campus today seems beset by a protracted intellectual

malaise. The very term “Western civilization” is ruthless- ly castigated without careful study and analysis. In ignor- ing the many achievements and complexities of Western civilization, we do our college students a grave disservice.

In defending free inquiry, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni has played an indispensable role. Its hard work will, I fear, be increasingly necessary in the years ahead.

In 2016, a group of Stanford students proposed a non-binding resolution to create a “Western civiliza- tion” course requirement, something that had been abolished at the university more than 50 years ago. Alas, the proposal was overwhelmingly defeated in a student vote. The arguments of the resolution’s opponents were revealing. In the run-up to the vote, one Stanford student wrote in the Stanford Daily that “a Western Civ require- ment would necessitate that our education be centered on upholding white supremacy, capitalism and colo- nialism, and all other oppressive systems that flow from Western civilizations.”

By reducing Western civilization to the worst excesses of its history, and by leaving out the best it has brought forth–to repeat: women’s equality; the abolition of slav- ery; individual freedom; religious tolerance; freedom of expression–the Stanford student who wrote those words makes a common mistake. Sadly, however, this lopsided view is shared by a growing number of students and professors.

One cannot dismiss the total of Western civilization without losing one’s moral compass. And one cannot participate in the battle of ideas raging in the world today by dismissing the value of Western civilization as a whole.

Read more about TOPICS IN THIS CHAPTER:

• We Have Been Subverted, Restoration (June 2024)

Now is the time for all of us blind seekers to come to- gether. To restore what we have lost will be the work of our lifetimes. Can there be a more important project?

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STANDING UP FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS

“There is no reason to tolerate human rights violations in the U.S. No religion, culture, or tradition can be invoked to justify violence against women and girls.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

She knows the cost of silence. As a survivor of female genital mutilation (FGM), Ayaan Hirsi Ali has spent more than two decades sounding the alarm on abuses too often ignored in the West—from FGM and child marriage to the erosion of safety and freedom of women in Western Europe and the broader denial of women’s rights under Islamism. Long before these issues reached headlines in the U.S. or the UK, she was warning of the dangers, challenging the cultural taboos that kept them hidden, and calling out those who, in the name of mul- ticulturalism, chose not to offend rather than to protect. As she has said, “Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.” Through AHA Foundation, her vision becomes action— changing laws, shifting public awareness, and defending the rights of women and girls.

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Trey: When you established AHA Foundation in 2007, you immediately targeted practices like female genital mutilation (FGM) and hon- or violence. At the time, the American public largely viewed these as distant, foreign trage- dies. What compelled you to sound the alarm that this brutality had already arrived on our shores?

Ayaan : As an African who was subjected to FGM, now living in the West, I could not turn a blind eye when I learned that this abuse threatens the lives of girls in my new homeland. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 513,000 women and girls in the U.S. are at risk of or have undergone FGM.

It is hard for people outside of communities practicing FGM to understand what is taking place. Although it rightly makes many squeamish, we must speak openly about what female genital mutilation is. Otherwise, it will remain underground, and vulnerable girls will continue to be brutalized.

Trey: It’s hard to grasp why this continues to happen. Can you explain what the perpetra- tors are actually trying to achieve regarding a woman’s sexuality, and the kind of lasting harm this inflicts on the victims?

Ayaan: The main aim of FGM in all its forms is to control female sexuality. The clitoris is removed to take physical pleasure from sex and reduce the libido. In its more severe forms, involving sewing the genitals up, the aim is to ensure the girl is a virgin on her wedding night. Many women must be surgically opened in order to con- summate their marriage. The consequences of FGM are ongoing psychological and physical harms, ranging from infections to fistulas and even death.

One example that has stayed with me over the years was a woman in the Netherlands whom I translated for. I accompanied her to visit an obstetrician as she was hav- ing great difficulty with urination and menstruation. She showed the doctor the anatomy left after being subjected to the third and most severe type of FGM, where the tis- sue was completely removed. The stunned doctor asked if she had been burned. He could not believe that what

had been done to her was deliberate; he assumed it must have been a horrific accident. But it was no accident.

It’s for women like her that I started AHA Foundation as a resource to help women and girls who are truly bridg- ing the gap between worlds and cultures. They are living in the U.S. under the protection of our laws and Consti- tution but suffering human rights abuses imported from overseas.

Trey: Why do some families continue to practice FGM despite the risks?

Ayaan: It may seem hard to understand why parents would inflict this particularly cruel and risky form of abuse on their daughters. The reasons are deeply held religious and cultural beliefs, usually about female sexuality and modesty. By stripping sex of physical pleasure for a woman, it is thought her libido will be reduced, her virginity safeguarded, and her marital fidelity ensured. Families fear that their daughters will be unmarriageable within their community or bring shame to their family if they are not subjected to FGM.

This outdated, barbaric practice takes place behind closed doors, inside families, and within communities that know it is considered abhorrent and illegal in this country, so they hush it up.

Trey: Why are state-level laws so important in preventing FGM in the U.S.?

Ayaan: Nine states have yet to outlaw FGM, making the job of law enforcement and prosecutors so much harder. State laws give local prosecutors the tools they need to pursue a case and provide crucial services to survivors. They can mandate education to frontline professionals and the impacted community. Two of the 7-year-old girls allegedly mutilated in 2017 in Michigan were brought by their families from Minnesota, where a prosecution can lead to life imprisonment, to Michigan—a state that at that time had no specific FGM protections.

State laws are necessary and have proven useful for families, feeling pressure from their communities, as to why they will not cut their daughters. Yet laws are insufficient for stamping out FGM.

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Trey: Why are the current state laws insufficient–what else is needed to end the practice?

Ayaan: Frontline service workers—the police, teachers, child protection, social services, and health-care workers—are often uncomfortable broaching the subject, worried about appearing culturally insensitive.

This is why AHA Foundation has developed training for professionals on how to recognize and respond to the warning signs of FGM, and how to broach the topic in a culturally respectful manner.

FGM is the symptom of harmful cultural beliefs that girls and women must be sexually pure, modest and that their bodies exist to breed. Whether it’s justified by being a Muslim, Egyptian, Indian, black, a woman or any other category venerated in the identity politics pantheon, these beliefs are not compatible with liberal societies that profess to ensure the human rights of their citizens.

To end the practice of FGM it is important to address the deeply ingrained cultural beliefs that perpetuate the practice of FGM. Education and outreach programs in communities can make a difference. These programs teach women, girls, and, importantly, men, about the health risks and emotional trauma caused by the practice as well as the criminal penalties for inflicting FGM on a minor.

Trey: Ayaan, let’s turn our attention to another important topic: child marriage. Your work suggests that child marriage isn’t just a “tradition” in a vacuum; it seems to be part of a much larger, more violent framework of control. How does that system actually operate against young women?

Ayaan: I think child marriage is a form of slavery. When you are a minor, before the age of 18, you are not mature enough to enter into a legal contract stating that you’re going to spend the rest of your life with this person, in many cases, someone you’ve never met before. That you’re going to have children with someone you’ve never met before. That you’re going to establish a home and a future with a person you’ve never met before.

“I think we talk a lot about slavery and events that took place 200 years ago, but child marriage exists today, and about 98% of these forced marriages happen to girls. That is a form of modern-day slavery. I can’t think of any other language to define that.”

Sometimes the marriage is sold to the child as inevitable. You know, you’ve come of age, you now have your period, and your body is transitioning from that of a child to a woman. So it’s time for you to get married because that’s what your mother did, that’s what your grandmother did, that’s what your sisters did. The child is given no choice in the matter. It is presented as this is tradition, this is just our religion, and you have no choice in this. And sometimes it is actually forced with physical force, where girls are beaten into submission, and they are told, ‘either you die, or you enter into this marriage.’ Even though one might be softer than the other, both represent coercion.

It is an individual who is not yet mature enough, not of age, being forced into a situation that is often a lifelong prison from which they cannot escape. Where unwanted pregnancies occur, any kind of sexual activity that takes place in that marriage is clearly rape. I have spoken to many, many victims of child marriage, and that’s exactly how they describe it. They don’t have the opportunity to say no, and the law is very clear in developed countries that protect women that sex without consent is rape, and that happens when you subject that child that later on becomes an adult who has had a lifelong experience of being captive by someone she would have never chosen had she had the opportunity.

Then, there are honor killings. They are the end of a long chain of coercion: intimidation, confinement, beatings, and forced marriage. A girl is told she belongs to her family and that her body is not her own. If she

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resists, she is punished. When she continues to resist, the punishment becomes lethal. The murder is then presented as a moral act, carried out to cleanse shame.

Practices such as honor killings, forced marriage, and female genital mutilation are not cultural accidents. They are rooted in a system of beliefs about female obedience and male authority. Women who reject these roles are seen as threats to the moral order of the family and the community, and violence is used to bring them back into line. The concept of honor functions as a prison for women. Their value lies in their virginity and obedience. A girl who refuses an arranged marriage, who falls in love, or who chooses her own life is seen as dishonorable. Violence is used to enforce compliance. In extreme cases, the punishment is death. These are not isolated crimes of passion, but acts approved and sometimes planned by families and communities.

Trey: Beyond religion or “honor,” there is often an economic argument in developing countries—that families are too poor to keep their daughters. Is that a valid justification, and why are daughters almost always the ones who pay the price?

Ayaan: Well, the one mouth less to feed—if you allowed this child to actually go to school, she would actually be feeding herself. She would finish higher education, find a job, maybe even start a small business, or join an existing business. She would have the capacity not only to feed herself, but also probably to feed her own children and maybe even contribute to the family income, so I do think it is a fallacy and that denying children, especially girls, their education is what keeps this cycle of poverty going.

I think that it has to do with the history of traditional society, where girls and women are seen as the weaker sex. Young boys and men are trained to be focused on the outside, outside of the house: to fight, to work, to earn money, to travel. By the time a young man has done all of that, he has reached an age of maturity, and often it is taken for granted that a young man will choose who he wants to marry, or, in any case, from what family. Girls are sheltered; they are protected as the weaker sex, and in many of these traditions, girls are seen as property, unfortunately. So when you give a girl away as a bride, the family, in many cases, gets money. The

girl, the woman, is seen as a source of shame, again an extra mouth to feed, and if you put all of these things together, then the family, especially the father or the male guardian, sees it as his responsibility to ensure that a girl is married off for her own sake, for her own protection, for the family honor. I think that’s why girls are affected way more than boys and men.

I have also heard arguments about ‘we have nothing to eat, we are so poor.’ So you know, if this man is going to pay us a lot of money to accept this underage daughter as his wife, then our family gets to eat. And that is literally selling your child. We are seeing, after the withdrawal in Afghanistan, many, many cases of that in Afghanistan, where parents with tears in their eyes and a broken heart are literally selling their children just so that they can have food. Child marriage is a product of poverty and cycles of poverty, and just really a terrible understanding of what it takes to break through these cycles of poverty; it is justified in the name of religion and tradition.

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Trey: Ayaan, while some of these horrors happen across cultures and religions, it seems that when they happen within Muslim communities, feminists fail to speak about them. You have argued that by ignoring the subjugation of women in some Islamic communities, Western feminists are betraying the very people they claim to protect. How is this failure playing out?

Ayaan: It’s easy for feminists in the U.S. to avoid the topic of Islam; there aren’t nearly as many unassimilated migrant men from Muslim-majority countries in America as there are in Europe. But European feminists, influenced by the racial absolutism of the American Left, are also failing women–both Muslim and non-Muslim– who suffer horrifically at the hands of Islam.

Self-described feminist and former leader of the UK’s Green Party, Caroline Lucas, has a long history of censuring “Islamophobia,” instructing her constituents to “call out Islamophobia wherever we see it” in 2022. Meanwhile, Lucas embraced the #MeToo movement, working on a 2018 report on sexual harassment within Parliament. The glaring, but typical, inconsistency here is that sexual harassment is indeed on the rise in the UK and Europe, but the culprits are not Members of Parliament. Inconveniently for feminists on the Left, who think race trumps sex in the hierarchy of victimhood, there is a huge problem of unassimilated young men from Muslim countries who regard Western women as mere objects. How dissonant must the mind be to read this and still consider Islam compatible with feminism?

“While those within the Western Left defend the absolute validity of all asy- lum seekers, over 70% of asylum ap- plicants to Europe are men and most children are boys. Aren’t women considered particularly vulnerable in warzones, from which these migrants ostensibly flee? It’s strange how the overwhelming majority of vulnerable people who come to the West are young, healthy men, isn’t it?”

Trey: In your book Prey , you drew a controversial but data-driven link between this influx of young male migrants and a spike in sexual violence. What did your research reveal?

Ayaan: In my book Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights (2021), I show the causal connection between increased sexual coercion and rape in countries like Germany (which experienced a 41% increase in 2017 alone) and the influx of young male migrants from North Africa and the Middle East. The 2015-16 New Year’s Eve assaults, when a large group of North African men assaulted approximately 1,200 women in a single night, starkly revealed the ways in which unassimilated migrants treat Western women, whom they view as ripe for the picking.

Between 2008 and 2010, a voracious grooming gang in Rochdale comprising British-Pakistani men was made known to British police. The cops failed to clamp down on its activity, largely out of fear of being condemned as racist (which, no doubt, would have happened). As a result, hundreds of white working-class girls, many of whom were from vulnerable backgrounds and lacked parental support, were made victims of sex trafficking.

Rochdale was by no means the only grooming gang; grooming gangs have since been exposed in Rotherham, Huddersfield, Bradford, Oxford, and other areas with notable South Asian Muslim populations and enclaves. In 2017, it was found that 84% of those convicted for grooming gang offenses in the UK were South Asian, despite representing only 7% of the population.

Trey: You often criticize the Left, but the rot seems to go deeper. From the police to the BBC to academia, why have the British establishment institutions have been so eager to cover up or rationalize this specific form of violence?

Ayaan: As the Rochdale debacle shows, leftist ideologues are not alone in ignoring the problem: police and establishment media are complicit. “Centrist” media outlets routinely ignore the inconvenient trends I describe in Prey , instead framing migrants as victims of Islamophobic bigotry when the topic arises. In 2016,

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the BBC produced a gushing documentary about Omar Badreddin, a Syrian refugee who was charged with sexual assault but found not guilty.

Similarly, rather than grappling with unpleasant case studies or statistics that risk seeming critical of Islam, Western feminism paradoxically condemns “Islamophobia” and sexism in the same breath. On May 1, 2023, the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) compared the French radical feminist group Femen with the “far-right.” Why? For criticizing patriarchy within Islam and the sexually aggressive behavior of migrants from Muslim countries.

Trey: What explains the reluctance among progressives to confront the cultural factors behind migrant-perpetrated sexual violence?

Ayaan: Christopher Hitchens’ comments on leftist hypocrisy regarding unassimilated Muslims remain relevant. There’s little wonder why these young men don’t consider it their moral duty to assimilate to the normative condemnation of sexual assault in the West: as Hitchens pointed out in a 2007 article, “Londonistan Calling,” Traditional Islamic law says that Muslims who live in non-Muslim societies must obey the law of the majority. But this does not restrain those who now believe that they can proselytize Islam by force, and need not obey kuffar law in the meantime.”

For Western feminists, Islam is the elephant in the room. While many feminists refuse to address the ways in which Muslim women suffer all over the world, they even more anxiously avoid the topic of sexual abuse by migrant men from Muslim countries on their own turf. To point out the data on sexual assault by migrant men in Europe, as I did in Prey , won me the baffling label “absolutist” in The New York Times . Another review in The Standard condemned my book for implying that “sexism” is in the “DNA” of migrant men who mistreat women. Nowhere do I make such an essentialist claim. Cultural norms, uncorrected by assimilation, drive the phenomenon of migrant-perpetrated sexual assault. The Left has a serious problem grasping the implications of per capita calculations: for my critics, noticing demographic trends means painting every single member of that group with the same brush.

A constructive feminism would not be angered by the contents of my book Prey ; it would confront the problem, lobbying for pragmatic solutions and tough borders in response to the unmanageable numbers of asylum applicants who enter Europe for economic purposes. Above all, it would demand that all men in Europe, no matter their creed or color, assimilate into the cultural norms that allow women to walk the streets in safety.

Trey: What is at stake for women—both in Muslim-majority societies and in the West— depending on which interpretation of Islam gains influence?

Ayaan: All cultures have strong views on marriage, family, divorce, promiscuity, and parenting. Not all cultures are similar or interchangeable, however. Let me explain how different groups of Muslims perceive women’s rights and where their beliefs have been shaped. The first group of Muslims is the most problematic—the fundamentalists who envision a regime based on Sharia, Islamic religious law. They argue for an Islam largely or completely unchanged from its original seventh-century version and take it as a requirement of their faith that they impose it on everyone else.

I call them Medina Muslims, in that they see the forcible imposition of Sharia as their religious duty, following the example of the Prophet Muhammad when he was based in Medina. They exploit their fellow Muslims’ respect for Sharia law as a divine code that takes precedence over civil laws. It is only after they have laid this foundation that they are able to persuade their recruits to engage in jihad. There is no equality between men and women in their eyes, either legally or in daily practice.

The second group—and the clear majority throughout the Muslim world—consists of Muslims who are loyal to the core creed and worship devoutly but are not inclined to practice violence or even intolerance towards non- Muslims. I call this group “Mecca Muslims,” after the first phase of Islam and the peaceful Qur’anic verses that were revealed in Mecca. In this group, the position of women is contested.

More recently, and partly in response to the rise of Islamic terrorism, a third group is emerging within Islam—Muslim reformers or, as I call them, “modifying

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Muslims”—who promote the separation of religion from politics and other reforms. Although some are apostates, the majority of dissidents are believers, among them clerics who have come to realize that their religion must change if its followers are not to be condemned to an interminable cycle of political violence. Reformers generally favor equality between men and women.

The future of Islam and the world’s relationship with Muslims will be decided by which of the two minority groups—the Medina Muslims or the reformers—can win the support of the rather passive Meccan majority.

In the West, most people of goodwill are committed to providing women with equal rights and the opportunity to build a good future for themselves, to develop into autonomous human beings. The people I would call “Medina Muslims”—men such as Sayyid Qutb, Yusuf Qaradawi, or Osama Bin Laden—offer an alternative vision. They claim that their vision, based on Sharia law, is in all ways superior to the norms prevailing in the West. Medina Muslims churn out the statistics—which are of course widely available in the West—of divorce, single parenting, prostitution, the hook-up culture on American campuses. They offer crude and simple remedies: segregate the sexes; cover women from head to toe (the modesty doctrine) to prevent men from losing sexual control; marry girls off as early as possible on Sharia terms; and a list of other measures.

Medina Muslims claim that, when all of these Sharia measures towards women have been adopted, the vexing problems of promiscuity, children born out of wedlock, and the social chaos (fitna) they view in Western countries will cease. Yet Medina Muslims are uncomfortable when pressed to explain why Sharia measures implemented in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and to some extent in Pakistan

Read more about TOPICS IN THIS CHAPTER:

• The Transformative Power of Women–Speech at Pepperdine Uni- versity (Oct 2019)

• Western Women and Islam, Restoration (April 2024)

• What We Were Really Talking About Beneath the Weasel

Words: Genital Cutting, Fox News (April 2017)

• Finally, FGM is on Trial in America, Daily Beast (April 2017)

have not resolved every conceivable social ill. On the contrary, what we see in those countries is often appalling mistreatment of women and especially of young girls.

Feminist academics in the West might be expected to call out Medina Muslims, or at least to enable students to think through the consequences of implementing Sharia measures such as we see in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Yet what we see is rather different. It is striking how many American university professors and students reject any analysis of a real conflict between enlightened Western values and unreformed Sharia, even as Western civilization is mocked and its many contributions to human freedom and gender equality are cynically dismissed.

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Confronting Radical Islamism

“In effect, I have been deemed to be a heretic, not just by Muslims—for whom I am already an apostate—but by some Western liberals as well, whose multicultural sensibilities are offended by such ‘insensitive’ pronouncements. My uncompromising statements on this topic have incited such vehement denunciations that one would think I had committed an act of violence myself. For today, it seems, speaking the truth about Islam is a crime. ‘Hate speech’ is the modern term for heresy. And in the present atmosphere, anything that makes Muslims feel uncomfortable is branded as ‘hate’.”

—Ayaan Hirsi Ali,

Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, 2015

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Long before most in the West were willing to confront it, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was a rare and unflinching voice warning about the growing danger of radical Islamism. Her clarity came not from theory, but from lived experience—as a young woman, she was drawn into the Islamist ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood while attending school in Kenya and saw from within how it sought to control thought, silence dissent, subjugate women, and sow antisemitism.

Escaping a forced marriage, she found refuge in the Netherlands, only to discover that the same patterns of oppression persisted within immigrant communities there. Speaking out against these abuses, she co-created the short film Submission with Theo van Gogh, a searing portrayal of the treatment of women under Islam. Van Gogh’s murder by an Islamic extremist—and the death threat to Ayaan pinned to his body—made clear the personal risks she faced for telling the truth.

After 9/11, Ayaan left Islam and dedicated herself to confronting radical Islam head-on. Through her work in the media and on college campuses, she has often been shunned, silenced, or targeted for her candor—yet she has remained unwavering in her mission to defend West- ern liberalism and safeguard the freedoms that ideology seeks to erode.

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Trey: What exactly is the threat of political Islam or “Islamism”?

Ayaan : I want to start by issuing the by now familiar dis- claimer that not all Muslims are Islamists. I refer purely to the threat posed by those Muslims who subscribe to the political agenda of Islamism: A theocratic agenda that seeks to replace our existing liberal, secular order with an alternative one based on Islamic law.

Islamists are playing the long game. Through the pro- cess of conversion or missionary work and the gradual Islamization of institutions, the Islamist is committed to the transformation of Western society. How long does he hope it will take him to get Sharia law established in Europe and North America? The answer to this question differs from one Islamist to the next.

Trey: We often associate the Islamist threat with the post-9/11 era. Has this threat dimin- ished in the U.S., or has it merely evolved in recent years?

Ayaan: In the past, Islamists sought to physically and psychologically harm the West through acts of terrorism. They beheaded civilians, attacked crowds of people, and in their most visible act, flew planes full of passengers into buildings, hoping to strike fear into the heart of Western democracy. These attacks continue to have a huge impact on the psyche of the West. Countries like the UK and the U.S. sacrificed significant personal liber- ties for a degree of security; liberties which they have yet to recuperate.

It is important to recognize that, by and large, this tradeoff (of liberty for security) has worked. The U.S. resolved to never let something like the attacks of 9/11, 2001, happen again, and so far, they haven’t. Western omnipresence in the Middle East, combined with perva- sive surveillance networks at home, ensured that Islamic terrorists never came anywhere close. Though smaller attacks persisted for some time, the threat of Islamic terrorism has mostly faded into the background, along with some of the fear. In the 2016 Presidential election, terrorism was the second biggest concern for Americans, only four percent behind the economy. In 2024, Islamic terrorism didn’t even register in polling.

It would be a shortsighted mistake to say we defeated Muslim terrorists, however. Given the sustained and withering military operations the West inflicted upon them, I think it is more realistic to say that the Islamists who argued for gradualism and the methods of subver- sion defeated those who sought to fast-track the imposi- tion of Islamic law on the West through Jihad or coer- cion. In other words, the prevailing Islamists have simply altered their methods in favor of domestic subversion.

What 9/11 made clear is that the terrorists successfully built up a massive network of operators within the U.S. who were hard at work, gradually radicalizing vulner- able targets. What is most interesting about this form of subversion is that it no longer requires direct contact between a source and a target. The perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing, for example, had no clear links to a terrorist cell but were radicalized by osmosis, including through their mosque and through Islamist social media. These agents of radicalization are now telling their audiences to work within and through the system. Convert one person at a time; bring Sharia law to one community at a time. Win one election at a time. Change and capture one institution at a time; and do so legally, without firing a single shot. Large, spectacular attacks weren’t the most efficient way. Perhaps this is.

“The rise and spread of

Political Islam must be seen within the bigger picture of Western decline.”

Trey: You noted the shift to domestic subversion. What key assets or methods are Islamists using to carry out this gradual takeover?

Ayaan: Islamists have successfully implanted themselves within mosques, activist groups, educational institutions, and social media such that they can flood the ambient environment with pro-Islamist content. The effect has been to gradually subvert Americans and immigrants alike to support Islamist political objectives. The most obvious example of this is the seismic shift in public

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opinion on Israel among the youngest generations. No other issue in our time has seen so big a shift so quickly.

The rise and spread of Political Islam must be seen within the bigger picture of Western decline. Islamist ideas can only flourish in a society that is too feeble to defend itself. As I mentioned previously, Islamists have been able to exploit several assets to their advantage. The first is time. Like the Soviets, Islamists have learned that the attention span of American democracy is very short. We suffer from the myth that our domestic problems can be resolved in the next election with a reshuffling of the White House. Subversives know that weakening a nation is a generational prospect.

The second asset is discontented demographics, by which I mean the swaths of disaffected people, mostly young men, who are ripe for radicalization. These can be either the domestic population who feel largely alienated from their communities, or immigrants from developing countries who struggle to assimilate. The friction these groups feel with the rest of the society makes them prime candidates. In rich societies with welfare states, immigrants are put in the position where they are dependent on welfare and are not incentivized to participate even in the economy. Simultaneously, it is becoming increasingly difficult to bring families, resulting in an immigrant population heavily skewed towards young men. In Canada, for example, the population ratio between men and women ages 25 to 44 is widening, fueled entirely by immigration. Among the 20-24 year old age bracket, there are now 110 men for every 100 women, a disparity approaching China’s own much- reported male surplus.

Whereas the alienated domestic population might find meaning in wokeness or other para-religious movements, young immigrant men–alienated, angry, idle, and bored– enter the mosques and become radicalized. Sometimes these disparate groups interact, such as when we saw “Queers for Palestine” banners march to the tune of “from the river to the sea,” up until an avowed Islamist would confront them and knock them down. This is a recipe for disaffection. Such a society has sown the seeds of its own destruction. As for wokism: it is a pointless pseudo-religion and the Islamist knows this very well. Many converts to Islam first went woke and, when predictably they come out spiritually and morally empty, the Islamist is there inviting them into the warm embrace of the Muslim Umma.

Trey: Focusing on the challenge of assimilation, what is being overlooked in the immigration debate that makes certain groups vulnerable to radicalization?

Ayaan: What has been mostly overlooked is that regions of the world, where most immigrants have come from in the 21st century, are often tribal and do not have the same institutions, culture, or morals as the West. It is irresponsible to assume that all immigrants to the West will fully adapt to our way of life because they come here voluntarily. True, that was the case when large numbers of people fled European wars and economic stagnation in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In a matter of one or two generations they were fully assimilated. Even though it took a little longer, the same can be said about immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and even parts of Africa.

It is obvious, however, that immigrants who are predominantly Muslim struggle to fit in. Even when they flourish economically, as they have done in America, they are confronted with the insurmountable cultural differences between Islam and the West. They come from the regions of the world that do not have the same institutions, culture, or morals as the West. Of course, many Muslims do manage to find a way of balancing their faith with their citizenship. But it is harder, and, unfortunately, a growing number of American, British, French, and other Western Muslims choose to turn to the Islamists instead.

Trey: Are there any other assets that Islamists are using to their advantage, besides time and discontented demographics?

Ayaan: Their third asset is technology. Here, the Islamists have deployed the techniques of subversion with much success. The earliest and most obvious example was the use of communications and social media to isolate and radicalize individuals, often for violent terrorist action. With the rise of mass social media consumption on sites like TikTok, Islamists have been able to inspire large swathes of young TikTokers to flirt with Islamism. As I mentioned previously, the most notable example of this is found in the rapid shift of opinion against the state of Israel among young people. In the past two years, we have witnessed the stunning

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resurgence of antisemitism among the same population and the compulsory urge to attribute everything wrong in the world to Western action, and particularly the U.S.

“It is important to call out what is happening on social media for what it is: It is reinforcing indoctrination that has happened at school or in the mosque.“

Maybe, these young people do not understand what they are saying or that they are being used. Maybe, they go along with whatever they are told to believe because it is exciting, or maybe it gives them a sense of belonging to a movement that fights for justice. Few of them can properly describe how what is going on in Gaza constitutes a genocide, as my friend Douglas Murray teased out recently. Technology provides the most effective means for priming the masses yet devised, and we are rapidly losing the next generation to subversion.

The fourth and final asset, paradoxically, is Western constitutional and legal frameworks. This gets to what I said in the past about the West being too tolerant of intolerance. Islamists have been able to wield legal institutions against their enemies. All they have to do in many cases is claim Islamophobia and any obstacles

to their objectives clear themselves away. The fear of a discrimination lawsuit is enough to send nearly any person or organization running for the hills.

“What makes the concept of Islamophobia so dangerous is that the very effort to explore this question is deemed Is- lamophobic. There is no ability to probe the bounds of what counts as Islamophobia. Just the accusation is a death sen- tence in some circles.”

Absurdly high levels of open immigration have allowed Islamists to establish beachheads within Western societies with almost no filtering from immigration authorities. The conditions in the host country are such that assim- ilation can be avoided, while disaffected young men are gradually Islamized in their communities and through technology. The same process occurs for the young domestic population, which is indoctrinated through

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similar channels. Islamists infiltrate every institution and organization, cloaking themselves in the language and legacy of historic civil rights movements. Whenever they are confronted with objections to their activities, they are able to effectively wield the law against the host country.

Trey: What can be done about the Islamist-led subversion of our societies?

Ayaan: I fear the window to address the Islamist threat is getting worryingly narrow. Many European countries are moving in a direction that would make vocal dissent either highly discouraged or formally outlawed. Most of Europe now has some system of censorship on the books. Scotland, a country known internationally for its free spirit, joined the ranks of such countries, enacting a new hate crime law that aims to tackle “hatred and prejudice,” two notoriously unclear and ambiguous concepts. In Canada, Justin Trudeau introduced what journalist Matt Taibbi has described as a “blueprint for dystopia in a horrific speech bill.” This so-called “On- line Harms Act” would allow administrative panels, not judges bound by rules of evidence, to fine or imprison citizens for internet posts they made in the past–in some cases, for life.

In Germany, Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, a politician in the Alternative for Germany Party, cited the government’s own statistics in an argument against resettling yet more Afghan nationals in Germany. Afghans in Germany commit rape at very high rates. Along with other mi- grants from places like Turkey and Syria, they commit half of gang rapes–despite being collectively only 14% of the population. She did not make up these num- bers. They are, again, the government’s own. Yet, under German hate-speech laws, she has now been twice found guilty and fined thousands of Euros. It boggles the mind that you can get a criminal record in Germany for citing government-produced facts.

Forces in the U.S. hope to do so as well, though that remains a more distant threat for the moment. Still, the direction of travel is unmistakable: the Islamists are here, and they are winning.

Trey: Should Western governments seek to engage with political Islamists like al-Qaeda and Islamic State, or is this a mistake, in your view?

Ayaan: The main focus for this debate has been the controversy over how to deal with the Muslim Broth- erhood, the world’s most influential modern Islamist organization. This diffuse global network, whose broad aim is to promote Sharia-based government and Islamic values, makes enthusiastic use of democratic institutions wherever they exist to promote its goals. But Muslim-ma- jority countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, in particular, have put pressure on their Western allies to ban the Brotherhood as an extremist or- ganization with links to terrorism, and hence to join their front against Qatar, the Brotherhood’s main sponsor in the Gulf.

Trey: You identify the Muslim Brotherhood as a central player in this ideological struggle. For those unaware, what are its origins, and why does it remain so influential?

Ayaan: The Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna. It advocates the adoption of Islam as a means to both personal self-improvement and broader social reform. Initially a religious and welfare organization, the group quickly adopted a political agenda. Its self-professed aim is the establishment of a state ruled by Sharia (or Islamic) law, ultimately united with others under a caliphate, which became the basic ideological template for all subsequent Islamist movements. al-Banna himself offered a five-fold formulation of its ethos that has remained the motto of the Brotherhood ever since:

• Allah is our objective.

• The Prophet is our leader.

• The Qur’an is our constitution.

• Jihad is our way.

• Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.

Implicit in this formation is a rejection of the contem- porary political arrangements of his native Egypt, then under British administration. As far as al-Banna was concerned, contemporary Islam had lost its prestige and dominance precisely because most Muslims had been corrupted by Western influences. The very idea of the nation state he regarded as an illegitimate form of gov- ernment of alien origin that was at odds with the impe- rial and ultimately global ideals of Muslim governance.

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He also rejected the secularizing tendencies of moder- nity, which, in his view, violated a proper Muslim way of life, which should be governed in all its facets by the Qur’an and the Sunnah: as the group’s most famous slo- gan puts this totalizing ambition, “Islam is the solution.” His ultimate goal was an Islamic, not a national state, and one which would eventually unite all the Muslims.

In accord with this global vision, al-Banna sought to establish branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in other countries. He succeeded. Soon after it was founded, the group spread beyond the confines of Egypt, establishing branches in nearly every country in the Arab world. In addition, it also provided the ideological basis for a num- ber of other major Islamist movements outside the Arab world, especially the Pakistan-based group Jama’at-i Islami.

By the 1950s, the secular nationalist government of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt came to view the politi- cal Islam of the Brotherhood as a threat to the security of the Egyptian state, and members of the group were imprisoned and, in some cases, tortured. In the decades that followed, governments in other countries where the movement had established branches, including Iraq, Tunisia, and Syria, began their own crackdowns on them, prompting many Brothers (Ikhwan) to seek refuge in Europe, especially in the UK, France, Germany, and Switzerland.

By the 1980s, many of the émigrés who had taken the Muslim Brotherhood to Europe realized that they would not be returning to their countries of origin any time soon. They began to create permanent organizations inspired by Islamist ideology but with priorities adapted for new generations of Muslims born and raised in the West. This gave rise to national affiliates like the Muslim Association of Britain (est. 1997), the Union des Organi- zations Islamiques de France (est. 1983), and the Isla- mische Gemeinschaft in Deutschland (est. 1982).

The Brotherhood also began operating in the U.S. in the 1960s after the arrival of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia. By the late 1970s it became clear that many of them were not returning to their often repressive homelands either. Following the Iranian revolution of 1979, the Saudis intensified their focus on American Muslims, and as more funds and Islamic immigrants flowed into the country, a variety of Brotherhood-affiliated organizations like the Muslim

Students Association (est. 1963), the North American Is- lamic Trust (est. 1973), and the Islamic Society of North America (est. 1981) sprang up. The best known of them is probably the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was set up following a 1993 Philadel- phia meeting of Hamas leaders and activists to discuss propaganda efforts against the Oslo peace accords be- tween Israel and the Palestinians. Its stated mission is to “enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual under- standing.”

Those objectives sound innocuous enough, but advo- cates of repressing the Brotherhood argue that they hide sinister objectives and connections behind deceptively anodyne language in public. Contrast, for instance, the bland mission statement above with evidence that emerged as part of a 2007 federal trial against the Holy Land Foundation, which was charged with providing millions of dollars to Hamas. One of the key documents that came to light was a 1991 strategy paper of the Brotherhood authored by Mohamed Akram, who was a key Ikhwan leader in the U.S. at the time. In his 18-page “Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” Akram states that it exists to “present Islam as a civilizational alter- native” and “support the establishment of the global Is- lamic state wherever it is.” He says that Muslim Brothers should look upon this mission as a “Civilization Jihadist responsibility.”

The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the be- lievers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

Even though many Brotherhood apologists have dis- missed this memo as outdated, it is consistent with numerous other statements on its long-war strategy. In a 1995 speech to an Islamic conference in Ohio, the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, Yusuf al-Qarada- wi, declared that “victory” will come through dawa, i.e., the conversion of non-Muslims and radicalization of Muslims: “Conquest through dawa, that is what we hope for.” The group’s official supreme leader, Mohammed Akef, later affirmed the same objective, stating that he

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has “complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America, because Islam has logic and a mission.”

Nor are the Brothers averse to using deception to cam- ouflage their cause. FBI wiretaps of the 1993 Philadel- phia meeting that led to the founding of CAIR caught several US-based Hamas activists agreeing that hiding their affiliation and intentions was the best tactic to avoid proscription: “I swear by Allah that war is deception,” said one senior leader,“deceive, camouflage, pretend that you’re leaving while you’re walking that way. Deceive your enemy.” More precisely:

Let’s not hoist a large Islamic flag and let’s not be bar- baric-talking. We will remain a front so that if the thing [the U.S. govern- ment ban on Hamas] happens, we will benefit from the new happenings instead of having all of our organiza- tions classified and exposed.

Trey: Does this mean the Mus- lim Brotherhood should be criminalized?

Ayaan: Their radical objectives, deceptive tactics, and links to terrorist outfits mean that the difference be- tween non-violent extremists engaged “only” in political and missionary work (da’wa) and violent extremists is merely one of tactics and timing, not deep principle or long-term goals. This means that legal proscription on grounds of sedition is the appropriate policy towards Brotherhood-affiliated organizations.

It is key to understand that there is no “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood. Every branch of the organization works towards its primary mission as summarized in the works of Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb: a theo- cratic Islamist caliphate under the rule of a literalist form of Sharia law. Although initially re-created in historically Muslim lands (includ- ing Spain), this would ultimately be

carried elsewhere by the sword or by mass migration. In this long-term objective they differ little from jihadists like al-Qaeda, varying only over how to get there and on what timescale; worse, their “long war” political Islam is often a gateway to violent jihad when conditions are ripe. Both are as incompatible with liberal democratic West- ern values as the Soviet aspiration for global communist hegemony during the Cold War.

Advocates of toleration argue that the Brotherhood no longer seriously embraces the radical vision al-Banna enunciated, nor the establishment of an Islamic State. They claim the Brotherhood is ready to participate in ordinary politics and, through that participation, would

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further moderate. In contrast to the “Islamized Lenin- ism” of Qutb, the alleged new model for the Ikhwan (Brothers) is more akin to the Christian Democratic par- ties of Europe. On this view, we should not ban them for three reasons: not all of their chapters are violent, they are not fundamentally anti-democratic, and the social and diplomatic backlash would be too severe.

Trey: Is political Islam fundamentally differ- ent from other religiously inspired political movements?

Ayaan: The skeptics–and I’m one of them–reply that political Islam is exceptional. Its theology, history, and the behavior of its adherents stand out in ways that mark it as irreconcilable with democracy and secularism in a way that Christianity is not. Unlike Christian Democrats, the Muslim Brotherhood takes an instrumental view of elections to seize power and then subvert the system for theocratic ends: “one man, one vote, one time,” as the saying goes. Any appearance to the contrary is just them playing al-Banna’s long game. As Recep Erdogan, the Islamist President of Turkey, notoriously said about democracy, “it is a train that we ride until we get where we need to get and then we get off.”

This theocratic ambition has deep roots in Islam. Where- as Jesus was a political dissident executed by the state and Moses famously a leader without one, the Prophet Muhammad was a political leader who founded a polity himself. Muslim scripture was powerfully shaped by that biographical difference. The Koran contains myriad direct legal injunctions, ranging from the implementation of the hudud punishments for offenses such as apostasy to specific rules on civil questions like inheritance–hence al-Banna’s [founder of the Muslim Brotherhood] boast that “the Koran is our constitution.”

Despite plentiful rules for individual conduct, the Koran is hazier about the form of government to administer them. Indeed, the most famous schism in Islam, between Sunnis and Shias, arose immediately upon Muhammad’s death. His followers were unable to decide if the Caliph– his successor as leader–should be elective or hereditary. Notwithstanding the lack of scriptural clarity on the point, Muslims came to regard the caliphate itself as an essential part of Islam. This fact further politicized the

faith, as hereditary caliphates–fusing secular with reli- gious power–became the model for Islamic politics for the next millennium.

Trey: If we look back at the 20th century, what was the pivotal moment that sparked the modern-day Islamist movement?

Ayaan: It was the disintegration of the Ottoman Em- pire in the 1920s and the abolition of the last caliphate by Ataturk’s secular Turkish Republic. Muslims like al-Banna, humiliated by European imperialism, rejected secularism, democracy, and the nation state as Western imports at odds with Islamic tradition. But he also saw the achievement of a new theocratic caliphate as some- thing that would unfold gradually, each step requiring different tactics. Islamists might downplay their theo- cratic goals early on, and even partake in elections, if it improved their position in the long term.

This sets the stage for the present dispute: have his fol- lowers come to accept democracy as part of all stages of their political theory, or are they still theocratic oppor- tunists at heart?

Trey: You frame this as a dispute between gen- uine belief and opportunism. When Islamists have actually taken power, does the record support the skeptics?

Ayaan: Aside from Hamas, the Brotherhood group that controls Gaza and turned authoritarian almost as soon as it won elections in 2006, Exhibit A for the skeptics is the Brotherhood’s native Egypt. The short-lived Islamist president, Muhammad Morsi, seemed to govern for the Brotherhood alone. He flooded the bureaucracy with Islamists, declared his decisions beyond judicial review, and infuriated the army by attending a rally where clerics urged Egyptians to join a jihad in Syria. In the autumn of 2012, he oversaw an effort to draft a new constitution that would have increased the role of Sharia in Egyptian courts, alarming secularists. By the time a military coup removed him in 2013, his autocratic behavior in power had done much to discredit the view that the Egyptian Brothers had moderated.

Exhibit B is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president. Another avowed Islamist, he threw his full weight behind

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the Brotherhood when it took power in Egypt and has backed other Islamist parties in Libya, Syria, and Tunisia since the Arab Spring. Domestically, he has grown more autocratic the longer he has been in power. After 11 years as prime minister he was elected president and set about turning that previously weak post into a hegemon- ic one. After an attempted coup in 2016, he had tens of thousands of people purged from their jobs or arrested, often for the merest suggestion of a connection to the religious group blamed for the plot. He has also steadily co-opted institutions and eroded checks and balances, turned much of the media into a tool of state propagan- da, censored the internet, and jailed many of his critics.

Defenders of the Brotherhood claim that the authori- tarianism displayed by Morsi and Erdogan reflects their national political environments rather than an anti-dem- ocratic essence in their ideology. More hopeful exam- ples, they say, might be found in Tunisia and Morocco. Tunisia’s Brotherhood party, Ennahda, which styles itself “Muslim democratic,” was the biggest party in parlia- ment–until President Kais Saied suspended the assem- bly in July 2021. Similarly, in Morocco, the Justice and Development Party (PJD), another supposed moderate Islamist outfit, was appointed by King Muhammad VI to lead the ruling coalition, until suffering a crushing defeat at the polls a month later.

Both Ennahda and the PJD seem to have learned from the Egyptian Brotherhood not to overreach and to share power with more secular groups. For example, when large protests pushed Tunisian democracy to the brink in 2013, Ennahda compromised over a new constitution and relinquished power. The PJD also tried to downplay its Islamist image; it failed to stop laws pushing French in education at the expense of Arabic, for instance, and de- spite pledging never to do so, its prime minister presided over the normalization of relations with Israel.

We cannot prove whether such parties are still playing al-Banna’s long game. But advocates of tolerating the Brotherhood tell us that, in environments that do not encourage authoritarianism, it is not a necessary devel- opment. If Morocco’s King or Tunisia’s lack of a strong politicized army can place effective checks on how much power they amass, surely mature Western democracies could do at least as well?

Trey: Could the Western tradition of liberal democracy facilitate the moderation that the advocates of tolerating the Brotherhood propose?

Ayaan: There’s no good reason to think that it could work. Instead, they can create opportunities for Islamist minorities to exert disproportionate impact. See how the Muslim Brotherhood Islamists have encouraged and exploited the two-tier system of justice in Western Europe or the implementation of DEI diktats in America. The seemingly sudden mobilization of mobs in the aftermath of the October 7th attack that fills the hearts of Western cities with genocidal cries of globalize the Intifada and from the River to the Sea, Israel Shall Be Free, is another illustration of Muslim Brotherhood duplicity in action.

Another cautionary tale in this regard is Indonesia, a secular democracy where no avowedly religious party has ever received more than 8% of the vote in national parliamentary elections, even though the country is majority Muslim. But locally elected Islamists have passed over 400 local ordinances based on Islamic law since the country’s regions were granted more autonomy in 1999. In Aceh province alcohol is prohibited, women’s dress is restricted, and adultery and homosexuality are punished with whippings.

Indonesia shows how the workings of democracy can magnify the power of an illiberal minority at the local level. The danger for the West here is obvious. As I pointed out in my writings on British local elections, for instance, mass immigration has already produced several hundred local council wards with an Islamic majority. This has been accompanied by the emergence of a grassroots campaign group called “The Muslim Vote,” pushing a sectarian agenda. Sharia-lite is a de facto reality in Britain and other European countries with a serious presence of the Muslim Brotherhood. There are “family courts” that officiate marriages (including polygamous ones), divorces, and child custody. If the borders stay open and the Brotherhood remains active, then local demand for Islamist legislation will inexorably increase, whether it’s more mosques and religious schools or greater restrictions on alcohol sales and on mixed- sex public facilities. The phenomena of honor violence and female genital mutilation have now been a reality

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in various European countries for at least three decades. Even in the minority, Islamists will be able to ratchet up restrictions.

The final argument for tolerating the Brotherhood is that it would be too risky to ban them. Diplomatically, it would put a wrench in the works of America’s alliance with Turkey, a key regional ally of the Brotherhood. A decision to designate the Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization would also forbid the U.S. government from engaging with foreign officials from Brotherhood-affiliated parties, which have in recent years included the governments of counter-terrorist partners like Morocco and Tunisia.

Domestically, it would risk driving non-Islamist Muslims into the Brothers’ hands by creating a narrative of anti-Muslim persecution. Driving this sort of wedge between Muslims and non-Muslims in America, Europe, and elsewhere, it is argued, would be seriously counter- productive.

Trey: What about the diplomatic risks associated with banning the Muslim Brotherhood?

Ayaan: Those are real. However, the U.S. and her allies can deal with these countries without agreeing to

tolerate subversion of their societies by a hostile foreign entity. They must also be offset against the diplomatic benefits to our relationship with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE, all of whom have proscribed the Muslim Brotherhood domestically and are beginning to defund the petro-Islamic groups they birthed. They have asked Western countries to follow suit, and conditioned trade and security deals on such a crackdown.

As for Turkey, we shouldn’t forget that its motives are varied and the U.S. has leverage. Its President has weakened his drive to promote political Islam abroad and has spent the last couple of years mending fences with regional powers like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, whose help he needs to support the Turkish Lira. He has also ordered news outlets launched by Brotherhood exiles not to criticize Egypt’s military regime, and even reached out to the Assad government, who are mortal enemies of the Ikhwan. To be sure, Erdoğan hasn’t totally changed his spots; he has been fiercely critical of Israel’s conduct during its conflict with Hamas, accusing Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu of genocide, and halting all trade with the Jewish state. But overall, political Islam is a weaker force in Turkish foreign policy in the Arab world than it was, meaning a U.S./UK crackdown on our Brotherhood affiliates will be less of an irritant.

As for the risk of a domestic Muslim backlash, we shouldn’t be too moved by Middle Eastern precedents. From the Shah’s iron rule in Iran, through Saddam Hussein’s secular dictatorship, to the coup that ousted elected Islamists in Algeria in 1992 and the repression of the Brothers in Syria, it is said that attempts to ban them have produced at best a precarious stability and at worst civil wars. But this overlooks huge differences between autocrats in the Middle East and Western societies. To be sure, the record of crackdowns in the former is bad. Unlike these autocracies, however, Western societies offer durable prosperity, generous welfare states, and expansive political and personal freedoms, including the freedom to live one’s life in accordance with Islamic precepts. All of this, combined with much smaller Muslim populations, reduces the risk of a violent backlash.

To the extent that there is an Islamist population that might be radicalized by the move, this just highlights the fatal flaw in the argument: the poor track record of tolerating political Islam in the West to date. If the assumption was that by giving the Brotherhood free reign

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Read more about

TOPICS IN THIS CHAPTER:

• How to Deal with the Muslim Brotherhood - Part I, Restoration (May 2024)

• How to Deal with the Muslim Brotherhood - Part II, Restoration (May 2024)

• Islamism’s sharpest words, Restoration (March 2024)

we would starve such views of support, it hasn’t worked. Europe has seen thousands of radicalized Muslim youth joining terrorist groups, the rise of Islamic ghettoes, polls indicating widespread support for Islamist views, and civil unrest along sectarian lines, most recently in Britain and in France. In America, where Muslims are only 1% of the total population, let’s not learn these lessons too late. The key threat here is not an Islamist takeover of the country, but an Islamist takeover of its Muslim citizens. As the most prominent Muslim organizations were either created by or are associated with the Brotherhood, the absence of a strong tradition of Islam means that immigrants are more susceptible to being won over by their purism. This makes it even more important for us to call for a crackdown.

Trey: With President Trump’s recent Executive Order to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization, we have finally taken decisive action at home. But this is a global network with powerful state backers. What further steps must be taken on the international stage to fully dismantle this threat?

Ayaan: Here is what I propose:

1) Designate the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization, starting in Egypt and then on a case- by-case basis in other countries as appropriate. This piecemeal approach is to be preferred to a blanket global designation, as it requires proof of “material support” (18 U.S.C. § 2339B) to Salafi-jihadist movements.

2) Explore the use of sedition charges (18 U.S.C. § 2384) against other domestic Brotherhood affiliates that do not fall under the material support statute.

3) Develop foreign policy mechanisms to deter Turkey and Qatar from facilitating the Muslim Brotherhood and its global affiliates, including those in the West. Particular attention should be paid to the Turkish-EU economic relationship and Turkey’s status as a NATO ally.

By taking an axe to the roots of this rotten tree, we’ll allow more light to shine upon those Muslims at home and abroad who believe in democracy and the separation of mosque and state.

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Defending freedom of speech

“Why is freedom valuable? To me, it is valuable because all other freedoms in a democratic society are meaningless without the freedom of speech. You cannot have freedom of religion without freedom of speech. You cannot have the freedom to assemble without freedom of speech. You cannot have any kind of freedom without the freedom of speech.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

From the day her life was threatened and a fatwa was issued against her after the murder of Theo van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has made the defense of free speech integral to her life’s work.

Where most would have stepped back, she stepped for- ward—seeing that moment as her call to action to ensure those who seek to silence dissent do not prevail. Through AHA Foundation, she has carried that fight into every arena, working to rescue our education system from ideologues and anti-liberty propagandists. For Ayaan, protecting young minds—our future leaders—means en- suring they can learn and embrace the values that have sustained open societies and democracies for centuries.

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Trey: You’ve been a staunch supporter of free speech since moving to the West, especially during the height of cancel culture. How has your upbringing influenced this commitment?

Ayaan : Free speech enables people to explore controver- sial ideas and voice their own perspectives. My personal history of being silenced makes me especially protective of this right; once I finally experienced the liberty to think and speak for myself, it became something I could never give up.

When I was young, I grew up in countries like Somalia, Kenya, and Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia and Somalia, in particular, universal human rights as we understand that term in the West do not yet apply. In Saudi Arabia, commanding right and forbidding wrong as determined by Sharia remains the law of the land, although the current Crown Prince appears to be seeking a different course. In many countries today, freedom of speech, especially for a woman, is not guaranteed. If you step out of line, you can be punished.

In my own life, I have witnessed restrictions within the household and within society at large. In Somalia, when I was a young child, the country was under the rule of a dictator, Siad Barre. There was zero tolerance for opinions opposing his authority. He abolished all political parties except for his own and squashed anything he saw as a threat to his control. Dissidence or even mild dissent was met with swift imprisonment. Those who favored charting a different political course—people like my father—faced prison or had to go into exile, or both.

When I escaped to the Netherlands and later enrolled at Leiden University, a whole new world opened up to me. The freedom of expression that I found in Holland—the freedom to think critically—is unknown where I come from. It is a right and practice that I always dreamed of having as I was growing up. Whatever its flaws, no nation understands the principle of free expression better than the Dutch. It runs so deep in Dutch culture that while I was a member of the Dutch Parliament, I received protection from death threats, even as some top figures in Dutch politics told me they strongly disagreed with my ideas.

Since coming to the West, I have since been fascinated with how deeply most people in this part of the world

are committed to the idea of an open society. Even though the open society is vulnerable, it is also stubborn. It is the place I ran to for safety and freedom. And I would like to keep it that way: safe and free. There is an irony: some people who were born into this open society appear unable to appreciate the ethical advantages an open society confers over closed societies.

“We lulled ourselves into a false sense of security. For while we were distracted by Islamist intolerance, Islamist terrorism, and maybe the demands of daily life, other forms of intolerance were being seeded and cultivated in our universities, schools, media, healthcare facilities, administrative government, political parties, and large corporations.”

Trey: How have threats to free speech in the West evolved over the past three decades?

Ayaan: In 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini, then supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran issued a fatwa against the British author Salman Rushdie for a novel he wrote titled “The SatanicVerses”. This event sparked a debate between the West and Islam on the boundaries of speech. Margaret Thatcher, back then Prime Minister of Britain is quoted by the British journalist, Charles Moore in her response as having said: “Whether or not we have any sympathy with Rushdie’s views is not the point. We must react strongly to any state murder-hunt made against one of our citizens.”

The author Rushdie and the politician Thatcher were on either side of the left/right political spectrum. She points out the irrelevance of political differences and is solid in her conviction that the protection of the author is a matter of principle rather than politics.

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It is very interesting to look back at the last three decades in the West and to see how attitudes to free speech have changed dramatical- ly. Three things stand out in that timeline:

First, the threat to Free Speech inside the West in 1989 was perceived to be FOREIGN. Even though many commentators blamed Rushdie for provoking the ire of the Ayatollah, the intoler- ance of speech to the point of seeking to murder the offender was something that came from outside the West. Back then, it was thought–maybe even taken for granted–that Westerners had reached almost perfect consensus on the matter of saying, inquir- ing, writing, publishing, painting, drawing, singing, and producing any kind of content one wanted. It was left to audiences to decide what they wanted to pay attention to and what they wanted to ignore.

Sure, there were still controversies on what content might be regarded as offensive. Citizens sued their governments and one another on grounds such as defamation, libel, and slander but always accepted the final verdict of the courts. The idea that offensive speech was to be punished with fines, time in prison or capital punishment as in Rushdie’s case was thought of in the West as something foreign or something from the annals of history. Even better, on the matter of fictional output such as movies and novels anyone who felt aggrieved enough to com- plain to the courts was viewed as a narrow-minded loser. Matters of fact [non-fiction works] were reviewed based on such criteria as evidence, logical rigor, and coherence rather than emotional standards. When I came to the Netherlands thirty years ago that was the Western society I found: free, tolerant, and prosperous.

The second thing that stands out is the response in Western society to the religious intolerance exhibited by some members of the Muslim communities who live in the West. There was the heinous murder of Theo van Gogh; the killing of the Charlie Hebdo journalists, the crazed reaction to the cartoons of the prophet Muham-

mad in Denmark and in France; the relentless threats against Muslims who chose to leave their faith like me, or who criticized its intolerant and violent components. At first, the native populations of Europe and the U.S. reacted to this intolerance with horror. Most Westerners condemned the people who took offense as intolerant and backward.

It is true that a number of com- mentators from the media, politics, and the universities chastised those allegedly guilty of the provocation and urged the wider society to be patient with their Muslim minori- ties. In any case, the assault on the freedom of speech and conscience of those accused of provoca- tion was seen as NARROW IN SCOPE. Muslims were seen as a minority–new to the West–for whom religious identity is salient and who will one day learn the virtues of freedom and tolerance.

A key feature of this threat was that this particular minority seemed to want to silence only critics of their religion and did not interfere in other matters. The solu- tion to this was seen as simple: steer clear of anything that could possibly antagonize the religious sensibility of any Muslim individual or group. Do that for as long as it takes this minority to catch up with the rest of society. If that is not a perfect solution, but a containment strategy, then so be it. For some problems, there is no such thing as a perfect answer.

Taken together, and this is the third thing I want to pin- point, you could say that Western leaders concluded to stand up to: A) any foreign threats to our freedoms and B) to manage the intolerance within the Muslim commu- nities with patience and as needed. End of story?

But we lulled ourselves into a false sense of security. For while we were distracted by Islamist intolerance, Islamist terrorism, and maybe the demands of daily life, other forms of intolerance were being seeded and cultivated in our universities, schools, media, healthcare facilities, administrative government, political parties, and large corporations.

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The ideology that rose most recently and threatens Free Speech is Wokeism. It has potential. has the potential to ruin our societies is a different one. It is not foreign and it is not Islamic. It goes by many names, but I will call it Wokeism.

Trey: Wokeism is a term used frequently, yet it often resists easy definition. How do you define it, and why is it so elusive?

Ayaan: Wokeism, say those who have studied it, is an amalgam of postmodernist theories. I highly recommend the works of British author Helen Pluckrose and American mathematician James Lindsay if you need a primer on what Wokeism is. Especially their book Cynical Theories.

Mad minds like Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Michelle Foucault cooked up the original woke potion in France because they were disappointed with the fruits of the Enlightenment. American scholars–many of them black– built their activism against racism, perceived or real, on this shaky house of theories. Legal Scholar, Derrick Bell, developed it further and centered it around ‘race.’ What was ‘Critical Theory’ became Critical Race Theory. Kimberle Crenshaw (another black scholar) seasoned it with something she called ‘intersectionality’.

Aggrieved members of the Gay community expanded these ideas further and intellectual conmen and women like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi monetized it. One reason why it is difficult to pin down Wokeism is that their theories of deconstruction are constantly expanded with grievance after grievance. They claim to possess a

skepticism that deconstructs existing metanarratives that favor groups who hold power and the structures they set up to maintain that power.

But then the woke reject the skepticism of the scientific revolution: that of the pursuit of inquiry using objective criteria to get to the bottom of things or the truth and then embarking on the process of bringing about the necessary changes. In other words, they have their own metanarrative and its objective is to deconstruct society into pieces. Literally! Race, gender, sexual orientation, disability…

“Sometimes I think this ambiguity is intentional. If you can pin an idea down, you can expose it and accept its conclusions or reject them. But if its meaning keeps shifting with the grievance of the day, it becomes elu- sive.”

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Another key element is the contamination of language. Wokeism comes with its own lexicon. You may have heard Wokespeak–words like microaggressions, safe spaces, equity, diversity, non-binary, cultural appropriation. It also has its bureaucratic acronyms: DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion); ESG (Environmental and Social Governance), LGBTQ… and even more sinister ones like MAPS (Minor Attracted Persons): let that sink in.

Under this ideology, our existing language is constantly policed to become ‘purified’ of any perceived bigotry and injustice, understood only as the woke understand these things. The main goal of the woke is to seek unchecked and absolute power, advancing from the academy and out into the other institutions of society. And into the streets.

In America and the rest of the English-speaking world there is no issue of any significance that we can discuss in any meaningful way without running into Woke sabotage. Think about the challenges we face. From globalization, national identity and immigration; to inequality; healthcare; radical Islamism; the pandemic; climate change; the threat of authoritarian great powers like China and Russia; new technologies such as AI and the opportunities and threats they introduce. None of these issues is free of wokespeak and in almost every case we tend to bend towards where the arc of wokeness leads.

Trey: Why do you see woke ideology as dangerous, and how does it compare to other harmful ideologies?

Ayaan: In fact, in a spooky way, Wokeism has remarkable similarities with white supremacy; and with Islamism; it is inherently hostile to women and gay people; and worst of all, in practice, it ruins the lives of those who live with gender dysphoria.

In what way, you might ask? Like white supremacists, the woke rank human beings into races, with the white- skinned people still on top, except this time as the top oppressors of all other races. In the Woke rankings, as in the white supremacists’ ideology, various shades of skin color are distinguished. Some brown-skinned people the woke tell us are ‘white adjacent.’ But blacks are still placed at the bottom this time, as ultimate victims.

According to the woke, merit, punctuality, hard work, hygiene, individualism, objective truth, and the notion of lifting yourself by your bootstraps–all of these things are manifestations of whiteness. That, of course, implies that mediocrity, tardiness, laziness, filth, tribalism, superstition, and lack of ambition are inherently the traits of non-white peoples.

Colonialism, as was practiced by whites (Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands) is scrutinized for all kinds of sins of oppression and condemned but non-white empires (the Han Chinese, the Moghuls, the Muslim empires) and their barbarities are ignored. America’s past of holding slaves and America’s treatment of indigenous peoples is constantly litigated but black and brown people’s role in slavery, in producing slaves, trading them, and still perpetuating it to this day is completely ignored. According to the worldview of the woke, only white people are capable of reckoning with their history. Only white people are fit enough to be held accountable for their actions. If that is not racism, you tell me what is!!

The woke and the white supremacists are both antisemitic: If you are Jewish, you are categorized by them as white. Never mind that just 77 years ago, a serious attempt was made to eliminate all Jews because they were considered pollutants to the white race. The woke hate the state of Israel and they freely indulge in conspiracy theories about the Jews. For those of us who recognize it as the threat it is, I believe we have no option but to fight it in just the way we fought the other bad ideologies such as white supremacy and Islamism.

Read more about TOPICS IN THIS CHAPTER:

• What about free speech in the West? University of Lucerne (October 2022)

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FIGHTING ANTISEMITISM

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“The deep human desire for freedom will, I think, ultimately triumph over the darkness. But we need to fight to ensure that it does.”

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan has long been at the forefront of confronting Isla- mism-fueled antisemitism. She often recalls how, in her youth, she was taught to hate Jewish people—a prejudice she later rejected and has spent her life challenging.

In the wake of the Israel–Gaza conflict, she has spoken with moral clarity, condemning the October 7th attacks, calling out the silence that followed, and demanding ac- countability from those who abandoned their principles. Through the CLARITy Coalition, convened by AHA, she has united voices worldwide to expose Islamist influ- ence in education and its ties to antisemitism, while using media, op-eds, and activism to warn of the rising tide of extremist violence, global resurgence of antisemitism, and the moral double standards that allow it to thrive.

In 2025, Ayaan has worked closely with the AHA team to design the Courage to Confront, a strategic, multi- year initiative to address Islamist-driven antisemitism. Unlike efforts that merely try to manage antisemitism, this initiative asks a different question. Not how to keep Jews safe, but how to make the West wholly inhospitable to antisemitism and Islamism.

“October 7th, 2023 was not combat but the deliberate killing of a people—a modern pogrom broadcast to the world.”

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Trey: Why did you choose to discuss the global resurgence of antisemitism, given the many other crises facing the world today?

Ayaan : Because of how it manifests: it is directed at Jewish people, and even Judaism itself. For that alone, it must be discussed. My Jewish friends tell me that when antisemitism becomes this big and broad, it is a sign of a much larger crisis in society.

An identity crisis began in the West in 1989. Before then, when we were fighting the Cold War, we knew who we were and what we were fighting for. There was still a sense of triumph from winning the Second World War. Now, we see that all the assumptions we made were wrong—like letting China into the World Trade Organization in the hope that as their economy grew, they would become like us. We thought the same would happen with the Soviet Union and in Africa. Instead, the West has become an object of hatred and filled with self-disdain.

Every red line has been crossed. I was taught “Never Again”—that after the Holocaust, we would never again repeat those narratives. In the last two and a half years, all of that has been thrown out.

If antisemitism is a symptom of a larger, deeper crisis, then we are living through it now. We see it in how girls and women in Europe are no longer protected from grooming gangs, child pornography, and modern slavery. We have many human rights organizations, but they are ineffective; they have reached a level of polarization where they cannot find the unity to address these issues.

I believe in dedicating my activism to fighting this be- cause this hatred is deep—it is a hatred against humanity. It is demoralizing. But fighting antisemitism should not be something only the Jews do; it must also be done by non-Jews. There is something about scapegoating Jews that is transcendent—a visceral desire to avoid seeing your own shortcomings. That path always spells disaster.

Trey: We must turn our attention to October 7th, 2023. You have described this not just as an attack, but as a shattering of assumptions. How do you view the significance of that day?

Ayaan: On October 7th, 2023, Hamas gunmen crossed into Israel and carried out atrocities so depraved that language can scarcely contain them. More than 1,200 people were executed. Mothers were raped before their children. Infants were murdered in their cribs. Young people were gunned down at a music festival devoted to peace. Another 253 men, women, and children were dragged into captivity, vanishing into the tunnels beneath Gaza. The killers filmed themselves. They livestreamed their atrocities. One phoned home mid-massacre to tell his mother he had murdered ten Jews with his own hands. She praised God and told him she was proud.

Israel’s intelligence apparatus had failed catastrophically, but something deeper had shattered. The promise at the heart of the nation’s founding—that Jews would nev- er again face eradication without the means to defend themselves—suddenly seemed uncertain.

Trey: One might expect such an atrocity to unite the world in condemnation. Yet, you observed a very different reaction, particularly in the West.

Ayaan: Worse still was what came next—not in the Middle East, but in the cities and institutions of the West. Within days, the shock that had briefly united the democratic world began to fade into something far less certain. Governments that had rushed to express solidarity soon began to hedge. The language changed. Suddenly, there was talk of “context,” of “cycles of violence,” of “disproportionate response.” Those who had built entire careers condemning cruelty seemed blind to it when it butchered children and abducted grandmothers from their homes.

The United Nations became a theater of the absurd. In the two years following the massacre, the General Assembly passed resolution after resolution condemning Israel, while Hamas—the orchestrator of mass murder— escaped a single word of censure. The Commission accused Israel, the only democracy in the region, of genocide, reducing a word once reserved for humanity’s darkest crimes to a political weapon. The institution founded to prevent another Holocaust had become an instrument for condemning those who survived it.

American and European universities revealed themselves as incubators of hatred dressed in academic language. At

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Harvard, student groups issued statements holding Israel responsible for the violence inflicted upon it. At Oxford, protesters waved the green flags of Hamas and described the slaughter as liberation. Marches swept through the streets of Western cities. The chant “From the river to the sea” echoed across London, New York, and Paris. Everyone understood its meaning: the erasure of Israel, the elimination of its people. Yet intellectuals insisted it was merely a cry for freedom.

The numbers tell a different story. In the U.S., antisemitic incidents rose by more than three hundred percent in the months after October 7th. In Britain, over two thousand anti-Jewish hate crimes were recorded, shattering every previous record. Synagogues in Germany required armed guards. In France, Jews were assaulted in broad daylight. The veneer of tolerance—thin to begin with— had finally split. Antisemitism had not returned; it had merely shed its disguise.

“October 7th did not invent antisemi- tism. It merely exposed how close to the surface it remained. Jews in Syd- ney, Berlin, and New York discovered that acceptance was conditional. The new antisemitism arrives wearing dif- ferent clothes: the academic’s tweed, the activist’s keffiyeh, the journalist’s byline. But its essence is ancient— the belief that Jewish blood is cheap, that Jewish suffering is secondary, that Jewish survival is still subject to permission.”

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The West stands at a defining crossroads. One direction leads toward moral clarity and renewed conviction. The other leads toward confusion, decline, and eventual irrelevance. You can see the fork in university classrooms where students romanticize jihad as justice. In newsrooms where murder is repackaged as resistance. In parliaments where expedience passes for statesmanship and conviction has grown scarce.

Trey: Many argue this is a regional territorial dispute, but you see it differently. Is Israel fundamentally fighting for Western values?

Ayaan: Let me be clear: This is not Israel’s struggle alone. It belongs to all who believe that civilization is more than stone and statutes, more than comfort or custom. It belongs to those who know that some distinctions are absolute: between the defense of life and its desecration. When Israel defends itself, it upholds the very principles the West once considered sacred. To abandon Israel is to abandon those principles. And in doing so, we abandon ourselves.

We must stand with Israel. Not because it is flawless, but because its survival safeguards the very idea of order and conscience in the world. When Israel stands, it affirms that decency is worth defending, that human life is not expendable. If it falls, the darkness that follows will not stop at her borders.

My hope rests with Israel’s endurance after October 7th, and with Western leaders like President Trump who understand that peace is not born of concession but of strength. Where hope endures, appeasement must end. Israel must never be asked to bargain with those who would see it erased.

“I pray for peace in the Holy Land, but not the kind built on illusion.”

Trey: To understand the difficulty of peace, we must understand the enemy. What does Hamas actually represent?

Ayaan: Hamas is not a normal political movement. It is an Islamist enterprise founded on conquest, not coexistence. Its charter does not speak the language of compromise but of continuity—the continuation of jihad until victory. Western governments plan in two- and four-year cycles. Hamas plans in generations. That mismatch alone should shatter any illusion of parity. You cannot reason a doctrine out of existence. You cannot paper over theology with treaties.

Then there is Iran, the unseen hand that shapes and sustains Hamas’s strength. Tehran is the foundry in which its weapons are made and its worldview is refined. Qatar may bankroll, but Iran builds. When Tehran invests, it does so not for peace but for power. Every missile, every sermon, every militant trained is part of a larger design: to erode Israel’s security and the West’s standing. Any peace that fails to confront that design is already compromised. Any accord that imagines Hamas acts freely of Iran’s will is built on fantasy.

Language itself warns us. The Arabic term often rendered as “peace” shares its root with “submission.” For many believers, peace is achieved not when all

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coexist but when all conform. For the pluralist, peace means mutual respect under shared law. These ideas are not merely different but irreconcilable. To pretend otherwise is to mistake conquest for concord, a delusion the world has paid for many times before. History bears the scars. For centuries, truces have been signed and shattered, pauses declared and betrayed.

From the earliest days of Islamic expansion, treaties were rarely gestures of goodwill. They were tactics of war—moments to regroup, rearm, and return stronger. The pattern endures. Hamas views ceasefires not as conclusions but as intervals—pauses to rebuild, recruit, and recalibrate. Each lull is not peace but preparation; each silence, a gathering storm. The rhythm is old, and to ignore it would be the gravest folly. Perhaps this time will be different, but I remain unconvinced.

Trey: There is immense pressure to rebuild Gaza following a ceasefire—a return to the status quo. Why are you convinced that this traditional diplomatic approach is doomed to fail?

Ayaan: Let’s imagine what follows the ceasefire agreement. After the applause and, cameras flash end, and the aid begins to flow, cities rise again on Western money and borrowed hope. Billions are pledged in the name of reconstruction, yet experience shows how quickly concrete becomes tunnel and cash becomes control. The West has poured fortunes into Gaza before, only to rebuild the very machinery that threatens Israel’s survival. Compassion without scrutiny turns to complicity; generosity without vigilance, to self- destruction.

And still, a deeper question endures: who will teach in the classrooms, preach from the pulpits, and patrol the streets? If the IDF withdraws and no credible force replaces it, the vacuum will not stay empty for long. Hamas feeds on such voids. Its ideology seeps into every space left unguarded—from the lesson plan to the loudspeaker to the legislature.

Hamas signed from a position of weakness, left with little choice but to comply. Yet weakness does not change nature. For Hamas, a treaty is a tactic, not a transformation. The story of the scorpion and the frog is not simple fable but a warning written in human nature.

Read more about TOPICS IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Why I Don’t Trust Hamas—And Neither Should You, Resto- ration (Oct 2025)

The frog believes goodwill can carry evil safely across the river; the scorpion stings because that is what it was born to do. If we let Hamas ride on the back of Western idealism, we should not be surprised when it strikes again before the crossing is complete.

None of this means peace should be dismissed. It means peace must be earned through power, not purchased through wishful thinking. Israel must retain the right— and the readiness—to defend itself. The Arab countries must move beyond empty declarations to enforce real accountability. Iran’s influence must be broken, not merely balanced. And Palestinians must be given an alternative to death as destiny: education, enterprise, and a civic culture that prizes life over martyrdom.

We must also learn to think beyond election cycles. Western democracies measure success in headlines and polls. Islamist movements measure it in centuries. If we seek real peace, we must plan for permanence. Again, I ask: Who will police Gaza? Who will run its courts? Who will decide what its children learn? These are key questions for any lasting settlement, and currently, they remain unresolved.

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PATH FORWARD

The West We Lost—and How We Can Restore It

Trey: Ayaan, thank you for your eloquence and courage, for helping us confront these con- cerns with clarity. You are known as a voice who resists apathy and insists on action. So I ask you: how do we march forward?

Ayaan : Trey, the crisis we face is a fracture in the human soul that spans every age. Whether you are just starting your journey or looking back on a long career, the feeling is the same: a sense that the ground beneath us is thin- ning and the stories that once bound us together have been torn apart. We are all, regardless of our generation, staring into the same void of meaning.

However, I do not blame the young generations for the cultural and moral decline of the West; I think we owe them a specific apology. This is what I told the young

people who came to hear me speak at the FreedomFest in June 2025 in Palm Springs: I apologized to them on behalf of the two older generations—the Boomers and Gen X—on behalf of those who were meant to be their guardians, teachers, and their builders of bridges to a better world. Instead, what we did was hand them a society, and even a civilization, stripped bare.

We told them that meaning was outdated. That faith was superstition. That morality was relative. In doing so, we inherit dust. But we must realize that you cannot defend “dust”—you can only defend a home, and the Western civilization is our only home.

To march forward, we must first understand why we are retreating.

I have come to realize that my 20-year struggle for freedom—and my battle against the forces of authori- tarianism and Islamism—cannot be won by secularism alone. Secularism is a fine-weather creed. It is a set of rules for a society that is already peaceful. But it cannot tell us why we should be free, or what is worth dying for. The Judeo-Christian traditions, by contrast, can help us fill the void of meaning that has been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious cults, such as wokeism, Isla- mism, or postmodernism.

To march forward, we need to reclaim and protect our moral foundations.

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Trey: For many, the future feels uncertain. The surge of antisemitism, the ongoing threats to women and girls, and the shadow cast by Isla- mist extremism across the West suggest that such a pessimistic response is reasonable.

Ayaan: Freedom is not self-sustaining. It survives be- cause ordinary people decide, again and again, that it is worth protecting. I spent the first part of my life living under oppression. I know what it means to be silenced, to have your freedom stolen, to watch a civilization reject the very values that make human flourishing possible.

I also know what it means to be free. And I know that freedom is not inevitable—it must be defended, under- stood, and taught anew to every generation. The West will not be restored by winning news cycles. It will be restored by winning the argument for why the West is worth preserving.

As our supporters and followers engage with our work, I hope they see what I see: a community determined to rebuild what apathy and division have worn down, and to defend the principles that make a free society possible. And we are doing it side by side.

Trey: Your work through AHA Foundation and more recently, through your Substack, Restoring the West above all focuses on “reclaiming the mind,” which is an extremely timely undertaking. We saw during the pandemic, especially, how quickly trust collapsed and conspiracy theories rushed in. How do we reverse that?

Ayaan: When critical thinking dies, conspiracy thrives, and satire becomes prophecy. During COVID, many young people watched their freedoms vanish— lockdowns, mandates, censorship—all during the years that shaped their view of society and their place in it.

Read more about TOPICS IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Why I Am Now a Christian, Unherd (November 2023)

• The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference, London (2023)

• FreedomFest 2025, Palm Springs, CA (June 2025)

Their frustration was real, their mistrust justified. But then came the nonsense about Bill Gates, microchips in vaccines, and secret mind control plots. That’s what happens when intellect surrenders and ignorance marches in.

To rebuild civilization, we must first reclaim the minds of young people. Teach them to think clearly again. To separate what is from what should be, and what can be done about it. That framework once tethered the West to reality; without it, chaos reigns. But ideas alone are not enough. We must also reclaim the institutions that shape thought—schools, media, universities, and churches. They have been captured by those who trade truth for ideology. The task before young people is immense, but it’s not theirs alone. My generation, and the Boomers before it, owe them our help in restoring what we have neglected to preserve for them. A mind that cannot speak cannot think. A nation that cannot debate cannot grow.

Trey: In the end, what would you like to say directly to AHA supporter?

Ayaan: Thank you for standing with us. Your support is not just generosity—it is an act of faith in the future. Together, we can ensure that freedom remains the inheritance of the next generation, not a memory of the past.

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About AHA Foundation

From the very beginning, the mission of AHA Foundation has been rooted in the vision of our founder, Ayaan Hirsi Ali—a steadfast champion of free speech, critical thinking, and women’s rights. She has long believed we have a duty to defend and advance these liberal values , especially on U.S. college campuses where the next generation of leaders is shaped. At AHA, we are working to ensure these principles are not only preserved but strengthened for the future.

Ways to support AHA

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AHA Foundation

5237 River Road, Suite 333

Bethesda, MD 20816

TheAHAFoundation.org

AHA Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to preserving, protecting, and promoting Liberal freedoms and ideals.