Super Values

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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Christopher Orlet, October 19, 2007,  American Spectator (Excerpt)

"Europeans might have learned a valuable lesson after Western Civilization was nearly wrecked on the shoals of national socialism. Namely, nations unwilling to defend liberal democracy against those who would destroy it will not long have a democracy to defend. Sixty-two years later, many of their children and grandchildren remain reluctant to defend Western values if so doing gives the impression of cultural or racial superiority, which in today's society must be one the worst crimes imaginable.

It is Muslims or former Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Irshad Manji and Salman Rushdie who are not hesitant to speak out for Western values. Ms. Manji, author of The Trouble With Islam, recently cautioned Europeans that "if you give up on yourselves people like me are dead." Manji, who lives a precarious existence under countless death threats, notes that whether out of moral cowardice, an inverted snobbishness, or the fear of being regarded as unenlightened or culturally insensitive, many in the West will simply not stand up for liberty. This unwillingness has allowed a coterie of religious fundamentalists and moral relativists to whittle away at the core of Western Civilization. To paraphrase Douglas Murray, this type of death wish can only be explained as a kind of masochism being offered to us by intellectual sadists."