Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Equivalencism

I have been a complete supporter of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but a recent bit of information I came across is somewhat disturbing:

According to a recent essay in Taki’s Magazine by “Hotspur”—

[Hirsi Ali] advised the Belgian authorities in February 2006 to outlaw the VB. She opined that [“]the party hardly differs from the Hofstad group [a Jihadist terror network in the Netherlands, involved in the assassination of Theo van Gogh]. Though the VB members have not committed any violent crimes yet, they are just postponing them and waiting until they have an absolute majority. On many issues they have exactly the same opinions as the Muslim extremists: on the position of women, on the suppression of gays, on abortion. This way of thinking will lead straight to genocide.[”]

“Hotspur” does not provide a link. Spending minimal effort, I found the quote on the Brussels Journal website, where in an article they simply cite “In an interview with the Antwerp newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen (1 February)” but also provide no link. It could be that the quote does not exist in English, only in Dutch.

At any rate, if Hirsi Ali indeed said this, it disturbs me. While I support gay rights, women's rights, and freedom of choice on abortion, what is disturbing about Hirsi Ali’s quote is the equivalency she draws between the Vlaams Belang and a known jihadist cell that planned and executed the slaughter of Theo Van Gogh and has had plans for much worse atrocities, including the death and destruction of Holland and America (not to mention also the murder of Ayaan Hirsi Ali herself!).

Hirsi Ali’s equivalencism, if accurately reported, is an outrageous assertion for reasons so easily adduced, it would be an insult to anyone of minimal intelligence to even spell them out—even if one has bought into the slander of Vlaams Belang, in which case insult has been added to injury and lazy irresponsibility has subverted intelligence; for cogent argumentation in defense of Vlaams Belang is available out there, to which I have previously provided links (and see also these two essays).

Unfortunately, “Hotspur” himself succumbs to a similarly preposterous equivalencism when he writes of “liberals” such as Hirsi Ali, Charles Johnson, Bruce Bawer, and other more generalized people in the West who have been instrumental in trying to penalize free speech with respect to criticism not only of Islam, but also of putatively decadent liberal values such as homosexuality:

The other “cultural jihadists,” however, are determined to impose their social and sexual agenda on us. They, too, intimidate and terrorize. America has not been immune to this.

His only evidence for the attempts of “liberals” to “terrorize” is one instance of fascistic intimidation of a speaker against homosexuality at a college in Massachusetts. Of course, such intimidation is reprehensible, as are the attempts to penalize free speech whenever free speech dares to criticize or even condemn liberal values. However, the comparison of these tendencies and activities with the actual fascism and terrorism which Muslims perpetrate, and threaten to perpetrate, around the world is just as outrageous and ludicrous as Hirsi Ali’s equivalencism. Indeed, such equivalencism goes beyond outrageous and ludicrous: it enables the ongoing myopia about the paramount menace of our time—Islam—and by doing so, enables that menace.