COMMENTARY
by Nathaniel Zelinsky
November 1, 2014

On the evening of September 15, the writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali addressed a crowd of more than three hundred at Yale University. It was notable for the event to have occurred at all. In the past decade the Somali-born Hirsi Ali has established herself as an unapologetic critic of radical Islam and the premier voice for the rights of women in Muslim countries. The week prior to her Yale address, a group of Yale’s Muslim students who took offense at Hirsi Ali’s perspective had demanded that her host—the university’s William F. Buckley, Jr. Program—rescind her invitation, limit the scope of her talk, or include a pro-Islamic scholar at the podium to correct her views. When the demand was rebuffed, the Muslim Students Association (MSA) went to work and issued a public petition denouncing Hirsi Ali as a purveyor of “hate speech,” “unprotected libel,” and “slander.” That, too, did not succeed in keeping Hirsi Ali away.

Not letting her small triumph go to waste, Hirsi Ali closed her lecture with a question directed toward the MSA: “Why do you find energy, resources, time, and solidarity to silence the reformers and dissidents of Islam?” The answer: because such efforts are usually successful.

Hirsi Ali knows this only too well. She has long been the primary target of a coordinated and sustained national Muslim-based campaign to hush the critics of radical Islam. In April, Brandeis University, under pressure from the school’s MSA and a pseudo-civil-rights organization called the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), revoked its decision to award her an honorary degree……

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