Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the Challenge of Radical Islam

Conversations with Bill Kristol

Government, News, Politics, Society & Culture

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2016

⏱️ 67 minutes

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Summary

A best-selling author and fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the American Enterprise Institute, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a brave, impassioned, and provocative analyst of the problems in Islam, today, including the dangers of what she calls “Islamic totalitarianism.” In this conversation, Hirsi Ali narrates her own experiences as a young woman in Kenya attracted by radical Islam and explains the dangerous allure of Islamism to youth all over the world. She calls on Westerners to assert the superiority of liberal societies to political Islam—and argues that our current obsession with multiculturalism and political correctness has rendered us ill-equipped to do so.

Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal.
0:15.0	Welcome to Conversations.
0:17.0	I'm very pleased today to have as my guest, Ayanne Hersi Ali, author of several best-selling books. The first one I remember reading
0:26.8	and being very influenced by Infidel and then Nomad and now Herratic, I think. You're a fellow
0:32.4	at Harvard's Belfer Center and at the
0:34.6	American Enterprise Institute so thank you for joining me here and thank you for
0:40.0	having him that's great to see you Bill it's good to see you and I'm looking forward to this to this
0:44.4	conversation. Maybe we can begin with, well we're talking, we're speaking a week after the
0:49.6	attack and send Prenardino in early December and one of the two attackers was a Muslim woman and I don't take this in the wrong
0:58.0	way but I thought of you because one of the most interesting parts of your
1:00.6	book is that how you were radicalized I guess we
1:04.0	the way we now say it as a young younger woman really as a teenager and
1:08.7	became for a while a pretty pious and I guess as I say we would say radicalized almost Muslim and so
1:16.1	everyone knows I think people know about your subsequent life and very
1:21.5	courageous and distinguished career but it might be worth
1:25.0	in light of what has just happened.
1:27.0	How does it happen?
1:29.0	I mean, what happened to you and what conclusions did you draw from your own experience?
1:35.0	Well, I think the first, there are two things that I'd like to talk about in depth on that.
1:40.0	One is we should not be politically correct about the fact that there is
1:47.0	something within Islam, an ideology that is appealing people who are born into Islam, not everyone, but a lot of us feel attracted to.
1:58.0	Not everyone, but a lot of us feel attracted to.
	...

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