***update: we’ve got audio of Ali’s Harvard remarks at Hot Air…Charles Johnson gets a shout from Ali plus a first-hand account…Miss Kelly was also in attendance***

Reader Michael S. writes in:

I just went to Hirshi Ali’s presentation at the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard. It was held in the form of an interview with a member of the KSG faculty followed by questions and answers. I kept no notes, so this is from memory.

The interview focused on the personal, biographical aspects of Hirsi Ali’s life, deferring political issues to the Q&A and to another panel to be held tonight. It was interesting, especially in her description of the day that van Gogh was murdered. But I have little else to say about it.

The Q&A was marked by the number of Muslim students who objected to Hirsi Ali’s criticism of Islam. One student was strident, claiming that as a Muslim from Pakistan she knew nothing about the kind of Sharia Law, strict upbringing that Hirsi Ali claims to have had. One was fairly polite, questioning why any Muslims
should now listen to Hirsi Ali, who is now an avowed atheist, rather than to those who still follow Islam. One was insistent, asking why Hirsi Ali did not criticize all violence against women (she did and referred to articles she had written about numerous cultures and the origins of repression of women in each of them).
But the questioner persisted. Why didn’t she criticize Christianity and its sacred texts in the context of violence against women in America ? Why only Islam in that context ?

How can I capture what it felt like ? Hirsi Ali said things that you or I would take as the purest of common sense. For example, her film contains a scene of a battered woman, praying to God, tattooed across her broken body with the specific verses in the Koran that advocate that brutal kind of treatment by a man for his wife. It’s wrong for a man to do that to his wife. It calls for the genius of Harvard graduate students of Political Science to somehow equivocate around that simple fact.

One telling moment came when an early questioner asked about the overall issue of assimilation versus cultural isolation in Europe. Hirsi Ali
answered that she did not think in terms of assimilation and isolation but
rather in terms of individualism and collectivism. The collectivist says
that those people in this neighborhood all believe that a woman who is bad
should be beaten by her husband. And those people are a valid collective.
Hirsi Ali contends that the collective ethos of any group is fine, but it ends
when individual rights are violated. And she said in as many words that
she is firmly in the camp of the indivualists.

Near the end, somewhat exasperated, it seems, by the wave of denial that Harvard’s Muslim community had brought to the forum, she commented offhandedly to her interviewer “what are they learning here ?” or something close to that.

It was depressing, Michelle. The Muslim elite of the elite (or a vocal part thereof) could not accept the simple empiricism of the case in war, the case in terror or the case in domestic brutality against Islam. They preferred, on the whole, to talk about something else.

But she was brilliant.

Previous today:

Women warriors

More:

Sugiero has audio of a Swedish interview with Ali
Judith Kesher sends audio and photos of Ali at the PEN Festival

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