What Ayaan Hirsi Ali Might Have Said

…at Brandeis University, had the school’s…management (I hesitate to say leadership)…not been so cowardly.  Following is excerpted from her op-ed in The Wall Street Journal (RTWT).

So I ask: Is the concept of holy war compatible with our ideal of religious toleration?  Is it blasphemy—punishable by death—to question the applicability of certain seventh-century doctrines to our own era?  Both Christianity and Judaism have had their eras of reform.  I would argue that the time has come for a Muslim Reformation.

Is such an argument inadmissible?  It surely should not be at a university that was founded in the wake of the Holocaust, at a time when many American universities still imposed quotas on Jews.

The motto of Brandeis University is “Truth even unto its innermost parts.”  That is my motto too.  For it is only through truth, unsparing truth, that your generation can hope to do better than mine in the struggle for peace, freedom, and equality of the sexes.

But she couldn’t say that, in that venue.  Other venues will be similarly abject at their peril.  And at ours.

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