That blithering idiot Glenn Beck interviewed Ayaan Hirsi Ali (transcripts are here). In contrast to the slobbering incoherence of her host —my father has recently ventured that ours is The Age of the Idiot —Hirsi Ali was a model of lucidity. It helps that she looks like a model too. However, when asked by the hyperbolic host whether anyone in the USA was warning of the dangers of “radical Islam” —a redundancy Beck adheres to religiously —Hirsi Ali took full credit for being The Only One.
How did she do so? I repeat, when Beck asked her if anyone in the US was warning of “radical Islam,” she conceded only that we were slightly more aware of the dangers than were the Europeans, but not much.
Now that the transcripts are up, I can excerpt from the exchange:
BECK: Have you met with anyone here in the United States that you thinks — that you think really gets it and is willing to stand up next to you? Is there — is there anybody here? Is there a woman’s organization? Is there a Muslim organization that says, we’re with you?
ALI: I’ve met several individuals, several organizations and all very concerned. To be honest, I think vigilance in the United States seems to me to be today better than the one in Europe. What I haven’t seen in the United States is people who are aware of the problem here today in the U.S. Most Islam, as a foreign policy (ph), jihad in this country.
She clearly failed to acknowledge some heroic scholars-cum-warriors I’m proud to call friends: Robert Spencer and Andrew Bostom. (Spencer has even been addressed by an al Qaida emissary in a propaganda broadcast.) Nor was there any mention of Bat Ye’or, who was the first to expose the Islamization of Europe, and whose terminology we all use. Hirsi Ali cannot claim ignorance of another European woman on whose shoulders she stands.
Nor did Hirsi Ali offer a nod to Daniel Pipes’ efforts (he departs from the rest, and myself, in holding to a belief in a moderate Islam). The host is too dim to know much about anything, so he just effused and gawked and demonstrated that the force of his intellect matches his social etiquette: Beck told his guest that she was “not going to die of natural causes.”
Updated: I clean forgot Paul Sperry. He has done his share of courageous reporting and has received little TV time. Read my review of his Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington.
My sources also confirm that Hirsi Ali knows a number of the aforementioned individuals. That they were not credited for their indefatigable efforts was no innocent mistake. In any case, intellectual dishonestly is inexcusable and ought to be exposed.