Advice From Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Last night, I read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's recent essay in Newsweek not once but twice. What she has written bears consideration.

If you haven't read this essay, you must do so!

Excerpt to give you a taste of what the woman is saying:

Once again the streets of the Arab world are burning with false outrage. But we must hold our heads up high. Ayaan Hirsi Ali on how she survived Muslim rage—and how we can end it.

[...]

Utopian ideologies have a short lifespan. Some are bloodier than others. As long as Islamists were able to market their philosophy as the only alternative to dictatorship and foreign meddling, they were attractive to an oppressed polity. But with their election to office they will be subjected to the test of government. It is clear, as we saw in Iran in 2009 and elsewhere, that if the philosophy of the Islamists is fully and forcefully implemented, those who elected them will end up disillusioned. The governments will begin to fail as soon as they set about implementing their philosophy: strip women of their rights; murder homosexuals; constrain the freedoms of conscience and religion of non-Muslims; hunt down dissidents; persecute religious minorities; pick fights with foreign powers, even powers, such as the U.S., that offered them friendship. The Islamists will curtail the freedoms of those who elected them and fail to improve their economic conditions.

After the disillusion and bitterness will come a painful lesson: that it is foolish to derive laws for human affairs from gods and prophets. Just like the Iranian people have begun to, the Egyptians, Tunisians, Libyans, and perhaps Syrians and others will come to this realization. In one or two or three decades we will see the masses in these countries take to the streets—and perhaps call for American help—to liberate them from the governments they elected. This process will be faster in some places than others, but in all of them it will be bloody and painful. If we take the long view, America and other Western countries can help make this happen in the same way we helped bring about the demise of the former Soviet Union.

We must be patient. America needs to empower those individuals and groups who are already disenchanted with political Islam by helping find and develop an alternative. At the heart of that alternative are the ideals of the rule of law and freedom of thought, worship, and expression. For these values there can and should be no apologies, no groveling, no hesitation....

Read it all HERE.

Appeasement on the part of the West will only serve to prolong the power of the Muslim Brotherhood and like groups.  The same goes for foreign aid to the regimes of those same groups.  Let them fail miserably on their own, and the collapse will come a lot sooner that that of the USSR.