Not funny: Jon Stewart interviews Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Jon Stewart misses her point.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali just published a new book which calls for reforms in Islam and she’s been making media appearances to promote it. This week she appeared on the Daily Show and came off as intelligent and well informed despite Jon Stewart’s repeated disrespectful attempts to take her off topic.
As you’ll see if you watch the video below, it’s as if Hirsi Ali was being interviewed by a member of the Obama administration. I kept waiting for Stewart to bring up the Crusades.
This is a woman who is risking her life by speaking out against Islam’s treatment of women, a subject that a liberal like Stewart should care about and yet his every response was: yes, but Christianity.
If you think I’m exaggerating, just watch:
I wasn’t the only one who noticed Stewart’s bizarre approach to the interview.
Peter Malcolm of Truth Revolt:
Hirsi Ali Confronts Jon Stewart About Islam
The interview began with Stewart mocking the title, asking, “Why does Islam need a reformation …now?”
Hirsi Ali replied, “Because too many people are dying in the name of Islam, too many women live under oppression, too many Jews are being demonized, too many gays are being killed in the name of Islam, too many Christians are being killed in the name of Islam. I think it really has … the answer is to have the reformation now.”
Stewart, unsatisfied with the world-wide killing of non-Muslims as a reason to reform Islam, retorted, “Aren’t we having the reformation now?” asserting that Martin Luther wanted a “purer form of Christianity.”
Hirsi Ali pointed out that there are a growing number of people wanting to reform Islam, and said bluntly to Stewart, “I hope you stand with them.”
Stewart, cornered, struck back by asserting, “I think people single out Islam as though there is something inherently wrong with it that wasn’t wrong with other religions … If Christianity went through almost the exact same process … I get the sense that you think Islam is different from other religions.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali deserves better. Frankly, she deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.
Rich Lowry Knows what I’m talking about:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Hero for Our Time
Ayaan Hirsi Ali should be the perfect feminist hero. Viewed from a certain level of abstraction, it is hard to imagine one person who fits the role on so many levels: She’s an escapee — literally — from an abusive patriarchy. She’s an African immigrant who made her own way in a Western country, the Netherlands, starting from nothing. She’s a fierce advocate for women’s rights. She’s a target for deadly violence by angry men who want to shut her up. She left her religion and became a scourge of its repressive practices.
All this — her searing personal experience, her Third World background, her secularism — would seem fit to make her a rock star of contemporary feminism. Except for the blemish on her record: Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a dissident from the wrong religion.
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
It’s like he had one…and only one…question on his note card. Singular.
And no matter how many times she responded, he was going back to his blinkered meme.
The evidence of the last five or six decades is that there IS a Muslim Reformation in process, AND that it’s retrograde.
Brilliant … beautiful … FEARLESS!
May our common God and everyone else around her keep her safe.
Stewart is so unwatchable that it isn’t funny. He keeps referring to Christianity over and over as if it were still in the 11th century. Hello, Stewart, it is now the 21st century and things have changed. We cannot allow islam to take another 100 years to figure this out. We will be dead by then. Also as most people now know, islam is not a religion. It has a thin veneer of religion but the main part of it is total control of it’s believers lives. I had to look at the bottom of my shoes after watching this to make sure that none of Stewart was on them.
“…He keeps referring to Christianity over and over as if it were still in the 11th century.
I’m getting tired of hearing these Islamist apologist cite the 11th century.
Christians and secularists alike had better commit this year to memory if they mean to effectively own clowns like Stewart!
628 AD and 634 AD. Because that was the year when Mohammed sent an envoy to the Christian Byzantine Emperor Heraclius demanding his conversion or face the sword. Heraclius dismissed the envoy, half amused that a desert nobody and religion he never heard of would presume to threaten a superpower.
What followed was one thousand years of 9/11 style invasions of Christendom beginning with the destruction and occupation of Christian Syria in 634 AD leading up to the destruction of Constantinople in 1453.
Christian Europe did not start this fight. Islam did. That’s a fact.
Thank you for this.
Jon Stewart is a clueless smart ass (and I’ll generalize based on my experience) like most angry atheists. He’s trying to create a moral equivalency between some miniscule minority of so-called Christians who acted badly millennia ago and the current horde of beheading, female mutilating, misogynistic, murderous, genocidal Islamic Republic of Terrorists & Assoc. The same ones who shout “death to America” and built 19,000 centrifuges in order to enrich weapons grade Uranium, in order to wipe out Israel and all infidels including Stewart and his audience.
Purity is on the mind of Jon Stewart? And, Martin Luther vs. Islam’s Supreme Leader of World Fatwa/Terrorism and the effects of purifying religion? He’s throwing crap at a wall hoping it will stick. We don’t need a flush of this secularist’s putrid hubris flooding our homes.
This same kind of moral relativism reasoning puts people like Stewart and those who worship his shtick onto the ‘higher’ moral ground of… sand towers. This epicurean narcissistic ‘reasoning’ is a way ‘out’ of having to respond to objective absolute theistic authority and morality.
Stewart will not have the last laugh. In fact, God isn’t laughing about any of this.
Hirsi Ali’s responses were spot on, intelligent as opposed to the make-you-laugh-for-money-and-fame Comedy Central clown. She spoke truth to nihilistic and temporary “ha, ha”.
YOU GO JENNIFER!!!!!!
Re: “Jon Stewart is a(n) … ass ……”
Official Symbol of the Democrat Party.
He’s a stage monkey and this is the best script his staff of writers could come up with.
Dance Monkey! Dance!
That would explain a lot. I always wondered why there was that organ grinder at the stage side.
Moral equivalence is the escape hatch (if the race card doesn’t apply) for these Leftist lightweights and punks.
Christopher Hitchens once recalled an event at which Hirsi-Ali was speaking. He overheard some leftists huddled together and talking about the “problem” Hirsi Ali represented to them. You see, she was black, a woman, an atheist — how were they going to destroy her? A real dilemma. But they always find a way.
Jon Stewart singing…”Oh if I only had a brain…”
Snark Snark for his humor impaired viewers.
“I guess my point is …. I’m just a (not so) funny man.”
FWIW Jon Stewart legally changed his name to Jon Stewart. No more Liebowitz for him. No sir. But I suspect he’s more or less a Muslim-ish convert. Probably some ‘liberal’ imam helped and while he’s not observant he’s certainly sympathetic. Considering he spends most of his down time in the Arab world, in Egypt and Jordan, he’ll probably tell you it’s simply expedient to claim the Muslim faith when moving around that part of the world.
Jon Stewart’s question, comparing the Christian Reformation to calls for a Muslim reformation, was not unreasonable: The Christian Reformation was indeed a call for a return to Christianity’s roots and an abandoning of the layers of bureaucracy and corruption that had grown upon it. The problem is that Christianity’s roots are gentle and peaceful whereas Islam’s are intolerant and violent. Jesus told his followers to preach, bringing the Good News to everyone in the world. Mohammed told his followers to make war, bringing fire and sword to the entire world.
If you had seen all the castles that still dot the landscape in West Germany and France, and all the city walls that used to surround every hamlet, you’d think differently about the roots of Christianity. Do you realize there is only ONE walled city on this continent (Quebec)? Part of the American success has to do with the lack of a need to spend substantial amounts of resources building walls to accommodate the raiding season.
Some a$$holes in our history came up with the notion of the “divine right of Kings” and some other pseudo-religious nonsense as an excuse for waging war against other kings and confiscating Church property, as well as the property of disfavored minorities, such as Jews.
The “divine right of kings” was identified as corrupt garbage, and by the time our Founding Fathers came on the scene, it was recognized that “God wants is” was a lousy basis for any kind of public policy. Hence our notion of “Separation of Church and State,” which in some ways has served us very well.
What that doctrine gave us was true freedom of religion, as described as one of the ideals of Islam.
Islam also embraces the two basic rules that are the roots of Christianity, and real Muslim Scholars recognize that, when Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount, he was quoting the Torah. http://www.acommonword.com
Islam has the same roots as Judaism and Christianity.
Islam also has a heresy, the Islamist perversion. This is a contemporary phenomenon, and is a direct result of the Hamas Covenant, which was executed in 1988 and included terms to engage in an advertising campaign to convince Muslims that they have an individual, religious duty to kill every living Jew.
That advertising campaign continues to be active, and it includes 1) teachings in Saudi textbooks that non-Muslims are subhuman, 2) fraudulent claims by the Hamas that the Jews have committed atrocities, sometimes including deliberate murders by Hamas of their own people for this purpose, and 3) an amazing pack of lies and false history about Islam, Israel, and the United States, among others.
Confront and disperse that advertising campaign, and we will have a different, and better, world.
I agree with you in part, but differ on important details. Divine right of Kings predate Christianity (see ancient Egypt). Historically kings and other rulers used religion to control the masses and as an excuse for their behavior. This is why the comparison Stewart makes between the Christian reformation and Islam is on extremely shaky historical grounds. The wars which broke out during the Reformation were often (not always) when ascension to a throne was in conflict and the conflicting parties used their religion to fortify their position. The kings of those days did not want to have to answer to the Pope and so embraced the reformation. This was more a walk away from “Orthodox” Christianity than an embrace of it. I think that these early “Christian” wars would have occurred regardless due to the fact that Kings and lines of succession were often the cause of wars in that day. I can’t say the same for the current “reformation” of Islam. Moderate Islam is already in power and it is the stricter faction that seeks power. I see the reformation as wars with religion as an excuse to move away from a centralized power (Pope) and Islam in which religion is a core motivating factor that is fighting for a more centralized power and moving away from de-centralization.
I’m afraid I have to add to the disagreement.
Christianity, as described in the New Testament, is a religion of sacrificial love.
Islam, as described in the Koran, is a religion of legalism and fear.
A devout Muslim can honestly say he loves Allah. He cannot honestly say Allah loves him – it depends on his works.
Search the Koran for the word “love”. It’s always in a conditional context.
Islam does not have the equivalent of this statement: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
Radical Islam is legalism and fear taken to extremes, but is not incompatible with the nature of Islam as expressed in the Koran.
Oops. Forgot one.
“Separation of church and state” is not in the constitution. It couldn’t be.
Most of our laws are based on Biblical principals. Would you like to eliminate the law against murder because “God said it”?
I think you mean well, but this is profoundly sloppy thinking based on a constant deluge of atheist propaganda.
Read the Quran. Muslims do indeed have a duty to kill all the Jews. The End Times (Muslim paradise) will not occur until that happens. Furthermore, Issa (Jesus) will kill all the Christians who don’t convert to Islam. So says the Quran. The notion that Hamas are heretics or pervert Islam is bullshit. Kill everybody who won’t convert is mainstream Islamic orthodoxy. It’s not heresy at all. It’s what Muhammad did and ordered, and everything he did is by definition what Muslims must do and approve of. So says the Quran. The idea that non-Muslims are subhuman is another Quranic imperative. It states that Christians are the descendants of apes and Jews the descendants of pigs.
The “roots of Christianity” go back long before those medieval castles. The warrior ideology came in with the conversion of the Germanic tribes. The chronicles of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages show Christian clerics, nurtured on an emphatically pacifist doctrine, trying to spread charity and compassion in a turbulent world — the same charity and compassion that drew so many people to Christianity voluntarily in its earliest centuries.
The roots of Islam are radically different. This is abundantly clear from a simple comparison of Jesus and Mohammed, who are polar opposites in their ethics and behavior.
It matters not whether we have accurate representations of actual people, or rather images of how the two religions wanted their founders and exemplars to be seen. In either case, we have diametrically opposed models of human behavior, and those models are reflected in the radically different ways that the two religions grew in their early phases: Christianity by peaceful persuasion; Islam by brutal and relentless conquests that swallowed up huge masses of territory within a century.
Mohammed superficially adopted some Jewish and Christian doctrines in the hope of appealing to Jews and Christians in the region, but when that didn’t work he went on the offensive. Orthodox Islam not only approves but commands the aggressive conquest of the whole world. There is no such doctrine of conquest in Christianity.
Orthodox Islam also commands the death penalty for apostates and blasphemers. Christianity does not.
The separation of church and state were written into the heart of Christianity when it developed apart from, and in tension with, the secular powers. Even during the many centuries of official Christianity supported (and to some degree enforced) by secular powers, there were always two separate structures of authority, and each could restrain the other.
Islam is very different: religious authority and secular power(i.e. force) were joined in one figure, and orthodox Islam does not acknowledge the legitimacy of any non-Islamic government.
There are reasons why the societies that developed out of centuries of Christianity are so different from those that have been pickled in Islam.
The notion that Islam “has the same roots” as Christianity and Judaism, and therefore is fundamentally the same, is complete and utter poppycock, and transparent nonsense. It is also a notion that the vast majority of Muslims would probably find offensive.
>> … Do you realize there is only ONE walled city on this continent (Quebec)? …
Well, your greater point is appreciated, but … none in Mexico, ¿seguro?
If you support the separation of church and state, gay rights, or female equality but don’t confront radical Islam you are doing it wrong.
The best conservative arguments on the matter are the liberal issues, along with protecting Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and all manner of smaller religious minorities who are the more frequent victims of Islam. Critics like Ayaan, Bill Maher, and Pat Condell are really the only hope of bringing polite liberal citizens into the ranks of counter-jihad.
Unfortunately by the rules of Islam the peaceful Muslims will need to kill very large numbers of the radical Muslims to have the required reform. Nothing short of an actual religious war will resolve the conflict.
May God have mercy on their souls
For those interested in the religious arguments most important to countering jihad Google-
1) Acts17 Apologetics
2) Robert Spencer
Both are thoroughly reliable on the topic.
The first 3 centuries of Christianity saw a complete separation of the church and the state. There is nothing in its teachings to suggest that it should be otherwise. Abuses by Christian groups occurred when the separation of church and state broke down. That is rarely the case today. There is your Christian “reformation”, Jon.
Islam was based on the concept of identification of church and state as one. The first few centuries of Islam was based on conquering armies to spread the religion. In fact, Muslim armies attacked central France a mere 100 years after the death of Mudhammad. There can be nothing but trouble as long as mainstream Islam insists that it must control the state. There in lies the need for Islamic “reformation”, Jon.
Your comments are factual. Apparently someone here doesn’t like facts.
Jon Stewart’s clown nose was on for the interview. Remember, if he does anything not newsy, it means he just a comedian, not a news guy. The clown nose only comes off after the fact, if he can bask in some accidental newsy-ness.
Jon Stewart’s clown nose was on for the interview. Remember, if he does anything not newsy, it means he just a comedian, not a news guy.
It’s worse than that. You could see that Ayaan had some serious issues in that book, and that his ‘debating’ style was to hijack the discussion with a tu quoque attack on Christianity’s behavior after Luther’s theses, several hundred years ago. And he wouldn’t let go – every time Ayaan had something to say, he’d blast her with another interruption with that same old irrelevant theme.
While Ayaan is clearly asking for Islamic reformation NOW, with current evidence that it’s badly needed to curtail mass mortality, Stewart is stuck with a freshman debating tactic learned from some fraternity brother – and he remains stuck on stupid plus buffoonery.
Stewart is a jerk. The only thing that is funnier than him is drying paint ~
I’ld rather watch paint drying – it’s wittier and more intellegent!
Ali is fighting the REAL war on women. And at considerable risk to her life. Not the bogus war pushed by the left that wants government subsidies for everything going on between a woman’s legs.
Hirsi Ali pointed out that there are a growing number of people wanting to reform Islam, and said bluntly to Stewart, “I hope you stand with them.”
Nailed him and the liberal hypocrisy of Islamist support.
These two groups: liberals and Islam couldn’t be more opposed in what they fundamentally agree upon. They are united in only one cause: Anti-American sentiment. It is a very telling observation to see the left behave so oddly towards Muslims. Feminists fall silent in lock-step. Gays fall silent in lock-step. Liberal Jews even muffle their words.
RE: “These two groups: liberals and Islam couldn’t be more opposed in what they fundamentally agree upon. They are united in only one cause: Anti-American sentiment. It is a very telling observation to see the left behave so oddly towards Muslims. Feminists fall silent in lock-step. Gays fall silent in lock-step. Liberal Jews even muffle their words.”
And the Muslim terrorists will fall in lock-step, beheading those self-deluded, hypocrite Leftist Liberals.
Here is a much more professional interview that was made the same day at the one with Jon Stewart:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7v0qCtq1mY
I have never been a fan of Fox News but Megyn Kelly stands head and shoulders above the rest of the cable and network talking heads.
Stewart has “white privilege” to question the Christian reformation today because of Martin Luther. Hirsi Ali is advocating for similar reformations in Islam, so Arab citizens can enjoy the same ignorant, snarky freedoms he enjoys in the video.
He is so uneducated on this subject, it is laughable.
John maybe should have read a book or two or a chapter or even a wiki article on the reformation because he doesn’t seem to know anything about it. News flash! It wasn’t solely about making Christianity ‘pure’. Or you know, it wasn’t about that at all. Good grief that was bad
Stewart displays his ignorance of history and of Islam. Ali’s effort is doomed to failure, because Islam includes deification of Mohammed and his terror tactics.