The fact that Brandeis has bowed to pressure and
canceled its plans to award Hirsi Ali an honorary degree at commencement should not be a surprise. It is merely a continuation of a decades-long trend in academia towards placating the left, and in favor of cowardice.
It's an especially interesting incident, though, because it highlights the fact that, in a choice between protecting women's rights and protecting Islam---two causes beloved of the left---the latter apparently trumps the former in importance.
Ali is a champion of women's rights, and that's one of the reasons she is so against Islam: because of its attitude towards women. She should know;
she was brought up as a devout Muslim, born in Somalia and raised in Kenya, and subjected to genital mutilation surgery at the age of 5. This is no casual and uninformed critic of Islam:
By the time she reached her teens, Saudi-funded religious education was becoming more influential among Muslims in other countries, and a charismatic religious teacher who had been trained under this aegis joined Hirsi Ali's school. She inspired the teenaged Ayaan, as well as some fellow students, to adopt the more rigorous Saudi Arabian interpretations of Islam, as opposed to the more relaxed versions then current in Somalia and Kenya. Hirsi Ali had been impressed by the Qur'an before she could even read, and had lived "by the Book, for the Book" throughout her childhood.
She sympathised with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and wore a hijab together with her school uniform, which was unusual at the time but gradually became more common. She agreed with the fatwa against British writer Salman Rushdie that was declared in reaction to the publication of his controversial novel The Satanic Verses.
There is no question whatsoever that Ali is a brave person.
