Nick Gillespie
Reason.com
4/9/2014
After announcing that it would honor author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali with an honorary doctorate, Brandeis University has withdrawn its offer, partly due to statements she made during a 2007 Reason interview.
Born in Somalia and raised in Kenya, Hirsi Ali fled to the Netherlands and became an outspoken critic of the treatment of women under Islamic law. She wrote the screenplay for the 2004 short film “Submission” (watch online). The film’s director, Theo Van Gogh, was stabbed to death on the streets of Amsterdam by an Islamic fanatic and Hirsi Ali ultimately fled Holland for the United States.
Various student and faculty groups at Brandeis protested and a petition posted at Change.org quoted from Rogier van Bakel‘s 2007 Reason interview with Hirsi Ali. The petition, which garnered 6,802 signatures as of this morning, argued that Hirsi Ali engages in “hate speech” and as such is not worthy of an honorary doctorate…
The article continues at Reason.com
Related: Ayaan Hirsi Ali Speaks
…“When Brandeis approached me with the offer of an honorary degree, I accepted partly because of the institution’s distinguished history; it was founded in 1948, in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, as a co-educational, nonsectarian university at a time when many American universities still imposed rigid admission quotas on Jewish students. I assumed that Brandeis intended to honor me for my work as a defender of the rights of women against abuses that are often religious in origin. For over a decade, I have spoken out against such practices as female genital mutilation, so-called ‘honor killings,’ and applications of Sharia Law that justify such forms of domestic abuse as wife beating or child beating. Part of my work has been to question the role of Islam in legitimizing such abhorrent practices…”
Read the whole thing.
Michael Graham, Brandeis just “Firefoxed” a human rights hero.
Kirsten Powers: Brandeis withdraws planned honorary degree for Ayaan Hirsi Ali for having an opinion on her own life experience.
Brandeis Student Blasts University ‘Hypocrisy’ on Ayaan Hirsi Ali at Breitbart.
