Ayaan Hirsi Ali characterizes the current crisis as a civilizational clash against an institutional "mind virus," citing protests from London to American campuses that chant genocidal slogans. She distinguishes this struggle from simple Israel-Hamas conflict, identifying Hamas, ISIS, and Iran as vectors of an ideology rooted in death where perpetrators claim parental pride in killing children. While feeling the weight of past dismissal by extremists, Ali now urges Western governments to immediately support Israel while investing long-term in rescuing compromised institutions, arguing that only a unifying atrocity like October 7th can finally force society to confront these harsh realities. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, I've been... I look at the situation that we're dealing with now, with people shouting Hamas and agitating for genocide and doing it in the name of religion.
And the last 20 years of my life was dedicated to trying to wake people up in the West to this hydra that's many-headed, that's elusive.
It's a mind virus, as Elon Musk calls it, but it also is an institutional virus.
And I think if you say, you know, is my life a good place to start, you know of my life story that I document in Infidel.
And the reason why I told that story was to talk to This society that I adopted, Western society, Western civilization, about what things look like and feel like and how people live, where I come from, using my life experience and my observations to tell you what you shouldn't throw out and throw away so quickly.
As for ARK, I'm pleased with... I arrived this morning and I saw all of those different organizations that are fighting for our civilization in their own ways, with the limited resources that they have, with different audiences, all come together.
And I hope that that's what ACT achieves, bringing us together, number one.
And number two, setting priorities.
And number three, setting our prides aside.
And number four, and that's probably the most important thing, not to be put in a position where you have to fight for the same dollars or same donors.
If the donor issue could be resolved and people, these little organizations, didn't have to worry about, you know, fundraising, which is where a lot of time is spent, then I think we could become a movement.
I'm always shocked at the banality, at the brazenness of it, but I'm not surprised.
And I got to a point where I was really disappointed.
A few years ago, you've met me at what I would call my depressed stage, where I thought, it's hopeless.
We're not going to win this.
We're not united.
We're distracted by so many different, in my view, trivial things.
And we're not fighting for the big things.
And now I hope with this, you know, horrific war that's underway with what happened on the 7th of October 2023, That we can stand up and say, no, we've got to be together against this thing.
This thing is evil.
It isn't that, you know, those members of Hamas walked in and killed Jews because, you know, They feel that their land is occupied.
They killed babies.
They beheaded babies.
They raped women.
They gouged people's dead eyes.
They humiliated and killed children in front of their parents and the other way around.
They did everything that is inhuman.
And they're doing that to Israel and the Jewish people today.
So is that really what you've always warned about, in a way?
Like, that really, when you came onto the scene, whatever it was, in an American context, maybe 20 years ago or so, that, to me, was what you were forecasting.
Like, pay attention to this, because it could happen.
I had been scarred by my experience. I had been hijacked by right-wing or extreme right-wing
people. People couldn't... I mean, I had been cast aside so many times and I keep coming back and I
keep telling you, look at this.
There are 100,000 people three weekends in a row in London who are shouting, From the river to the sea, Israel shall be free.
They're shouting, yelling, protesting for a genocide of the Jews.
In 1945, we said, never again.
This isn't going to happen ever again.
But it is happening.
The same people with the same ideas are shouting for the genocide of the Jews and the destruction of the State of Israel in Germany, in France, in the Netherlands, in Sweden, and on American campuses.
The proper short-term response is to stand up to evil and say and do what President Biden did and what Prime Minister Sunak and some other European leaders, you know, dragging their feet, what they said, which was we stand squarely behind Israel.
And that is when I say short-term.
That is the immediate response where you stand as a collective and you say we recognize evil and we're going to stand together against it regardless of our differences.
Because this thing, this monster is coming for all of us.
Short term.
A long time.
I think we have to recognize, first of all, that this war is not just a war between Israel and Hamas.
It is a war between these different concepts about humanity, about power, about how we live with one another.
It's a civilizational conflict.
And we have to invest in winning that civilizational conflict by rescuing the minds of our students, by rescuing our institutions, by governing in a way that Draws a red line between what we believe in, who we are, versus what they believe in, and who they are.
I mean, the real challenge is, well, what do you do now when you see... I mean, it must have been when you've been in London for a few days, when you saw that march, I mean... Yeah, these days you don't have to be physically in a place to see because it's all over social media.
But for me to arrive, and I happen to be Jewish, right?
There were people who were marching along with rainbow flags, queers for Palestine.
I know it's supposed, you know, I should be laughing about the same thing.
And I saw, you know, go to Gaza and let's see how that goes.
But that is the seriousness of our ignorance and our naivety and our stupidity and our suicidal impulse.
And this has been going on.
I joined this debate in 2001.
And when America was hit, the Twin Towers came down.
A wing of the Pentagon was hit.
A plane that was going to the White House was downed.
The reaction was, what did we do to deserve this?
That's a suicidal impulse.
We weren't asking, so some of us, I speak for myself, but there were other individuals born and raised with Hizna who made the choice for Western civilization because it's a civilization that invests in human life.
So is the inherent problem, or I guess maybe the asymmetry of this, is that we're taking a radical, let's say a radicalized religion or a version of the religion, And to fight that as a pluralistic society with all sorts of opinions and all sorts of people with all sorts of cultures and foods and everything else.
Yeah.
We're not equal.
The fight is not equal in a sense because of the ideology.
And I think the friendships I have with my Muslim friends are genuine because they know precisely what I'm saying.
It is not a fight against Muslims.
It's a fight against a narrative Yes, that is rooted in parts of Islam, but that has given rise to entities like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria that we sort of half destroyed.
We took out the organization, but the idea is still there.
It's an entity called Hamas.
It is the Islamic Republic of Iran.
It is all of these men, mostly men, organized in mosques and in Islamic schools and in other infrastructure, That are doing, you know, they're doing their best.
They're investing every waking hour in advancing this vision of humanity.
In retrospect now, you mentioned, you know, when you first started getting out of the sink here, the way people would talk about you and, you know, we are far, right?
In some respects, isn't, doesn't this moment seem like it was inevitable in a certain regard, meaning that all of the people who were warning about this were so castigated, were so pushed out of the mainstream that there was no defense against this in a sense.
Professor Sam Huntington, 1989, we were at the Crossroads, and so many different people within the International Relations Scholarship were trying to figure out, what is the world going to look like?
And the one man Professor Huntington, who talks about civilization and culture, that they're going to clash, they're going to compete, that non-Western civilizations like China, like Russia, like Islam, they would somehow downplay their own differences and gang up
on Western civilization.
All of that is unfolding.
Now you look back in that time and you think, how have we treated him and his work?
He passed away sadly.
But how have we treated him?
How have we treated all of those other people who told us the truth?
How do we even treat... I'm now reading journalistic reports of what happened on the 7th and the 43 minutes of video that was...
And some of the journalists, and this is a guy I admire him so much.
And he's describing that scene where a man kills children, babies, and he calls on WhatsApp using one of the victim's phones, calls his father and mother to say, you should be proud of me.
Look, I killed 10 Jews and this is what I did to them.
And Graham Wood has written this in the Atlantic and what fascinated me about it is Graham Wood is trying to guess the reaction of the parents.
This is a kid who is saying, I think you will be proud of me.
And their reaction was an expression that they're proud of him.
The banality of evil.
Remember Hannah Arendt?
It can be sometimes that banal, but we have this impulse in Western civilization.
Today, for those of us who are going through all of this in the last 20 years, what I have seen is this stubbornness, this bloody mindedness to deny and live in denial.
So I want to ask you something on a more personal side of all this, which is after everything you've been through, and I'm sure everyone watching this knows your story, and they can watch our, well, they should read your book, and they should watch our original interviews and everything.
I do sense a little bit of a renewed purpose, maybe, from last time I saw you, because we saw each other a couple years ago, and you were, as you said, you were kind of Well, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you were sort of depressed about everything.
Things are seemingly worse at the moment, but I sense you personally, maybe you're a little more, uh, well back in the fight.