Reason has published an interview (not yet online) with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the brave scholar and apostate Muslim forced to flee the Netherlands. As Rod Dreher notes, she faults the West for its “craven passivity” in face of a lethal threat. An atheist, she says that if people have to believe in God, better they become Jewish or Catholic than accept “the fire-breathing Allah who inspires jihadism and totalitarianism.”

Asked if she believes Islam can effect positive social change in the same way, for example, that Catholicism helped end communism in Poland, she answers:

Hirsi Ali: Only if Islam is defeated. Because right now, the political side of Islam, the power-hungry expansionist side of Islam, has become superior to the Sufis and the Ismailis and the peace-seeking Muslims.
Reason: Don’t you mean defeating radical Islam?
Hirsi Ali: No. Islam, period. Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful…

Islam, she states, must be resisted “in all forms, and if you don’t do that, then you have to live with the consequence of being crushed.” She said that she believes we are headed to that point “because the West has been in denial for a long time.” And: “There is no moderate Islam. There are Muslims who are passive… but there’s really only one Islam, defined as submission to the will of God.”

Moreover, she says (in Dreher’s words)

“that to save civil liberties, you have to restrict them on those who would take them away from everyone. She even goes so far as to say that all Muslims schools should be closed down in the US. She says that the Western constitutions that allow freedom of religion are products of the Enlightenment, and were written at a time when no one could have conceived of the jihadi threat. She says passing constitutional restrictions on Muslims is going to happen because the problem of Islamic extremism is not going to go away, and in fact is going to get worse….”