Author Ayaan Hirsi Ali has canceled her upcoming speaking tour of Australia and New Zealand, citing security concerns as well as “lapses” by the tour’s organizers.
The Somali-born activist, who is known best for her criticisms of radical Islam, announced this weekend that she would not be doing the “Heroes of Heresy” tour as planned.
Her Facebook page read: “Ayaan Hirsi Ali regrets that, for a number of reasons including security concerns, she must cancel her upcoming appearances in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney and Auckland. … [she] hopes to be able to return to Australia in the not too distant future.”
The group that had hoped to host Ali, Think Inc., also announced the tour cancellation, though their statement focused more on the reported security concerns.
“Think Inc. regrets that, for a number of reasons including security concerns, Ayaan Hirsi Ali must cancel her upcoming appearances,” they said this week in a statement.
Think Inc. claimed it received a steady flow of threats prior to Ali pulling out of the tour.
“[O]ne protester had been contacting insurance companies in an attempt to get the company’s insurance canceled,” the Guardian reported, citing a spokeswoman.
The cancellation comes shortly after a group called “Persons of Interest” circulated a video on Facebook denouncing Ali for supposedly using the language of “white supremacy” and for supporting “the global Islamophobia industry.”
“This is the language of patriarchy and misogyny. This is the language of white supremacy. This is the language used to justify war and genocide,” the video’s narrator said.
Roughly 400 people also signed a petition accusing Ali of promoting “hostility and hatred towards Muslims.”
Ali, who has around-the-clock security protection due to the number of death threats she has received over the years, responded Tuesday to the critics who protested her Australia and New Zealand speaking engagements, saying her detractors are the ones who promote and support oppression.
“These are people who are far more interested in defending Sharia law, that’s Islamic law, and the doctrine of radical Islam, over human rights,” she said in an interview with the Australian, adding later that the “horrible alliance between the far left and the Islamists… using the modern media tool to shut people like me out by smearing us.”
The incident should serve as a dark warning.
“It is a dark day when a woman who fled to the West to escape the Islamist suffocations of Somalia, and precisely so that she might think and speak freely, feels she cannot say certain things in certain places,” said the Independent’s Brendan O’Neill. “It points to the mainstreaming of intolerance, to the adoption by certain people in the West of the illiberalism that makes up the very Islamist outlook that Hirsi Ali and others have sought to escape.”
He concluded, “The signal we should be sending to society is not that some ideas are too dangerous for public life, but that no ideas, even ridicule of Islam, will ever be silenced or punished; that it is unacceptable ever to harm someone simply for what they think and say.
