WATCH: What Radical Islam And The Woke Have In Common

In the latest PragerU 5-minute video, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and former Dutch politician, shares the similarities betweeen radical Islam and the Woke ideology being promoted in the United States. 

Ali focuses on how both radical Islamists and proponents of “Cancel Culture” are intolerant of other ideas, and how neither recognize the value of free speech, a foundational American value.

In her public life speaking out against radical Islam for twenty years, she has received many death threats from those upset with what she was saying. But she was always comforted in knowing that America was a haven for free speech and debate. 

“It never occurred to me that free speech would come under threat in my newly adopted country,” Ali says.  

“Even when I first encountered what has come to be known as ‘Cancel Culture’, I didn’t fret too much. I was inclined to dismiss the alliance of campus leftists and Islamists as a lunatic fringe,” she says. “They are not the fringe anymore.”

Detailing how the leftist dominance of the media, academia, and the corporate world, Ali explains how intolerance of other viewpoints has been inculcated among many young people. 

Going back to the threat of radical Islam, Ali describes how many in America chose to adopt a materialist explanation for why the U.S. was attacked on 9/11. She asserts that the attackers were instead underpinned by firm ideological convictions, with the end goal of creating a caliphate in mind. 

“Two decades later we see a similar dynamic, only this time it is within America’s borders,” she claims, pointing to the materialist explanations given for the Black Lives Matter movement and protests. While noting that social concerns are real, she says that there is a deeper ideology behind the movement and unrest. 

“Wokism is just another version of Marxism; it scorns religion and the idea of an afterlife. Wokism divides society into myriad identities, whereas Islamists’ division is simpler: believers and unbelievers,” Ali says.

There are many differences between Wokism and Islamism, she says, but there are many similarities too. 

“The adherents of each pursue ideological purity, certain of their own rectitude. Neither Islamists nor the woke will engage in debate; both prefer indoctrination of the submissive and damnation of those who resist,” she says. 

She continues, “Both like burning the American flag. Both take offense at every opportunity and demand not just apologies, but concessions. Islamism inveighs against ‘blasphemy’; Wokism wants to outlaw ‘hate speech.’” 

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