“Please, Go Wake Up!”

Measured to our western standards, [the prophet] Mohammed is a perverse man. A tyrant. He is against the freedom of speech... Mohammed is a role model for all Muslim men. Do you find it strange that so many Muslim men are violent? You are frightened when I say such things, but you make a mistake that most native Dutch make: you forget where I'm coming from. I was a Muslim, I know what I'm talking about. (Ayaan Hirsi Ali cited in Arjan Visser 2003 Visser, Arjan (2003) 'Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Politiek schadelijk voor mijn ideaal', Trouw, 25 Jan. [Google Scholar]; our translation) It is one matter to suffer violence and quite another to use that fact to ground a framework in which one's injury authorizes limitless aggression against targets that may or may not be related to the sources of one's own suffering. (Judith Butler 2004 Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Lives: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso. [Google Scholar], p. 94)