Bombthrower?

[posted by Callimachus]

Christopher Hitchens fires back as the "hostile, sneaky reviews that have been dogging the success of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's best seller Infidel" in this piece on Slate.

The Feb. 26 edition of Newsweek takes up where [Timothy] Garton Ash and [Ian] Buruma leave off and says, in an article by Lorraine Ali, that, "It's ironic that this would-be 'infidel' often sounds as single-minded and reactionary as the zealots she's worked so hard to oppose." I would challenge the author to give her definition of irony and also to produce a single statement from Hirsi Ali that would come close to materializing that claim. Accompanying the article is a typically superficial Newsweek Q&A sidebar, which is almost unbelievably headed: "A Bombthrower's Life." The subject of this absurd headline is a woman who has been threatened with horrific violence, by Muslims varying from moderate to extreme, ever since she was a little girl. She has more recently had to see a Dutch friend butchered in the street, been told that she is next, and now has to live with bodyguards in Washington, D.C. She has never used or advocated violence. Yet to whom does Newsweek refer as the "Bombthrower"? It's always the same with these bogus equivalences: They start by pretending loftily to find no difference between aggressor and victim, and they end up by saying that it's the victim of violence who is "really" inciting it.

Curious word-choice, indeed. The most prominent "bombthrower" -- self-described -- working the street these days is that wicked Ann Coulter. Even if you ignore the literal meaning, why would Newsweek want to see Hirsi Ali put in the same category? There are people who step out of the noiseless tenor of their way to become incendiary political celebrities and provocators.

Then there are those who become marked men or women simply by trying to live a normal life, and the experience of being marked turns them, willingly or not, into walking lightning rods. Was Dred Scott a bombthrower?

However, since the media and the professorial class has selectively discovered the "enlightenment fundamentalism" pigeonhole, and is eagerly trying to cram into it every secular critic of Islam (but not, of course, of Christianity), Hitchens wonders whether a change of tactics might be in order:

Perhaps, though, if I said that my principles were a matter of unalterable divine revelation and that I was prepared to use random violence in order to get "respect" for them, I could hope for a more sympathetic audience from some of our intellectuals.

Their Loss, Our Gain

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is moving to America this fall. I say: Welcome!

Amazing that she'd be moving to the repressive U.S., isn't it? Wait until she discovers how terrible the oppression is here for people of conscience!

Fascinating that a woman with her political history is taking a job at the American Enterprise Institute.

That should set a-spinning the heads of those from across the spectrum who struggle with nuance, complex perspective and the concept of holding multiple, and sometimes conflicting, thoughts at the same time.

I say: Welcome to that, too!

Update: Here is an additional twist having to do with Hirsi Ali lying about certain facts on her application for asylum in The Netherlands back in 1992. She is expected to appear at a press conference tomorrow.

Obviously, I can't and don't approve of or condone providing false information on such applications, and I want to see what Hirsi Ali says in a press conference tomorrow. She needs to shoot absolutely straight on this one.

In and of itself, however, this revelation does not cancel out her great courage over the past several years, although--so far as we know the story now, and depending on how it plays out--it certainly may tarnish certain parts of her credibility.

Time will tell.

Update II: Thanks to a commenter for bringing to my attention this article, published on Saturday, that I missed over the weekend.

Hirsi Ali, 36, said Saturday she was puzzled by the uproar since she publicly acknowledged the false refugee application when she stood for parliament in 2002.

"Have they all gone mad?" she said, accusing her rivals of a political vendetta.

"Yes, I did lie to get asylum in Holland. This is public knowledge since at least September 2002," she said in a telephone call from Hamburg, Germany.

Personally, I don't find it puzzling that this is causing a flap at this time, and nor do I think Hirsi Ali does, either.

Do you?

Heroes and Neighbors

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was in my backyard this week, and would to the gods I had been able to get away and see her. She's been making the rounds of East Coast America's establishment, including NPR and PEN, where Ron Chernow confirmed my bad opinion of him, carried over from his puzzlingly popular Alexander Hamilton book, by giving her an introduction that was more an apology than an endorsement.

It would be enormously enjoyable to see her visit places like Atlanta and Birmingham on her American tour, where she'd shake up minds and hearts in a different fashion and no doubt get a warm and heroic reception. But she is going deliberately into the fetid dragon's dens of modern leftism, with a message meant to unsettle sleeping reptiles and prod them into thought.

“My criticism of the West, especially of liberals, is that they do take freedom for granted,” Ms. Ali responded. She noted that Western Europeans born after World War II are unused to conflict. “They have lost the instinct to recognize that there can be such a thing as an enemy or a threat to freedom, and that’s what I’m witnessing in Europe now,” she stated. “[There is] a pacifist ideology that violence should never be used in any circumstances, and so we should talk and talk and talk. Even when your opponent tells you, ‘I don’t want to talk to you, I want to destroy you,’ the reaction is, ‘Please, let’s talk about the fact that you want to destroy me!’ ”

Bull's-eye. But I can write that all day (provided I could be that articulate) and it never would escape the echo chamber. Because my Sioux name is Middle-Aged White American Son of Privilege.

She can say things and they'll have to listen. She's a woman. She's an African. She's educated and articulate. She's a member of the "Liberal Party." She's not a Christian. Though she doesn't present herself as such, she's a victim (she was genitally mutilated, for chrissakes, and her close friend was murdered by religious fundamentalists). If she can feign lesbianism and avoid red meat, she'll have batted for the cycle, liberal style.

I don't mean to imply this is solely a left-side deafness. When I drove past anti-Iraq war and anti-Bush rallies around here, I saw the lean straggle of crusty, bitter old college professor hippies in jeans and T-shirts walking from their expensive cars with the "No Blood for Oil" bumper stickers, and I saw patchouli-reeking drum circles. And I thought, "can't you please make the minimal effort involved in avoiding the exact stereotype? Nobody in this county is going to pay any attention to you, whether you're right or wrong. They're going to dismiss you on sight. They'll never even bother to read your signs."

In my head I wrote a business plan for a service that would hire out protesters that would go against type and thus catch people's eyes. Can you imagine the impact of an anti-Bush rally populated by young buff men in NASCAR T-shirts and stylish businesswomen?

[Judith was there, too, by the way]

* * *

Of course, for her bravery, Hirsi Ali has been rewarded by the Eurocrats by being evicted from her home because the neighbors are afraid to live next to someone who makes waves.

I remember the aftershock week that followed Sept. 11. The attacks cracked through America's shell and some of what oozed out was darkly ugly. My girlfriend at the time lived in Birmingham, and one of her best friends was a pretty Persian girl, identifiably Middle Eastern on sight. Nobody knew what was happening, or what was going to happen next. There were stories of physical attacks on anyone who looked vaguely Islamic; there were fears of how law enforcement would react.

But her neighbors rallied to her, and every time that girl left the house, for an errand, for her job, for anything, someone went with her. Just in case. There were stories like that everywhere. People who had never been inside a mosque turned out to stand guard over one, just in case. Those of us with Middle Eastern neighbors kept an eye on them, always asked how they were doing, if they needed anything. Just in case.

I don't think we're better than the average European. But I do think we're different. How could we not be? We and they are the same people, as recently as 300 years back. We and they segregated ourselves voluntarily. Those who took religion seriously, those who were greedy and ambitious, those who felt the stirring of individual spirit stronger than the urge to stay safe in the herd -- they came here. At tremendous risk, they plowed tinderbox boats over a month of ocean. They survived here, in the bear-haunted forest, by keeping an eye on each other. They're our grandfathers and grandmothers.

Those who were content, or unwilling to take risks, stayed home. Modern European history has many heroes, brave men and women. But they are, on the whole, exceptions. The mass of Europeans kept their heads down and hoed their own rows. When the knock on the door came in the middle of the night at their neighbors' houses in 1942, they closed their eyes tighter and pulled the covers around themselves tighter and pretended to sleep.

That's the difference between Germany and the Netherlands, on the one hand, and America, whose root stock is strong in those lands.

Evicting Moral Courage

"First they came for the Communists but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists but I was not one of them, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews but I was not Jewish so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me."--Martin Niemoeller

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s neighbors have successfully sued to force her removal from their apartment complex.

The EU court that heard the appeal based its decision on Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which guarantees respect for a person's private and family life. The Dutch government may appeal the ruling because of the challenges that such a precedent will pose to its efforts to provide protection to various people under threat. If the ruling stands, Hirsi Ali will have just a few months to relocate.


Somali-born Hirsi Ali is known as a critic of aspects of Islam and she went into hiding in November 2004 when filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered. They had finished work shortly before his murder on Submission, a short film about the ill-treatment of women under Islam.

Hirsi Ali and fellow MP Geert Wilders spent several months in hiding in secret locations due to death threats made against them because of their stance on Islam. "I think this is dreadful, horrible to have to move. I am happy living here and I feel safe," Hirsi Ali said in response to the judgement.

So it comes down to this: Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s history of moral courage in defending and demanding the rights of women, free speech and more is rewarded by the cowardice of her neighbors, validated and encouraged by an EU court. I can understand that not everyone—-indeed most of us—-are not and cannot be a Hirsi Ali. Greatness is reserved for the few, after all. But at a bare minimum, each and every one of us has some sort of ethical responsibility to support the Hirsi Ali’s of the world, and fear—-while understandable—-is no justification for falling down on that job.

When we do, evil and oppression win, if not sooner, then later. And yes: I do think it’s that simple. Some few things in the world are.

Pieter Dorsman of Peaktalk has this to say, among other things:

A few things. Firstly, it should be noted that Hirsi Ali is now booted out of her own house by virtue of the European Treaty for Human Rights which does indeed supersede Dutch law. Many cases are adjudicated by referring to this treaty, but given the subject matter here I would say: Euroskeptics, go knock yourselves out.

Secondly, and this is the one that really bothers me, is that somehow Hirsi Ali’s neighbors self-interest runs so deep that they are prepared to use the court system to throw someone whose life is in danger out of her own house. It goes like this: we’re tolerant, we support free speech and a critical attitude, but if it comes too close to our front porch, sorry, we are no longer interested. On the contrary, self-interest is the deciding motivator. True, Hirsi Ali’s flatmates do have a reasonable point in arguing that the Dutch State has an obligation to ensure that their security measures benefit the entire complex. If the State has dropped the ball in that respect, they should be compelled by the courts to correct this, but to put the burden on Hirsi Ali is a very disturbing precedent. …

The rest of his post is equally powerful, so I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Hat tip.

The neighbors say that their suit was really against the state, whose actions “exposed them to danger,” according to the Expatica article. But they’ve clearly lost sight of the bigger picture, in terms of what the real dangers are and from whence they come.

It doesn’t come from Hirsi Ali’s presence among them. It comes from forces of extremism and oppression. It comes from those who disavow any other belief system other than their own and are prepared to back that narrowness with violence. It comes from philosophies that appear more tolerant of people like that than those who would disavow such attitudes. It comes from appeasement on the part of governments. It comes from a thousand little acts of submission by ordinary people.

It comes from us. From you. From me.

Not long ago, I made the mistake of bringing up the concept of moral courage in a comments section elsewhere. Almost immediately, that idea was dismissed, even pooh-poohed, and I assume it was because the word “moral” is immediately associated with religion and petty "moralism." But moral courage isn’t about that (although, at its best, religion can, and I think should, promote it). Moral courage is an ethical construct, a way of approaching the world and our core responsibilities in it that transcend any particular religion or time or place. It defines us as thinking human beings who can face not just our physical fears (which are predicated on failure) but our ethical ones (which are predicated on success).

In this paper (scroll down), John McCain is quoted as writing in Why Courage Matters: The Way To A Braver Life:

“Physical courage is often needed to overcome our fear of the consequences of failure, [while] moral
courage, more often than not, confronts the fear of the consequences of our success.”

Think about that one for a moment.

(There are many essays and some books on the topic of moral courage, by the way; but for the purposes of this post, I thought it better and more accessible to find 'net essays/papers.)

I've traveled far afield from where I started when I first sat down to write this post, which I'll admit is not my most coherent. But that's what happens sometimes when a piece of news hits you so hard in the gut with a sense of human failure and lack of moral imagination that it's hard to breathe properly. For that reason, I won't apologize for the rambling nature of this bit of writing. Its purpose is not to settle anything, but rather to help me understand that which I'm finding increasingly unfathomable. It's part of an ongoing start, not a conclusion--though I've certainly drawn some of those along the way.

Meanwhile, there is Hirsi Ali, who's definitively further along the path to enlightened moral courage than most of us, a subset of whom reject her very physical presence among them, out of fear and because of their narrow imaginations about the bigger picture. On May 4, she is slated to receive the AJC Moral Courage Award, which I was interested to discover is on the 'net largely in press release form. I'm not seeing where this was covered in major media outlets, but perhaps I'm missing something. Nor does it appear to have been picked up widely in the blogosphere, though I see that Booker Rising caught it.

This coming Tuesday, Hirsi Ali will launch her new book, "A Caged Virgin," in New York. (Remember that it was her first one, "The Son Factory," which first earned her death threats. She was forced into hiding following the murder of Theo Van Gogh, with whom she'd made the film "Submission.") The impending release of the book has garnered some attention, and I hope it will rally more people to her support, if not for the ideas she espouses, then at least her right to express them.

After that? Well, I guess she goes--home.

Wherever that's supposed to be.

Heroic

"Der Spiegel" interviews Somali-born Dutch legislator Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and kindly translates the work into English.

She broke with Islam over its treatment of women, which alone would have earned her a death sentence in strict Islamist circles. She also said of Muhammad, "Measured by our western standards, he is a pervert. A tyrant" (he married a 9-year-old girl). Strike two for her. Islamic organisations and individuals filed charges against her for "discrimination" (Ah, Europe). The prosecutor in the case did not pursue charges, because her criticism "does not contain any conclusions with regard to Muslims, and the worthiness of them as a group is not denied."

Strike three came in 2004, when with Theo van Gogh, she made the film "Submission" about the oppression of women in Islamic cultures. Dutch Muslims found the film disgraceful and blasphemous. Van Gogh was murdered by a radical Islamist on Nov. 2, 2004; the letter pinned to his body mostly was addressed to Hirsi Ali.

The Spiegel interviewers (identified as Conny Neumann and Michaela Schiessl) ask her some odd questions. At one point they actually equate her with the Sept. 11 terrorists:

SPIEGEL: Now you are beginning to sound like a martyr yourself. The September 11 terrorists also died for an idea.

Her answer is remarkably restrained. But I guess, being in Europe and all that, she hears this all the time:

Hirsi Ali: I would like to draw a distinction there. If we all keep still and remain silent, there will be more than just one or two deaths. I prefer to follow the philosopher Karl Popper. He says that freedom is not to be taken for granted. It is vulnerable. One must fight for it and be willing to die for it. The Islamic scene is very aggressive. Those Muslims who wish to kill someone receive a great deal of support from their home countries. There is plenty of wealth, there are plenty of sponsors and there are plenty of desperate people who choose this path. We must defend ourselves if we wish to preserve our Western values. The price we pay is to be threatened.

More weasely appeasement talk follows. This part, at least, will be familiar to Americans. The gist of it is, "by attacking those who attack you, you cause more trouble for yourself and make more enemies":

SPIEGEL: You seem to be resistant against the hostility. In your book, you are unrestrained in your denunciation of Islam as backward, and you call for policies that force immigrants to become integrated. You are also in the process of preparing a second part of the film "Submission." Aren't you concerned about generating even more rage against you?

Her answer is a classic:

Hirsi Ali: What else can they do but issue a death threat? Now that I've already been given the maximum sentence, at least I can act freely.

She also ridicules the Dutch authorities' response to 9-11, which seems to be typical of many European nations, I'm afraid.

They called together the Muslim leaders, gave them money and asked them to keep their young people under control. It was laughable. Then they tried to force the many different groups under one roof. That effort produced two groups, one for liberal and one for orthodox Muslims. Their spokesmen were then expected to enforce all agreements internally. This is simply a naive expectation.

SPIEGEL: Why? After all, Islam is a highly authoritarian religion with strong leaders.

Hirsi Ali: Do you know what young Muslims who are drawn to radical Islam call these "leaders" who negotiate with the government? Charity whores. They consider them to be collaborators, traitors, idiots.

And her observations about the "closed communities" where much of Europe's Muslim minority lives, are chilling:

For her book entitled "Invisible Parents," the journalist Margalith Kleijwegt did some research in the Moroccan section of Amsterdam, where Van Gogh's murderer, Bouyeri, lived. She knocked unsuccessfully on doors six times. The seventh door was opened, and then she learned a great deal about this community. For example, she learned that no parents in that neighborhood knew about the murder, that no parents even knew who Van Gogh was or had heard about the film. They only watch Arab television where they are fed with conspiracy theories about the West. They spend every vacation at home in Morocco. They can't speak or write Dutch, and they don't read newspapers. The lesson of Margalith Kleijwegt's book is that the parents are not equipped to give their children the upbringing necessary in a modern western society. They also have many children and these parallel worlds are growing. We look on without even knowing what happens in them.

When the "spiegel" interviewers protest that her suggestion for insuring better integration of immigrants into Dutch society "sounds like a lot of trouble," she puts them in their place:

Hirsi Ali: So what? What is at issue is defending our values, and that can certainly lead to arguments.

SPIEGEL: Aren't you concerned that tensions would arise in these forced communities?

Hirsi Ali: The other alternative creates even greater tensions. If you allow the ghettos to grow, you'll have clashes between skinheads and Muslim extremists, for example.

Taken aback, or so it seems, the interviewers start pitching her phrases that, I suspect, they find abhorrent, just to see if she will embrace them. Sure enough, she does.

SPIEGEL: Ignore the cultures of the immigrants?

Hirsi Ali: Blindly respecting their cultures is the wrong approach. Here's an example: Many children in Holland's Arab ghettos are taught the teachings of Ibn Abu-Taymiya, one of the founders of pure Islam who preaches the holy war as a way of life. Instead of studying European philosophers, the children are taught to abide by 11th century teachings!

SPIEGEL: Integration and European culture can't be imposed on people.

Hirsi Ali: But we can do something about it. This is where society comes in. Artists, kindergartens, churches, they should all penetrate into the ghettos. It's really grotesque: We have all kinds of NGOs that send people all the way to Africa to convince people to use condoms. But they don't dare touch the problems we have at home. Charity begins at home.

SPIEGEL: Perhaps this is partly because part of democracy means allowing people to think as they wish.

Hirsi Ali: Democracy also includes legitimate intolerance. The intolerable cannot be tolerated. We must declare war on Islamist propaganda. Why should we ignore that women in our midst are being suppressed, beaten, enslaved? Why should we ignore that people preach hatred and vow to destroy us?

And with that, the interview ends. And the interviewers probably hustled away, muttering and shaking their heads, "She speaks just like ... just like ... one of those awful Americans!"