Welcome Home, Ayaan
Saturday, September 30th, 2006 9:36 am by NealI don’t know how I missed this, but a big thanks to Cyclops for bringing it to my attention.
Welcome Home, Ayaan Hirsi Ali! America is where you’ve always belonged. We’re always looking for a few, brave women.
George Will has dinner with Ayaan Hirsi Ali:
And an exile and an immigrant. Born 36 years ago in Somalia, Hirsi Ali has lived in Ethiopia, Kenya, Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands, where she settled in 1992 after she deplaned in Frankfurt, supposedly en route to Canada for a marriage, arranged by her father, to a cousin. She makes her own arrangements.
She quickly became a Dutch citizen, a member of parliament, and an astringent critic, from personal experience, of the condition of women under Islam. She wrote the script, and filmmaker Theo van Gogh directed, “Submission,” an 11-minute movie featuring pertinent passages from the Koran (such as when it is a husband’s duty to beat his wife) projected on the bodies of naked women.
It was shown twice before Nov. 2, 2004, when van Gogh, bicycling through central Amsterdam in the morning, was shot by an Islamic extremist who then slit his throat with a machete. Next, the murderer (in whose room was found a disk containing videos of “enemies of Allah” being murdered, including a man having his head slowly sawed off) used another knife to pin a long letter to van Gogh’s chest. The letter was to Hirsi Ali, calling her a “soldier of evil” who would “smash herself to pieces on Islam.”
The remainder of her life in Holland was lived under guard. Neighbors in her apartment building complained that they felt endangered with her there and got a court to order her evicted. She decided to come to America.
Holland evidently tolerates everything except skepticism about the sacramental nature of multiculturalism. One million of the country’s 16 million residents are Islamic, and the political left has appropriated the European right’s traditional celebration of identity grounded in racial and ethnic traditions and culture. But the recoil of many Dutch people from Hirsi Ali suggests that the tolerance about which Holland preens is a compound of intellectual sloth and moral timidity. She was more trouble than the Dutch evidently think free speech is worth.
Her story is told in a riveting new book, “Murder in Amsterdam,” by Ian Buruma, who is not alone in finding her — this “Enlightenment fundamentalist” — somewhat unnerving and off-putting. Having experienced life circumscribed by tribal and religious communities (as a girl she suffered the genital mutilation called female circumcision), she is a fierce partisan of individualism against collectivism.
…Neither is she pessimistic about the West. It has, she says, “the drive to innovate.” But Europe, she thinks, is invertebrate. After two generations without war, Europeans “have no idea what an enemy is.” And they think, she says, that leadership is an antiquated notion because they believe that caring governments can socialize everyone to behave well, thereby erasing personal accountability and responsibility. “I can’t even tell it without laughing,” she says, laughing softly. Clearly she is where she belongs, at last.
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali: No Direction Home
A Manifesto for our Destiny
Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Cartoons and Islam
Muslims throw temper-tantrum