Posted on 05/17/2006 4:59:20 AM PDT by RWR8189
FOR HER COURAGE, her honesty and her unflinching support of the rights of Muslim women, Ayaan Hirsi Ali deserves to be considered a heroine. A target for extremists throughout the Islamic world, her life is in constant danger. When, after the making of her film, Submission, its Dutch director, Theo Van Gogh, was murdered, she too found herself under sentence of death. Yet she has never held back from expressing her outspoken view that, in terms of subordinating women, repressing art and limiting freedom of speech, Islam is a backward religion. Controversial or not, she has a right to be heard.
One might have imagined that the Netherlands, as a bastion of liberal values, would guarantee that right. Ms Hirsi Ali is a full citizen of the country and, until yesterday, was an elected member of the Dutch Parliament. She is entitled to expect the same kind of protection that Salman Rushdie once had in the years after the publication of Satanic Verses. Instead, she finds herself today abandoned by her political colleagues and forced into exile. She intends to go to America, where she has been offered work and where she will be given the security that she no longer has in the Netherlands.
It is a squalid tale. Ever since the making of Submission, Ms Hirsi Ali has been subjected to a campaign of denigration by fellow Muslims. They have accused her of insulting her own native country — Somalia — her religion and her family. By refusing to marry the husband that had been chosen for her, by criticising Islamic attitudes to women, and then by using her position to argue for restricting immigration into the Netherlands, she has incurred the hostility, not only of fundamentalists, but also of even moderate Muslim opinion. Last year, Emel, the British Muslim lifestyle magazine, carried an article that described her as “a brown memsahib” and accused her of selling out to right-wing opinion. That Time magazine chose her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world did not endear her to her left-wing critics.
In the Netherlands, a country with a large Muslim population, struggling with multiculturalism and acutely aware of its failure to integrate its minorities, Ms Hirsi Ali’s uncompromising views were uncomfortable, not least because they were couched in such cogent terms. “I am not against migration,” she told The Guardian last year. “It is simply pragmatic to restrict migration, while at the same time encouraging integration and fighting discrimination. I support the idea of the free movement of goods, people, money and jobs in Europe. But that will only work if universal human rights are also adopted by the newcomers. And if they are not, then you run the risk of losing what you have here, and what other people want when they come here, which is freedom.”
It is for views like this — persuasive as they are — that she is being forced out of her adopted country. The lowest blow has come from her own political party in the Netherlands, the centre-right VVD, which has caved in to demands to open an inquiry into how she secured her Dutch visa. Ms Hirsi Ali has never denied that, when she first arrived in the country, she falsified her name and some of her details, claiming that she had come directly from Somalia, when in fact she had spent time in Ethiopia, Kenya and Germany. The VVD knew all of this when it adopted her as a candidate in 2002. It knew about the pressures she had been subjected to from members of her own family, and about the acute danger she found herself in because of her views.
Now, however, Rita Verdonk, the Immigration Minister, who is running for leadership of the party, has caved in to pressure from Ms Hirsi Ali’s critics and has pledged a formal investigation of her citizenship. Responding to a TV programme that has aired many of the accusations made against Ms Hirsi Ali, including complaints from her neighbours about the extra security she has been granted, Ms Verdonk has turned against her, saying her visa had been “improperly granted”. As Ms Hirsi Ali said yesterday: “It is difficult to work as a parliamentarian if you have nowhere to live. It is difficult, but not impossible. As of yesterday, it became impossible.”
This is a sad day in the history of liberal democracy, a stain on the reputation of a once-tolerant country and a setback for the reputation of Islam itself, cementing the impression that is simply not open to criticism. In particular, it lets down Muslim women, who are still being subjected to forced marriages. The debate about its role in Western society is one of the most urgent and complex that confronts us today — only this week, the Government launched an attempt to find a frame of traditional British values that could encompass young Muslim opinion. At the very least, therefore, we should be free to hear all strands of opinion, however challenging they may be.
Ms Hirsi Ali’s penetrating analysis of religion and society in Muslim countries should be answered, not ignored. This is not just a matter of a novel satirising the Prophet, or a few insulting cartoons; hers is a sustained and clear-sighted critique of Islam, from someone who has experienced its restrictions and believes that there is a reasonable case to be made against it. A country that turns its back on those views reveals itself, not only as illiberal, but one that has lost confidence in the resilience of its own democracy.
This statement tells me they have already fallen. The wording about democracy is in the past tense and the wording regarding islam is in the present tense. The setback is not too islam, but to democracy, at least if democracy still existed there. The author whether intentionaly or not is telling us the country is the Islamic Republic of the Neatherlands.
Because every year, liberal indoctrination of children in California continues.
For every liberal that moves to Seattle, there is an army of new ones arriving in California and being raised there.
California is like a agressive cancer. It infects everything around it as well.
Yes, that's true. But I hope she gets a *refugee* visa, and not some other immigration status, as a slap in the face of the Dutch government.
Not only can they not protect her, they are actively trying to silence and harrass her.
Do you see what Hirsi Ali and Theo Van Gogh meant? "Dutch tolerance" = "silence".
Ambassador Boudewijn van Eenennaam
Minister Wim Geerts
Coordinator Management & General Affairs USA Wim Henskens Political Counselor Caspar Veldkamp Minister René van Hell Counselor Simon van der Burg Counselor Jeanne Wikler
was@minbuza.nl;was-plvcdp@minbuza.nl;was-az@minbuza.nl;was-pa@minbuza.nl;was-ea@minbuza.nl;was-scc@minbuza.nl;was-scc@minbuza.nl;nyc-pcz@minbuza.nl
Honorable Ambassador, Counselors, and Minister of the Netherlands:
It is with great distress and disappointment that I've read of the domestic problems lately endured by your Parlimentarian Ms. Hirsi Ali.
There is no need to recount Ms. Ali's history, her political positions, or her current difficulties. You, and we - the free world - know what those are.
What is most disappointing is that Ms. Ali cannot find refuge and safety in what many consider to be the world's most tolerant culture: that of the Netherlands. Her current detractors in your Parliament and in (for example) your Immigration Ministry are making clear what the cost of Dutch "tolerance" actually is: silence.
It is probably best that Ms. Ali be silenced in a land where her voice is unprotected by the Dutch government and is bound to see her killed by religious fanatics. We are happy to have Ms. Ali join us in America, where she will be able to speak and write freely and without fear for her safety. The Netherlands will be free to return to the illusion of "tolerance" and "multiculturalism."
I think it appropriate that the U.S. government grant Ms. Ali refugee status from a Dutch government which cannot or will not protect her freedoms from the cult of murderers and maniacs which now inhabit your country.
My wife and I have airline tickets purchased some time ago, to visit Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum this summer, as well as several other European countries.
But your government's treatment of Ms. Hirsi Ali is repellent to our views of freedom and liberty, and indeed a shocking refutation of Dutch tolerance. For that reason, we will be cancelling our tickets to the Netherlands, and we do not expect to include your country in any travel plans for the forseeable future.
Respectfully,
I don't think so: a St. Bartholomew's Day massacre is more likely.
I like it.
The euro elitists are always trying to lecture the US on human rights and racism claiming they are soo superior and progressive compared to us to further their anti-american agenda.
I've been to europe and lived there on business.
America doesn't even come close to the level of racism in these european countries.
Europe always talks a good game, but when push comes to shove, they are full of crap.
You think the Catholics of the Netherlands are going to stop the muslim takeover?
I don't have much faith in that scenerio considering how secular western europe has become. How many church going Catholics and christians do you think live in these countries anymore?
The leaders of western europe, including now Italy, are filled with communists, socialists, and don't go to church. THey are self-loathing liberals who actually crave the muslim takeover and are helping it along.
Leftists are by and large jackboot-lickers and worshipers of government power over the individual. The dictatorship of the proleatariat and all that.
I can't wait till they declare the Revolution has begun. There are a lot of scores that will be settled.
-ccm
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