This is simply one of the most powerful books I have ever read. Got through it in a weekend, absolutely unputdownable. Get it, read it, buy copies and distribute them:
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Here she and her book are the subject of an Observer feature, and some interesting stuff comes out about a debate she had with Tariq Ramadan (some more links at the end).
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Taking the fight to Islam
Sunday February 4, 2007
The Observer
...
Strictly speaking Hirsi Ali is not an infidel but an apostate, a designation that in the Koran warrants the punishment of death. The distinction is not without significance. In a poll published last week, one in three British Muslims in the 16-24 age group agreed that 'Muslim conversion is forbidden and punishable by death'.
This figure comes as no surprise to Hirsi Ali. She argues that Europe's determination to maintain cultural difference will lead increasing numbers of alienated Muslims to seek the unambiguity of fundamentalism. Liberals, she says, have shirked the responsibility of making the case for their own beliefs. They need to start speaking out in favour of the values of secular humanism. And they need to make clear that they are not compatible with religious bigotry and superstition. 'You have to say that if you want the Prophet Muhammad to be your moral guide in the 21st century and you are aware of the choices the Prophet Muhammad made towards unbelievers, women, homosexuals, do you really think you're going to succeed? You will get into some sort of cognitive dissonance if you at the same time want to adapt to a life here.'
Without an open and robust critique of the nature of the prophet's teachings, she goes on, 'these clerics proselytising radical Islam make much, much more sense. Because the radical Muslims say that democracy is bad, and the young Muslim mind says "Why is it bad?". Because the Koran says it's bad. That makes more sense than democracy is good, the rights of individuals must be observed but you can also hang on to what the Koran says. I say stop that and appeal to and challenge young minds.'
When it comes to words, Hirsi Ali is not one to look for the mincer. She speaks in a language that makes no concessions to the softening euphemisms of political correctness. Those immersed in circumspection and ever vigilant to the contemporary sin of offence are bound to ask themselves if she's allowed to say what she says. In this respect her predicament is reminiscent of the moment in Basic Instinct when Sharon Stone lights a cigarette under interrogation in a police station. She's told that's it's non-smoking environment and she replies: 'So arrest me.' Hirsi Ali's life is already in jeopardy. She's long past the point of polite restraint.
Some observers find her forthright approach refreshing and, indeed, intoxicating, but many recoil from her unadorned conviction. Writing in the New York Review of Books, the historian Timothy Garton Ash described Hirsi Ali as a 'slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist'. Last year when Garton Ash chaired a discussion with Hirsi Ali at the ICA, he seemed both to admire the incisiveness of her quietly spoken logic and to wince at its unshakeable conclusions.
'For him,' Hirsi Ali laughs, 'the Enlightenment is complex. For me, it isn't. There's nothing complex about it.' A student of 17th- and 18th-century political ideas, she doesn't mean that she thinks the Enlightenment was some kind of uniform philosophical movement. The simplicity, for her, is the legacy of the Enlightenment, the things we take for granted about Western sociopolitical culture: the rule of law, the rights of the individual, freedom of expression. To Hirsi Ali these are bedrock precepts that should not be compromised in the name of cultural diversity.
Most of the political classes would agree with her in principle but like to take a more nuanced, and often evasive, stance in practice. She was one of the few intellectuals, for example, who rushed to support the Danes in the cartoon crisis last year. If you believe in the right of freedom of expression, she says, you have to defend that right. In a debate a few years back, Hirsi Ali challenged the Swiss Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan, something of a poster boy for the multicultural left, to be more consistent and clear-cut in what he said. Was the Koran the word of God or a man-made text that was out of date? Ramadan responded by questioning Hirsi Ali's adversarial style. 'The question,' he said, 'is whether you want to change the mentality or please the audience.'
Does her bald delivery not further alienate Muslims, forcing them to cling to traditional values? Hirsi Ali is too smooth of skin and composure to bristle, but it is obviously an accusation she finds irritating.
'Tariq Ramadan is filled with contempt for Muslims because he believes they have no faculties of reason,' she replies in a beguilingly friendly tone, as though she had remarked that he had an excellent taste in shirts. 'If I say that terrorism is created in the name of Islam suddenly they take up terrorism? He gives me so much more power than I have. Why don't my remarks make him turn to terrorism? Because he's above that. Like many believers in multiculturalism, he puts himself on a higher plane. The other thing is that it's not about your style, it's about your content. Are my propositions right or wrong? Is it social, cultural and religious beliefs that cause economic backwardness or is it the other way round? My take on this is the cultural and religious elements are far more important to look at. That is what we should be looking at and not how I say it.'
All the same, it's fair to say that her audience is made up largely of white liberal males, rather than the Muslim women she wishes to liberate. In Holland, a female Muslim politician named Fatima Elatik told me: 'She's appealing to Dutch society, to middle-class Dutch-origin people. She talks about the emancipation of women but you can't push it down their that you didn't bring John Stuart Mill and left us only with the Koran. It doesn't help to say my forefathers oppressed your forefathers, and remain guilty forever.'throats. If I could talk to her, I would tell her that she needs to get a couple of Muslim women around her.'
Hirsi Ali dismisses this as 'a very silly remark. I started off in a position where none of these women were visible anyway except as proxies to be put forward to get subsidies from the government. Just keep singing we're discriminated against. No Muslim women are allowed into this debate by their own groups. So it's way too early. By the time these women are assertive enough, I won't be around. It will be one generation on.'
She also argues that it's important to address white liberals because they need to overcome the self-censoring effects of post-colonial guilt. 'If you want to feel guilty,' snaps Hirsi Ali, 'feel guilty
There is no zealot like the convert, goes the old saying, and many commentators have concluded that Hirsi Ali is a prime secular example. 'In a pattern familiar to historians of political intellectuals,' wrote Garton Ash, 'she has gone from one extreme to the other'. The word on Hirsi Ali is that she is 'traumatised' by her upbringing and her subsequent adoption of a Western lifestyle. It's the word that Ian Buruma uses to describe her condition in his book Murder In Amsterdam.
Needless to say, she finds this appraisal of her ideas patronising. It was, she says, partly in an effort to combat this impression that she wrote Infidel. 'People can see that there is not much trauma in my story.'
That depends on what you think constitutes trauma. The account of being held down by the legs, aged five, and having her clitoris and inner labia cut off with a pair of scissors will certainly alarm many readers. 'I heard it,' she writes, 'like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat.' The fierce beatings she receives at the hands of her embittered mother, and the fractured skull inflicted on her by a brutal religious teacher, these too would leave psychological scars on most of us.
But as Hirsi Ali writes, they were normal events in her childhood and in the lives of people she knew. Death and illness were commonplace in Africa, and by African standards she lived well. There is nothing melodramatic in Hirsi Ali's prose. It's matter-of-fact and also, as she is quick to point out, entirely subjective. It's possible, she says, that her family will remember things differently. 'But it's my story and if you undertake such an endeavour you have to be honest. Usually people make excuses for their culture and family etcetera. I could tell the story that we in the Third World have things that the West could learn from, which is obviously true, but that isn't what I wanted to show. My argument is that western liberal culture is superior to Islamic tribal group culture.'
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Hirsi Ali, say her opponents, is an arch exponent of Islamophobia. One such critic has written a stinging attack on Hirsi Ali in this month's Times Literary Supplement. Maria Golia, an Egyptian-based academic, writes: 'Hirsi Ali seems far more interested in indicting Islam than helping damaged women, whose horror stories she conveniently trots out whenever she needs to bludgeon home a point.'
She takes Hirsi Ali to task on female genital mutilation which, she points out, is not an Islamic practice. Hirsi Ali wanted the Dutch government to institute medical checks on young girls in vulnerable circumstances. Golia calls the idea 'institutionalised violence' and prefers an approach that 'requires understanding of context and coalition-building, not to mention compassion and subtlety'.
It should be said that in Infidel Hirsi Ali specifically states that FGM predates Islam, is not limited to Islam and that it is not practised in many Islamic countries. However, she adds, it is very often 'justified in the name of Islam'. Indeed one need only look at the advice of the leading Egyptian cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is considered one of the most influential scholars in Islam. Qaradawi has been promoted by London mayor Ken Livingstone as a moderate voice, but on his Islam-online website he writes of female circumcision: 'Anyhow, it is not obligatory, whoever finds it serving the interest of his daughters should do it, and I personally support this under the current circumstances in the modern world.'
She characterises the manner in which liberals sidestep such details as a confusion of facts and strategy. 'Some people will accept that Islam is backward but they're not going to say that because Muslims will be offended. "We want them to become liberals, so we're just going to trick them into a secular humanistic way of thinking."' At this she lets out a giggle, as if tickled by the absurdity of the idea. 'But people are aware of what's going on. That's why many Muslims are suspicious of liberals. Because they know they are not being taken seriously.'
Perhaps a more telling symbol of the growing cultural gap between mainstream Western society and doctrinaire Islam is the veil. Again Hirsi Ali does not look around for a fence to sit on. 'The veil,' she says, 'is to show that women are responsible for the sexual self-control of men.' It's a surgical observation, cutting right through to the bone of the issue. She goes on to note that in all communities where the veil is actively observed boys are not taught to restrain themselves. 'They look upon all those who are not veiled as women who are looking for sexual contact and they just go about molesting and being a nuisance.'
But what about those women who say that the veil has nothing to do with sex, that is a demonstration of their love of Allah. 'That is a very small group of women?' But are you to deny them their right to dress as they please? 'No,' she insists, 'I don't want to deny them that and I don't want anyone to deny them that.'
Her solution is secular civic space - for example in schools and government offices - in which all religion is removed. The French model then? That's hardly been a great success. 'It's never been tried,' she counters. 'The French have voiced it but never implemented it. They've created these zones outside Paris where people from Third World countries are put together and excluded from the secular neutral model. They've preached secular Republicanism and practised multiculturalism, that's the whole French hypocrisy.'
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But of course in voicing her opinion in the style she does, she risks lumping together over a billion people from different nations, cultures and traditions as a single 'problem'. For Hirsi Ali, the problem is one of self-definition. If Muslims want to assert a religious text as the basis of their public identity, then they have to accept public debate of that text and its ideas with all the discomfort and offence that may involve.
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More on Ali v Tariq Ramadan
Lessons from the Cold War about reforming Islam
pulpmovies.com
Sunday 25 Jun 2006
Muslim pundits clash over future of Islam in Europe
FT
June 17 2006
20 comments:
Posted below is a review by the writer Douglas Murray of Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (I've posted the whole piece as the online journal it appeared in, The New Criterion, is subscription only).
Incidently, Jon and I watched Douglas Murray talk at Ken Livinston's Clash of Civilizations debate in London, where he gave an impressive, take no prisoners performance as Daniel Pipes' debating partner. Murray's was a very forceful talk that provoked cheers and jeers in equal measure. His confidence was all the more remarkable in someone still in their twenties.
Here's his review of Infidel in full:
'A passion for the future
By Douglas Murray | Volume 25, April 2007
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Infidel.
Free Press, 368 pages, $26
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has attracted many notable enemies in her life: not only the Muslim terrorists and wannabe-terrorists who threaten to kill her and who did kill her collaborator on the film Submission, Theo van Gogh, but also a strange band of pundits and politicians whom she has provoked and irritated out of their ideological comfort-zones. Struggling to come to terms with the current world situation, such people opt to attack the person who has identified the problem rather than deal with the problem itself.
In Murder in Amsterdam, Ian Buruma sneered at Hirsi Ali’s “zealousness” in defending the values of the enlightenment. This condescending jibe caught on. In reviewing Buruma’s book for The New York Review of Books, Timothy Garton Ash described Hirsi Ali as a “slightly simplistic enlightenment fundamentalist.” From such nudging it was only a small leap to the suggestion expressed by Rageh Omar (formerly of the BBC, now, seamlessly, of Al Jazeera) in his memoir Only Half of Me: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the ex-Beeb man declared, is morally equivalent to Yasin Hassan Omar, currently on trial for trying to blow up the people of London on the morning of July 21, 2005. Fundamentalists the lot of them. Each is as bad as the rest. That’s the gist of it, and for this to be an acceptable, indeed “sophisticated,” line among Western intellectuals today says much about the degradation of the current debate.
Prior to the publication of Infidel, English-speaking readers had only one book of Hirsi Ali’s to refer to. The Caged Virgin was a compilation of essays and interviews, which included the script of Submission, but it read like an interim book, leaving as it did many gaps and questions in the reader’s mind. For a woman who has been voted one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People,” the dearth of information about her in English is startling. It has not helped to clarify or rebut the confusions and falsifications published about her over the last five years, not least in relation to her withdrawn (and now restored) Dutch citizenship. Now here is Infidel, an autobiography that not only answers its author’s critics, but also does so with dignity, restraint, and skill, simply by relating the story of a very remarkable life.
It was Evelyn Waugh who declared that “only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.” Thirty-seven is certainly very young to be writing an autobiography, but this is no ordinary book, and the author has had no ordinary life. The vast bulk is given over to the story of a precarious childhood, in Somalia, Kenya, and Saudi Arabia. It describes the author’s upbringing in a tribal and ideologically backward society that, when it meets the modern world, does so with sometimes comic, but more often tragic results.
The story of her circumcision—and that of her siblings—at the hands of tribal elders is described in wince-making detail but with a straightforwardness that leaves no room for either self-pity or bitterness. The same trademark resurfaces in numerous passages in the book.
And there is wisdom in this approach. For as well as being the story of one girl, the reader is aware—and the author even more so—that this is also a book about countless others who never have written, and never will write, their own stories. The reader senses this in Hirsi Ali’s description of the gulf that existed for her and her childhood friends between what they once expected of marriage and what it actually amounted to. The young girl hooked on trashy-but-innocuous Barbara Cartland-style novels recounts stories of friends raped—essentially—night after night by unloved strangers onto whom they had been forced by marriage, and it makes for grim and salutary reading.
In such a narrative, there is a danger of survivor’s guilt or self-justification but Hirsi Ali manages to avoid it. She is certainly aware of her own luck: “How many girls born in Digfeer Hospital in Mogadishu in November 1969 are even alive today?” she asks. “And how many have a real voice?”
Why am I not in Kenya, squatting at a charcoal brazier making angellos? Why have I been instead a representative in the Dutch Parliament, making law? I have been lucky, and not many women are lucky in the places I come from. In some sense, I owe them something. I need to seek out the other women held captive in the compound of irrationality and superstition and persuade them to take their lives into their own hands.
And here is one of the miracles of this woman and this book. For the reader is also aware that something more than luck has saved Hirsi Ali. Determination and fearlessness do not characterize only the Dutch phase of her life. Even before escaping an arranged marriage and finding sanctuary in the Netherlands, her life seems to have been propelled by a drive and instinct that has been vindicated at every turn.
Of course it is her Dutch experience that will draw many readers to the book. And the author deals with this period with extraordinary calm. Before the broadcast of Submission, she recalls, it was suggested for security reasons that perhaps the director ought to remove his name from the film. And she records van Gogh telling her with indignation: “If I can’t put my name on my own film, in Holland, then Holland isn’t Holland any more, and I am not me.” Both points were soon proved. Van Gogh’s murder led not to an attempt to deal with the problem, but a shutdown of the debate and a persecution of Hirsi Ali that is remarkable to read not only because of the horror of the details, but also because of the stain it leaves on a country that was once renowned as a haven of tolerance and civility. Yet despite her appalling treatment at the hands of colleagues, neighbors, and strangers, Holland—and indeed the West—is something that Hirsi Ali still rightly, and more firmly than ever, believes in. The story of her life’s journey is in part—though only in part—the tale of the emergence of one of Western enlightenment’s firmest, wisest, and doughtiest defenders. “Some things must be said,” she affirms, “and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice”:
Muhammad Bouyeri, Theo’s murderer, and others like him don’t realize how deeply people in the West are committed to the idea of an open society. Even though the open society is vulnerable, it is also stubborn. It is the place I ran to for safety and freedom. I would like to keep it that way: safe and free.
Hirsi Ali has a passion for, and I suspect a significant role in, the future. It is only through her, and the few people like her, that the future, and the freedoms so many of us cherish, will be defended, nurtured, and allowed to flourish. She is currently a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. It is Europe’s loss. But her continuing passion, conviction, and example suggest that her existence at all is a collective and long-reverberating gain.'
Nice to see Britain distinguishing herself again.
Writer to get EU protection
Guardian
February 28 2008
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch activist facing death threats for her outspoken criticism of Islam, is to come under national police protection anywhere in the European Union, the top justice official in Brussels said tonight. ... British sources said a pan-European deal could not be "that simple" since there were cost and legal implications to authorising such special police measures. "There can't possibly be political agreement on it," said an official.
Definitely worth listening to. This guy was in hiding with Hirsi Ali. I agree with most of what he says, though I think his arguments would greatly benefit from making Pipes' distinction between Islam and Islamism.
Radio 4 - The Choice
05/08/08
Michael Buerk talks to Dutch politician Geert Wilders about his decision to make a provocative anti-Islamic film.
Listen | The Choice
Here's Wilders' film Fitna.
15 mins long. We all ought to have watched it.
How far my country has fallen.
Dutch MP Geert Wilders deported after flying to Britain to show anti-Islamic film
Telegraph
12 Feb 2009
A controversial Dutch politician has been sent back to Holland after trying to enter Britain to show his anti-Muslim film in the House of Lords.
Geert Wilders had been invited to Westminster to show his 17-minute film Fitna, which criticises the Koran as a "fascist book", by a member of the House of Lords. But on Tuesday Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary refused Mr Wilders entry because his opinions "would threaten community security and therefore public security" in the UK.
Mr Wilders went ahead with his trip anyway, and flew from Amsterdam to London on a British Midland flight. When he arrived at Heathrow airport he was met by two plain clothed officers from the UK Border Agency. As he was being led away, Mr Wilders said: "I am not nervous but is this how Great Britain welcomes a democrat?"
Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen said Holland would press for a reversal of the travel ban. Earlier on the flight, Mr Wilders had launched a savage attack on the Government. He said: "They (the British Government) are the biggest bunch of cowards in Europe. "I'm coming because I am invited by one of your members of parliament. I'm not provocative. I am an elected political representative. I am a democrat. I use my freedom of speech. I am using all the democratic means I have."
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In the Lords, Lord Pearson asked Lord West of Spithead, a home office minister, said: "Do you think this situation would occur if Mr Wilders had said ban the Bible?"
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There's an audio of Wilders here. Listen and see if he sounds like a dangerous extremist to you. Also, down with Huhne.
Dutch MP banned from entering UK
BBC
12 February 2009
... [Fitna's] opening scenes show a copy of the Koran followed by footage of the 9/11 attacks in the US and the bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005. ... Labour peer Lord Ahmed, who expressed his concerns to the Parliamentary authorities about Mr Wilders' visit, said he welcomed the decision to ban the MP. "It would be unwise to have him in the UK because this man's presence would cause hatred," he said.
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And Chris Huhne, Lib Dem home affairs spokesman, said he had watched the film, which he called "revolting", and backed the ban. "Freedom of speech is our most precious freedom of all, because all the other freedoms depend on it," he said. "But there is a line to be drawn even with freedom of speech, and that is where it is likely to incite violence or hatred against someone or some group."
As a supporter of more or less absolute free speech, I'm absolutely opposed to the banning of Geert Wilders - JP on what grounds are you opposed to the ban? Is it more a free speech issue for you or more about the growing influence of Islam within the UK?
1. free speech
2. they let Qaradawi do what he wanted
3. I think Wilders is right (subject to my previous comment that he'd benefit from making Pipes' clear distinction between Islam and Islamism)
1. I thought you were against Qaradawi being allowed in.
3. Didn't Wilders compare the Koran to Mein Kampf and say it should be banned?
Also, defenders of free speech need to argue how the banning of Louis Farrakhan from the UK was different or accept that this ban, shocking as it is, isn't unprecedented.
OK, the Qaradawi/Farrakhan thing. What I'm against are double standards, and ultimately I would probably support a "free speech, let anyone say what they want" argument.
If you are arguing on grounds of public safety (the reason Wilders was sent back) there are not only double standards, those that are applied are the *reverse* of what you would expect. Who is more threatening, the Qaradawi types whose supporters don't just incite ("Hamas! Hamas! Jews to the gas!" anyone?) but actually blow people up on buses, or the Wilders types whose supporters are knifed to death in the streets while cycling about?
As far as the Koran/Mein Kampf comparison goes, there's one obvious comparison - they are both the holy books of nihilist totalitarian groups. The difference is that one lot of totalitarians is largely a busted flush (in the West at least), while the other is increasingly active and successful.
Wilder's own argument is more detailed, and goes into comparisons of content:
The Koran’s core theme is about the duty of all Muslims to fight non-Muslims; an Islamic Mein Kampf, in which fight means war, jihad. The Koran is above all a book of war – a call to butcher non-Muslims (2:191, 3:141, 4:91, 5:3), to roast them (4:56, 69:30-69:32), and to cause bloodbaths amongst them (47:4). Jews are compared to monkeys and pigs (2:65, 5:60, 7:166), while people who believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God must according to the Koran be fought (9:30 [9:29]). Madam Speaker, the West has no problems with Jews or Christians, but it does have problems with Islam. It is still possible, even today, for Muslims to view the Koran, which they regard as valid for all time, as a licence to kill. And that is exactly what happens. The Koran is worded in such a way that its instructions are addressed to Muslims for eternity, which includes today’s Muslims.
My own view (as someone whose holy book is The God Delusion) is you could probably construct similar arguments about other holy texts, and that the thing that marks out the Koran from the rest is its use by currently active terrorist groups.
BTW, in the UK debates I've been listening to, all sides, no matter where they stand on "let him in/send him back" issue, seem to agree that Wilders is a right wing extremist.
Here's the politics of the party he used to represent: Party for Freedom and Democracy, and here's the one he founded: Party for Freedom. Do people feel that these are extreme right-wing positions?
Note that one of Wilders' own defences, that lots of people in Holland support him so he can't be extremist, is a non-sequitur.
My position is that people should be allowed to say whatever they want, it's what they do that the law and the state should concern themselves with; which means that Farrakhan, Irving, Qaradawi et al can say whatever they like, but then they can't stop someone like Wilders from saying whatever he want either. No double standards there.
Incidently, I thought it was interesting to note that the only part of our Government to demonstrate any backbone on this matter was the House Of Lords*:
"Wilders, the Dutch member of parliament who had made an uncompromising stand against the Koranic sources of Islamist extremism and violence, was due to give a screening of Fitna, his film on this subject, at the House of Lords on Thursday. This meeting had been postponed after Lord Ahmed had previously threatened the House of Lords authorities that he would bring a force of 10,000 Muslims to lay siege to the Lords if Wilders was allowed to speak. To their credit, the Lords authorities had stood firm and said extra police would be drafted in to meet this threat and the Wilders meeting should go ahead."
*Who here believes that a fully elected chamber wouldn't have been far more acquiescent
Based on this, I think Miliband is a worse than Huhne. The Foreign Secretary condemns Fitna as 'extreme anti-Muslim hate' that should be banned, without actually seeing it.
"I have been watching BBC News 24’s coverage of the Wilders story, which has included comments from the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. Miliband states that Fitna contains ‘extreme anti-Muslim hate and we have very clear laws in this country’. The laws are obviously not as clear as he would like as the film has now been shown and is not banned in the UK. He also said that ‘there is no freedom to stir up hate, religious and racial hatred, according to the laws of the land’.
"Does Fitna do this? This is a matter for debate. Debate is how the citizens of free societies dissect claims, ideas, films, and so on, as the Quilliam Foundation, to give a prominent example, argues.Miliband, having watched Fitna, obviously feels it does ’stir up hate, religious and racial hatred’.But, hold on… When asked by the interviewer if he had actually watched Fitna he responded that he had not and didn’t need to as he already knew what was in it!
"Fitna is a 16 minute film, easily accessible online. Is it really so much to ask that our political overlords bother to watch a film before condemning it and supporting its creator being barred from the country? How is Miliband any better than Muslims who screamed about The Satanic Verses without bothering to read it?"
Interesting piece on Geert Wilders from one of the Spiked squad:
"Brendan O’Neill
The Culture War that dare not speak its name
The Geert Wilders affair exposes an elite more interested in battling imaginary Islamofascists or Islamophobes than having an enlightened debate.
So, what is the greatest threat in twenty-first-century Europe?
Is it ‘Islamofascism’, as the Dutch filmmaker and MP Geert Wilders, who was excluded from Britain last week, would have us believe? The rising Muslim birth rate, the influx of radical Islamic preachers from ‘over there’, the free availability of an allegedly evil holy book – the Koran – which Wilders describes as being ‘like Mein Kampf’? Or is it, as Wilders’ critics and censors argue, ‘Islamophobia’? Not Islam itself, or its extreme adherents, but those who fear and loathe Islam, those who are intolerant of difference and multiculturalism and who might be inspired to join an anti-Muslim pogrom upon watching something like Wilders’ 17-minute, Islam-baiting film Fitna?
It’s neither. Europe is not threatened by ‘Islamofascism’ (there’s no such thing) or ‘Islamophobia’ (which is vastly exaggerated). Instead, the greatest threat in modern-day Europe to freedom and genuine debate – even to security – is the elite’s own Islamo-obsession. It is the tendency of both the left and right to view every major issue through Islamo-goggles – from peace to free speech, community relations to migration policies – that is denigrating liberty, obscuring truth in public debate, and potentially nurturing separatist and even violent tendencies. The Geert Wilders affair reveals that we are living through a Culture War that dare not speak its name, where thinkers, politicians and officials put the case for progress or tradition, Western civilisation or censorship, not openly and honestly, but under the cover of various Islamo-nightmares.
The British authorities’ refusal to allow Wilders entry into the UK, where he had been invited to show his film Fitna to some peers at the House of Lords, marked a new low in censorship. Whatever you think of Wilders’ film (I think it’s shrill, hysterical, repetitive and badly made) or Wilders himself (his deeply entrenched hatred of Islam is enough to make even a critic of the therapy culture like me wonder if he was perhaps interfered with by a bearded man when he was a toddler), he should have been free to come here and make his case. Just as others should have been free to argue or protest against him. In blocking Wilders from Britain – on the basis that his presence would ‘threaten community harmony and therefore public security’ (1) – the British authorities did not only irritate an elected MP from Holland; they also profoundly insulted us, the British and European public.
Wilders was excluded on the deeply censorious basis that words and images are toxic, damaging, even potentially lethal, and therefore we, the public, must be protected from them by any means necessary. Such an outlook has guided every censor in history, from Torquemada (who, with ‘excessive rigour’, burnt at the stake those heretics whose beliefs threatened Christian stability) to Joseph McCarthy (who thought that the ideas harboured by Reds Under The Bed threatened America’s ‘social fabric’) (2). Today they say ‘community harmony’ instead of ‘social fabric’ or ‘Christian orthodoxy’. Justifying the exclusion of Wilders, UK foreign secretary David Miliband said: ‘We have a profound commitment to freedom of speech but there is no freedom to cry “fire” in a crowded theatre.’ In his reliance on that cliché – which has been so warped over time, transformed from a libertarian defence of all but the most directly inciting forms of speech into a casual justification for everyday censorship – Miliband revealed how New Labour views the public: as volatile, unpredictable, irrational, for whom seeing a controversial film is the equivalent of hearing ‘fire!’ in a crowded theatre, in the sense that it might generate screaming, scrambling and stampeding.
The banning of Wilders from Britain was motivated by the axis of prejudices that always underpins censorship. First by the idea that the public is incapable of dealing with difficult or dodgy ideas, and instead hears only ‘fire!’ or ‘panic!’ or ‘kill, kill, kill!’ when it encounters inflammatory material. Second by the idea that there is some abstract greater good – ‘social fabric’, ‘public security’ or ‘community harmony’ – that must be guarded from the pollution of dangerous ideas. And third by the notion that it is the job of the authorities to decide what is appropriate and inappropriate material for public consumption and to airbrush from Britain any thinking judged too pernicious or poisonous. New Labour now polices the borders not only to keep out the ‘wrong’ people but also the ‘wrong’ ideas. The Wilders affair has set a very dangerous precedent. A Miliband-designed Thought Forcefield has been erected around the country. Britain is a little more unfree following last week’s Wilders exclusion."
Full article here.
Well said, Mr Moore. Makes my point about the distinction that Wilders would be well advised to adopt, between Islam and Islamism, and makes a host of other good points besides.
Banning Wilders plays into the hands of our Islamist enemies
Charles Moore
Telegraph 13 Feb 2009
The Home Secretary should instead stop the advocates of violence from entering Britain, argues Charles Moore
'The Secretary of State is satisfied" would be a good title for a satirical television drama. It is the favourite bureaucratic phrase used to convey a ministerial decision.
This week, the office of the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith wrote to Geert Wilders, the Dutch MP who had been invited to the House of Lords to present his anti-Muslim film Fitna to MPs and peers there. Miss Smith, said the letter, was "satisfied" that what Mr Wilders said "about Muslims and their beliefs… would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the UK".
So the Flying Dutchman reached Heathrow on Thursday, but was put on a plane back to Holland straightaway.
It is extremely unusual that an elected member of a European legislature is banned from this country when invited by members of our own Parliament. It contravenes a key democratic principle about the power of legislators to talk to one another, whether governments like it or not.
The Dutch authorities – though they greatly dislike Mr Wilders – saw this point at once, and protested to the British Government. Out of his respect for the rights of the elected, the Dutch ambassador went to Heathrow to meet Mr Wilders. It is typical of the collapse of our Parliament's self-belief that this aspect of the case has been ignored.
Anyway, the Secretary of State was satisfied. What satisfied her? I do not believe that it was the intrinsic nature of Mr Wilders's film or words. I have watched Fitna on YouTube. It takes the view that Islam is irredeemably evil. Mr Wilders has said elsewhere that "Islam is not another leaf on the tree of religion", but a totalitarian political ideology.
This is wrong. Islam is more than a leaf on the tree. It is an entire branch on the tree of monotheism, whose root is Judaic and whose trunk is Christianity.
The beliefs that Mr Wilders is talking about are better described as "Islamism" – the version of Islam which seeks the political, sometimes violent imposition of an intolerant theocracy. Mr Wilders takes an important, dangerous aspect of Muslim thought and treats it as the whole.
But that, in itself, is merely a point of view. What makes Mr Wilders's film nasty is that it contains no argument and few facts. It relies on images of Muslim violence set against Koranic texts. It is like a modern party-political broadcast – all image-peddling with no rationality. In fact, it more or less is a party-political broadcast for his Freedom Party, and its method is not to incite violence, but certainly to incite fear.
You see the appalling video made by the killers of the American journalist Daniel Pearl. You hear a woman telephoning from the stricken World Trade Centre saying, "It's so hot. I'm burning up." The Danish cartoon in which Mohammed's turban was shown as a bomb is reprinted, and you can hear the noise of the bomb ticking. It is an unscrupulous film.
But such nasty films and plays and books – against all sorts of people, faiths and ideologies – are published every week. The immensely popular musical Billy Elliot contains a scene in which people wish an early death for Margaret Thatcher. There is nothing uniquely vile about Fitna: it is merely highly unpleasant. So why is Jacqui Smith "satisfied" that its author must not darken the red carpets of the House of Lords?
Go back to the letter from her office. Mr Wilders's words and film "would threaten community harmony and therefore [my italics] public security in the UK", it says. What the Home Office means is, "If you upset Muslims, there will be violence". With the single word, "therefore", Miss Smith is making a link which is itself insulting to Muslims. Would she say the same about upsetting Christians, or Jews, or farmers, or socialists, or vegetarians? Of course not. It is only Muslims that scare her. So she is saying much the same thing as Geert Wilders!
The question then arises, are Jacqui Smith and Geert Wilders right? Is Islam so basically intolerant that you have only to be foul about it for its adherents to rise up and kill you? If so, we have an unpleasant choice. Act as Mr Wilders wants, and drive Muslims out. Or act as Jacqui Smith wants, and criminalise or exclude those who criticise them.
One's answer to whether they are right cannot be unequivocal. The unpleasant power of Fitna is that the atrocities it depicts and the preaching it shows are real and recent, and they were all carried out or uttered by Muslims acting, explicitly, in the name of their faith. You could not, in our age, compile any comparable clips of Jews or Christians. As a matter of plain fact, Islamic terrorism exists.
Another plain fact about current Muslim culture is the use of the angry demonstration, the constant agitation to ban a book or insist on the veil, the bristling search for offence. So it would be silly to pretend that there is no problem about Muslim attitudes to a plural, free, democratic society. We see bits of that problem every day.
But what the Smith/Wilders analysis misses is that, as you would expect from a great religion in crisis, there is a ferment of ideas and a struggle for mastery. On Channel 4 News, the man from the moderate Muslim Quilliam Foundation said that the Home Secretary had curtailed his own freedom of speech – he wanted Mr Wilders to come here so that he could tell him why he was wrong.
Every time that the Government gives in to pressure to be intolerant from Muslims such as the egregious Lord Ahmed (who was reported as saying that the Mumbai atrocities had been carried out – by implication by India – to distract attention from wrongs done to Muslims in Kashmir), it empowers such people. It gives them the veto.
By the same token, it weakens all those Muslims who want to take a full, non-sectarian part in British public life. In reality, the public order consequences of a visit from Mr Wilders would have been perfectly containable.
The manic Muslim mobs that threaten on such occasions (Lord Ahmed has denied reports that he warned that 10,000 would hit the streets) rarely materialise in large numbers. For the most part, "the Muslim street" goes peacefully about its business.
At present, the Government runs a large programme called Prevent, intended to discourage violent extremism. But there has been too much deference to the idea that extremists have more "cred" with the potentially violent than anyone else. People who have links with Hamas or Hizbollah or praise suicide bombing in Israel or give platforms to anti-semites have been promoted. Now there is a hot debate within Government about whether the programme is backing the right people.
Every month, people get let into this country who do not, like Mr Wilders, warn in blood-curdling terms about violence, but, in blood-curdling terms, advocate it. Neither Jacqui Smith nor the Opposition – who are still too timid on this subject – should be satisfied until they are stopped. At present, by mistake, we are helping them.
Well I know which couple I'd most like to invite to a dinner party. Hat tip this excellent blog.
The history man and fatwa girl: Niall Ferguson leaves wife for Somali feminist
07th February 2010
Daily Mail
The internationally celebrated historian and TV presenter Niall Ferguson has broken up with his wife of 16 years after a string of adulterous affairs. The 45-year-old Harvard professor has left former newspaper editor Susan Douglas, with whom he has three children, for his mistress, the Somalian-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
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The pair are understood to have met at Time magazine’s prestigious 100 Most Influential People In The World party in New York last May. Ferguson and Ms Hirsi Ali, who have both been on the list, were introduced by Belinda Luscombe, the magazine’s art editor. The flamboyant Ms Hirsi Ali, who was dressed in an eye-catching cobalt-blue cocktail dress, immediately captivated Ferguson, who was photographed with his arm around her waist.
Ms Luscombe, a friend of Ms Hirsi Ali, said: ‘I think that is where they met for the first time. In all the years I have known Ayaan, she’s never had a boyfriend. She’s gorgeous, but with a fatwa, it’s tricky to find guys.’
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Been following this Wilders story in this thread. Here's the latest.
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Dutch politician Geert Wilders in UK to show Islam film
BBC News
5 March 2010
Controversial Dutch MP Geert Wilders has arrived in the UK to show his anti-Islam film after overturning a ban on entering the country.
More news of the happy couple.
Somali feminist under a fatwa tells for the first time of her ‘complicated’ affair with millionaire TV historian Niall Ferguson
Daily Mail
2nd May 2010
The mistress of multi-millionaire historian and TV presenter Niall Ferguson has revealed that she intends to start a family with him. Speaking for the first time about their affair, Ayaan Hirsi Ali revealed that she is ‘enormously in love’ with the 45-year-old Harvard professor and hopes to become a mother ‘soon’.
Is this the impdec version of Heat magazine?
Well, I never thought I'd live to see the day I praise a Robert Fisk article. Here's a message close to that of Hirsi Ali. (Note: I picked just 3 of a multitude of similarly appalling stories from the article).
Hat tip Dan, btw.
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The crimewave that shames the world
By Robert Fisk
Tuesday, 7 September 2010
It's one of the last great taboos: the murder of at least 20,000 women a year in the name of 'honour'. Nor is the problem confined to the Middle East: the contagion is spreading rapidly
It is a tragedy, a horror, a crime against humanity. The details of the murders – of the women beheaded, burned to death, stoned to death, stabbed, electrocuted, strangled and buried alive for the "honour" of their families – are as barbaric as they are shameful. Many women's groups in the Middle East and South-west Asia suspect the victims are at least four times the United Nations' latest world figure of around 5,000 deaths a year. Most of the victims are young, many are teenagers, slaughtered under a vile tradition that goes back hundreds of years but which now spans half the globe.
A 10-month investigation by The Independent in Jordan, Pakistan, Egypt, Gaza and the West Bank has unearthed terrifying details of murder most foul. Men are also killed for "honour" and, despite its identification by journalists as a largely Muslim practice, Christian and Hindu communities have stooped to the same crimes. Indeed, the "honour" (or ird) of families, communities and tribes transcends religion and human mercy.
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...[t]he young woman found in a drainage ditch near Daharki in Pakistan, "honour" killed by her family as she gave birth to her second child, her nose, ears and lips chopped off before being axed to death, her first infant lying dead among her clothes, her newborn's torso still in her womb, its head already emerging from her body? She was badly decomposed; the local police were asked to bury her. Women carried the three to a grave, but a Muslim cleric refused to say prayers for her because it was "irreligious" to participate in the namaz-e-janaza prayers for "a cursed woman and her illegitimate children".
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Outrageously, rape is also used as a punishment for "honour" crimes. In Meerwala village in the Punjab in 2002, a tribal "jury" claimed that an 11-year-old boy from the Gujar tribe, Abdul Shakoor, had been walking unchaperoned with a 30-year-old woman from the Mastoi tribe, which "dishonoured" the Mastois. The tribal elders decided that to "return" honour to the group, the boy's 18-year-old sister, Mukhtaran Bibi, should be gang-raped. Her father, warned that all the female members of his family would be raped if he did not bring Mukhtar to them, dutifully brought his daughter to this unholy "jury". Four men, including one of the "jury", immediately dragged the girl to a hut and raped her while up to a hundred men laughed and cheered outside. She was then forced to walk naked through the village to her home. It took a week before the police even registered the crime – as a "complaint".
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One of the most terrible murders in 1999 was that of a mentally retarded 16-year-old, Lal Jamilla Mandokhel, who was reportedly raped by a junior civil servant in Parachinar in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Her uncle filed a complaint with the police but handed Lal over to her tribe, whose elders decided she should be killed to preserve tribal "honour". She was shot dead in front of them. Arbab Khatoon was raped by three men in the Jacobabad district. She filed a complaint with the police. Seven hours later, she was murdered by relatives who claimed she had "dishonoured" them by reporting the crime.
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