Ayaan Hirsi Ali is in town and we have seen the predictable reaction from various representatives of the Muslim community. Yawn.

Whats more disconcerting is the criticism Hirsi Ali has received, particularly in Europe, from various intellectuals and philosophers, cultural relativists in-denial and morally obtuse apostles of the coming great Multiculturalist Utopia, some of whom had the gall to call her an “Enlightenment fundamentalist”. This attack on Hirsi Ali, and the accompanying championing of “moderate Islamist” Tariq Ramadan was the subject of a momentous debate I posted about earlier, which serves as the background for this post.

The cover story of the current issue of The New Statesman is called “Who’s afraid of Tariq Ramadan?” (and doesn’t Ramadan ever look the part of a modern philosopher?), by Paul Berman, and contains the most erudite, complete and clear defense of Ayaan Hirsi Ali against the lot above, yet. The whole essay is very long, broken up over 12 pages, so I recommend heading straight for the “print” version, which allows you to view it in one page. Feel free to search the page for “Ayaan” to get the relevant part (not that the whole thing is not worth reading, it is).

Here’s Berman’s explanation of why these people attack Hirsi Ali:

If you open either of her books and read a few lines at random, you will discover one reality that you would hardly guess from reading those attacks. Buruma–and he is not the only one to do this–presents Hirsi Ali as a diehard enemy of Islam, dedicated to hurling insults, which, to be sure, she does do, and with gusto. But this is not her major theme. In her books, and in the little film that she made with van Gogh, she dedicates herself mostly to something else, and that is to describe and to decry the miseries of women in the portion of the Muslim world that she knows best–in East Africa and Saudi Arabia, together with the immigrant zones of Europe. Her account of her own genital mutilation as a little girl, and of the botched genital mutilation of her sister, and the sister’s tragic life and suicide; her portrait of girlhood and marriage in Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia, not to mention her own forced marriage, which she fled; the portrait of her grandmother, the Somali nomad, and the patriarchal customs of the past, which do seem to have lingered on; her sense of horror, as a girl, at seeing the women of Saudi Arabia for the first time, these women who have no faces because of their veils and whose black garments hang so shapelessly upon their bodies that, in order to know which way the women are facing, you have to look to see which way their shoes are pointing; her account of the shelters for abused Muslim women in Holland; her account of the terrors of refugee existence, and the double terrors of refugee existence for women–all these passages express something that can never be detected in a certain kind of high-minded cerebral journalism today. It is a visceral anger at oppression. A moral indignation, and not just a wistful pragmatism.

But mostly these passages in Hirsi Ali’s books raise the issue of women’s rights, and not from an outsider’s point of view, regardless of how many times she has been denounced for making herself an outsider to Muslim life. Hers is a story marked by knives–the knife at her own genital mutilation, and at her sister’s; the knife at the murder of her friend and colleague, pinning to his chest the sheet of paper threatening her own life. This is not a Swiss professor! Here is the actual insider; the real thing. I suppose that all this unironic indignation can only be annoying in the extreme to a certain kind of refined sensibility. Something about those knives takes away the quality of abstraction that allows a social issue to be shrugged off. It is always good to be subtle and nuanced, but Hirsi Ali’s writings have the effect of making a large number of nuanced subtleties look ridiculous.

About Hirsi Ali we do not have to wonder: where does she stand on the question of stoning women to death? Or on the obligation for husbands to beat their wives? Read one page by her and you will know the answer; and if you read two pages, you might begin to suspect that, on the television screens of France, the man who defended the oppressed of the oppressed in the poorest neighborhoods of Europe was Nicolas Sarkozy. But that has got to be the problem from a perspective like Buruma’s. This talk of women’s rights–doesn’t it point ultimately in directions that ought to be regarded as (here is the mystery of our present moment) conservative? Better the seventh century than Nicolas Sarkozy.

If there is an intellectual establishment, and I suppose there is, the attacks on Hirsi Ali radiate from its center. And this, the campaign against Hirsi Ali–this, like the anti-Semitic mob assault during the Paris peace march of 2003, or like the spectacle of millions of Britons marching under the leadership of an Islamist organization, or like the calm discussions in The New York Times of why it would be wrong to condemn with any vigor the stoning of women to death–this does represent something new. Here is the new development among journalists and intellectuals, the development that Ramadan’s career has served to illuminate. Something like a campaign against Hirsi Ali could never have taken place a few years ago. A sustained attack on an authentic liberal dissident crying out against injustices in remote parts of the world and even in the back streets of Western Europe, a sustained attack that appears nearly to have erased the very mention of women’s oppression and the struggle for women’s rights from discussion–no, this could not have happened yesterday, except on the extreme right. This is a new event. This is a reactionary turn in the intellectual world.

And delving deeper, past “the reactionary turn”, we happen upon a nose-dive:

[the French writer Pascal Bruckner] wrote a criticism of the leftist doctrine that in [the seventies] was still known as “Third Worldism”–meaning the hope and the expectation that, around the world, the impoverished countries, the former colonies and semi-colonies, would generate, as an aspect of their struggle against Western imperialism, a worldwide revolutionary alternative, a soulful new kind of socialism, a new and revolutionary culture. This was the doctrine that venerated revolutionary leaders such as Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro not because they were communists but because they were the leaders of the Third World revolution.

But Bruckner, in writing about the “Third Worldist” idea, noticed that among the good-hearted leftists of the Western countries, sympathy for oppressed people in the former colonies had turned into a kind of dehumanizing contempt for the oppressed people in the former colonies, without anyone having noticed. He called his book The Tears of the White Man, and in its pages he served up a spectacular exposé of left-wing European clichés about the poor and the oppressed in faraway places–an enormous catalogue of Noble Savage imagery and other fantastical pictures of the superior qualities of downtrodden people in poor countries, compared with their former oppressors in Europe. The book was a demonstration of how, through a combination of guilty consciences and patronizing ignorance, the European intellectuals had ended up re-creating the worst sorts of racist and colonialist imaginings of what people in other places and with other skin tones must be like: their wisdom, virtue, selflessness, brilliance, and, above all, their profound quality of being different.

Bruckner has returned to this topic from time to time over the years, and just last year he came out with a sequel called La Tyrannie de la Pénitence, or The Tyranny of Penitence, updated to our own age, in which the “Third World” of yore has been renamed the “south,” and the imperialists have been renamed the forces of globalization. And the sequel has led Bruckner to take a new glance at how, in our own time, the progressive intellectuals of the Western countries, out of a continuing self-contempt and feeling of guilt for the Western crimes of the past, have likewise updated their fantasies about the wronged and inscrutable people of other regions without really changing them. Ian Buruma, because of his sundry books, was the ideal person for The New York Times Magazine to assign a profile on Tariq Ramadan; and Pascal Bruckner, because of his own books, has turned out to be the ideal person to write about Ian Buruma. Bruckner noted the peculiarities of Buruma’s campaign against Hirsi Ali. He took note of Timothy Garton Ash’s contribution to this campaign in The New York Review of Books. And Bruckner offered a philosophical analysis.

Buruma and Garton Ash, Bruckner concluded, had fallen for the intellectual miasmas of the postmodern sensibility, and the miasmas had led, via the errors of relativism and an indiscriminate multiculturalism, to the simplest of philosophical mistakes. This was the inability to draw even the most elementary of distinctions. In the postmodern idea, the Enlightenment has come to be looked upon as merely one more set of cultural prejudices, no better and very likely rather worse than other sets of cultural prejudices–a zealotry that is unable to control its own excesses. From this point of view, someone like Hirsi Ali, who grew up in an atmosphere of Islamist radicalism and the Muslim Brotherhood in Africa and has taken up a new outlook committed to rationalism and individual freedom, has merely gone from one fundamentalism to another–not much different, seen in this light, from van Gogh’s murderer.

And another great essay from Fjordman:

[..] Sweden is a great example of why we need limited government, a state that only upholds law and order and does not concern itself with pushing a particular ideology on its people.

Why does the government dispense with the social contract and attack its own people? Well, for starters, because it can. The state has become so large and powerful that is has become an autonomous organism with a will of its own. The people are there to serve the state, not vice versa. And because state power penetrates every single corner of society, there are no places left to mount a defense if the state decides to attack you. Its representatives are no longer leaders of a specific people, but caretakers preoccupied only with advancing their own careers through oiling and upholding, and if possible expanding, the bureaucratic machinery.

[..] A characteristic of the situation in Western Europe is that we have more and more laws, yet at the same time more and more lawlessness. The German journalist Jens Jessen claims that his country has been gripped by a “prohibition orgy” regarding tobacco, cars, cheap holidays and computer games, television and fast food. The process is “disconcerting and almost grotesque in its systematization.” He believes there is some level of compensation going on for the powerlessness of politicians.

Parallel with an explosion in street crime, the state turns on its law-abiding citizens with a proliferation of regulations and an inflation of laws. The less control the state has over the the most important tasks of society, the stronger its desire to assert its power over the tiniest details becomes. Or is it a subtle show of force, a constant reminder to the average citizen of who’s boss, a sign that resistance to state policies is feared?

As Jessen points out, the dangerous thing about this spirit of prohibition is that “once it’s out of the bottle, it spreads like an infection” whose first casualty is tolerance: “The fettered citizens are going to loll in security; the more unbearable the state regulations, the more relaxed they will feel. But such a society, one that makes the individual citizen and he alone responsible for all possible environmental sins, can easily become the blind accomplice to the worst catastrophes on the international stage.”

[..]When does the rule of law break down? It breaks down when laws are no longer passed with the consent of free people, when citizens no longer feel that the law is just, when regulations become so numerous that it is virtually impossible even for decent individuals not to break the law on a regular basis and when the authorities are incapable of protecting their country’s borders while criminals rule the streets. It breaks down when the law appears increasingly arbitrary, when it invades the most intimate details of the life of law-abiding citizens while it allows great freedom to criminals. In short, it breaks down when it no longer corresponds to reality and to the sense of justice experienced by ordinary people.

Unless current trends are changed, I fear parts of Western Europe could reach critical mass soon.

Do read the whole thing.

Christopher Hitchens on the fruits of blind multiculturalism in the face of political Islam in the UK, Vanity Fair:

For the British mainstream, multiculturalism has been the official civic religion for so long that any criticism of any minority group has become the equivalent of profanity. And Islamic extremists have long understood that they need only suggest a racial bias—or a hint of the newly invented and meaningless term “Islamophobia”—in order to make the British cough and shuffle with embarrassment. Prince Charles himself, the heir to the throne and thus the heir to the headship of the Church of England, has announced his sympathy for Islam and his wish to be the head of all faiths and not just one. This may sound good, if absurd (a chinless prince who becomes head of a church because his mother dies?), but only if you forget that it was Prince Charles who encouraged the late King Fahd, of Saudi Arabia, to contribute more than a million pounds to build … the Finsbury Park Mosque! If you want my opinion, our old district was a lot better off when the crowned heads of the world were busy neglecting it.

Anyway, you can’t be multicultural and preach murderous loathing of Jews, Britain’s oldest and most successful (and most consistently anti-racist) minority. And you can’t be multicultural and preach equally homicidal hatred of India, Britain’s most important ally and friend after the United States. My colleague Henry Porter sat me down in his West London home and made me watch a documentary that he thought had received far too little attention when shown on Britain’s Channel 4. It is entitled Undercover Mosque, and it shows film shot in quite mainstream Islamic centers in Birmingham and London (you can now find it easily on the Internet). And there it all is: foaming, bearded preachers calling for crucifixion of unbelievers, for homosexuals to be thrown off mountaintops, for disobedient and “deficient” women to be beaten into submission, and for Jewish and Indian property and life to be destroyed. “You have to bomb the Indian businesses, and as for the Jews, you kill them physically,” as one sermonizer, calling himself Sheikh al-Faisal, so prettily puts it. This stuff is being inculcated in small children—who are also informed that the age of consent should be nine years old, in honor of the prophet Muhammad’s youngest spouse. Again, these were not tin-roof storefront mosques but well-appointed and well-attended places of worship, often the beneficiaries of Saudi Arabian largesse. It’s not just the mosques, either. In West London there is a school named for Prince Charles’s friend King Fahd, with 650 pupils, funded and run by the government of Saudi Arabia. According to Colin Cook, a British convert to Islam (initially inspired by the former crooner Cat Stevens) who taught there for 19 years, teaching materials said that Jews “engage in witchcraft and sorcery and obey Satan,” and incited pupils to list the defects of worthless heresies such as Judaism and Christianity.

And from the accompanying interview:

Q. Is London going to have another attack?
A. Of course. Everyone is. No city in the world is not going to have this. It’s probably going to be the dominant fact of our future. They will be able to demonstrate with fairly convincing means that there is nowhere that’s safe from them. It’s coming.

A “perfectly un-PC” image via Tim Blair (Via James Lileks):

In other great “You did what with that nuclear waste?!” moments in history (as opposed to cartoon life as above), I wonder what kind of images Arthur Kesller’s father used to sell his “atomic” product:

[Arthur Kesller] was born in Budapest in 1905 to assimilated Jewish parents. His father was a businessman who failed most of the time but who occasionally hit the jackpot: immediately before and during the first half of World War I, he made a fortune (soon lost) by manufacturing and selling soap that contained radium. Radioactivity was then a recently discovered phenomenon, and many believed the rays to be life-enhancing and disease-curing.

A marketer’s dream that soap surely would have been. Well, several decades after initial deployment anyway. I can picture it now: Three long glowing legs kick out of the bathtub caucetishly, soapie splashes mushrooming around it; the camera mists up like a window on a crisp nuclear winter morning as it closes in on her radiant smile. Fade to black. Beautiful.

This has already been posted all over the joint, but just in case you missed it:

The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don’t have to lie. I don’t have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don’t have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine. I don’t have to say that everyone’s special or that the rich cause poverty or that all religions are a path to God. I don’t have to claim that a bad writer like Alice Walker is a good one or that a good writer like Toni Morrison is a great one. I don’t have to pretend that Islam means peace.

Of course, like everything, this candor has its price. A politics that depends on honesty will be, by nature, often impolite. Good manners and hypocrisy are intimately intertwined, and so conservatives, with their gimlet-eyed view of the world, are always susceptible to charges of incivility. It’s not really nice, you know, to describe things as they are.

This is leftism’s great strength: it’s all white lies. That’s its only advantage, as far as I can tell. None of its programs actually works, after all. From statism and income redistribution to liberalized criminal laws and multiculturalism, from its assault on religion to its redefinition of family, leftist policies have made the common life worse wherever they’re installed. But because it depends on—indeed is defined by—describing the human condition inaccurately, leftism is nothing if not polite. With its tortuous attempts to rename unpleasant facts out of existence—he’s not crippled, dear, he’s handicapped; it’s not a slum, it’s an inner city; it’s not surrender, it’s redeployment—leftism has outlived its own failure by hiding itself within the most labyrinthine construct of social delicacy since Victoria was queen.

[..]

And because we’ve allowed leftists to define the language of political good manners—don’t say women are less scientific; don’t remark that black people bear the same responsibility for their actions as whites; don’t point out that the gunman was a Muslim, it’s not nice—the sort of person willing to speak the truth isn’t always the sort of person you want to be seen with. It sometimes takes, I mean, a Rush Limbaugh or a Sean Hannity to withstand the obloquy attached to stating the facts of the matter. If these people in their public personae seem harsh to more genteel conservatives, it may be because it requires that extra dollop of aggression to shatter the silence created by the Left’s increasingly elaborate sensitivities.

Self:

Chapter 1: “Life’s little contradictions”, by Tim Blair
Chapter 2: “A Self-Hater’s Guide To Science”, by P. Granate

The latest issue of the New Statement is some kind of cheese-eating wankfest, which I don’t recommend wasting your time on, but here’s a little bit of comedy that frothed out of the jibberish:

Agnès Poirier, a young French woman who now resides in London, expounds on why so many French people are moving to London:

The culture shock feels intense and elating. For some, it proves too hard. In 2004, the French consulate had to help repatriate 300 young French people who, according to one official, “couldn’t adapt to the harshness of the Anglo-Saxon lifestyle”.

Reverse Paris Syndrome, perhaps?

Frédéric Niel informs us, with not a hint of irony:

Far from the stereotype that a 35-hour week has bred laziness among French workers, young people place a great deal of importance on jobs: half of all young French people say they want to become civil servants, mainly for the job security.

Thats job security now, or else.

Chain-smoking movie director Bruno Dumont, “one of the most intriguing and talented film-makers in France”, shares his thoughts about his country:

“I think the French are diseased, [..] Everything happening in France at the moment shows it’s a diseased country. It’s a country that is searching for meaning and can’t find it. That’s why I feel a lot happier when I’m abroad.”

[..] In France, where secularism is highly prized, Dumont’s films have been criticised for being too “Catholic” in their portrayal of the battle between good and evil. He responds to this with derision. “I’m not Catholic. I don’t believe in God. But at the same time, I’m obsessed by the sacred, by spirituality. The question of redemption has been present well before Christianity, but as French people are a bit stupid, they see all that in religious terms.”

[..] Although his films do not directly engage with politics, Dumont believes that “to retain his dignity, an artist must live in opposition. He must be critical of his country. If not, then he is worthless.” He intends to vote for the “extreme left” in next month’s presidential elections.

Like I said, its a total wankfest. But it certainly gives you a bit of insight into the desease that has indeed gripped France.

Anthony Grant has more on the French malaise in “France’s New Surrender”, for the NY Sun.

And I hope you didn’t miss this latest symptom of the illness.

Nidra Poller in the first of the linked articles:

Against the Giuliani principle, represented in a mild French version by Nicolas Sarkozy, stands the jihad-intifada strategy: I disrespect your laws, defy your authority, attack you frontally and if you dare lift a hand against me I scream “victim” and call in my troops.

Well put.

Wise words from Dennis Prager in this piece that begins:

This past weekend, a friend of mine attended his 13-year-old son’s baseball game. What he saw encapsulates a major reason many of us fear for the future of America and the West.

Be sure to find out why.

This essay by Samir Khalil Samir on AsiaNews, explores how in Europe women’s rights are being sacrificed in the name of blind cultural relativism demanded by multiculturalism, in the process slowly destroying Europe’s identity. In particular he looks at the issues of polygamy, which some European countries are turning a blind eye on or even considering legitimising, and wife-beating.

An extract recalling an interesting recent episode in France:

[..]

The Imam of Vénissieux and women

To understand the humiliation in which women live in the Islamic world, I would like to recall a fact that sparked much debate in France. Last February 20th, the courts definitively rejected an appeal made by Imam Abdelkader Bouziane. An Algerian-national, Sheikh Abdelkader, imam of the mosque of Vénissieux, near Lyon, a polygamist and father of 16 (sixteen) children (14 of which French citizens) had been living in France since 1980.

He had been ordered on February 26, 2004, to leave the country by Interior Minister Sarkozy, for his inflammatory speeches and for incitement to hatred, but the ordinance was not enforced. On April 20, following an interview in the “Lyon Mag” newspaper, he was again served an expulsion order for his statements against women, in particular for having said that “the Koran authorizes a Muslim, in certain cases, to beat his wife,” that women must subjugated themselves to their husband and were not equal to men.

On April 23rd, the administrative tribunal of Lyon suspended the expulsion ordinance and rejected the Interior Ministry’s request. The imam went back to France in May 22. On October 5, 2004, the State Council cancelled the expulsion suspension, and the next day the iman was again expelled to Orano in Algeria. On June 21, 2005, the Lyon court declared him once again free, but on October 14, he was convicted in absentia. The imam filed an appeal, but on February 6, 2007, the courts definitively rejected his case.

The “Régards de femmes” Association of Lyon, which had sued the imam, declared: “The right to dignity, to respect, to the integrity of her body belongs to every woman in France. It will not be possible from now on to legitimize violence against women on the pretence of religion.”

The Imam’s interview

Here are a few extracts of the (famous) interview with Sheikh Abdelkader on the male-female relationship.

In your opinion, are women equal to men?

No. For example, women do not have the right to work alongside men, as they [women] could be tempted by adultery.

Must women necessarily be subjugated to men?

Yes, because the head of the family is always a man. But he must be fair to his wife: he must not beat her for no reason, nor consider her a slave.

Is this why you are favourable to polygamy?

Yes, a Muslim can have more than one wife. But not more than four! Plus, there are conditions.

But why can women not have more than one husband?

Because no one would know who fathered the children!

Are you in favour of the stoning [1] of women?

Yes, because beating one’s wife is allowed by the Koran, but under certain conditions, in particular if she betrays her husband. Please note however: the man does not have the right to beat her everywhere: not on the face, but in the lower parts, her legs, her stomach, her bottom. He can beat her vigorously so as to induce fear, so that she does not start again!

The Koran: wife beating is allowed

Various readers were up in arms, but in the end the imam defended himself saying that this is the Koran. And he’s right. If we open the Koran at Sura 4, verse 34, we can read:

“Men have authority over women due to the preference that Allah concedes to them over the other and because they spend their property [for women]; Good women are therefore obedient, guarding under secrecy that which Allah has preserved [sex]. [2] ; As for those on whose part you fear insubordination, admonish them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places and beat them; then if they obey you, do nothing further against them; Allah is high and great.”

Samir concludes:

I don’t know if the flag-wavers of multiculturalism realize how much human damage they cause. Actually, it is increasingly clear that so-called multicultural tolerance is only acquiescence to a subtle form of racism. In the name of cultural difference, in fact, everything is left to proceed on parallel tracks, without envisaging any progress, integration or betterment in the name of human dignity.

It is time for Europe to understand that religious law cannot prevail over civil law and that, above every form of tolerance, there is a country’s constitution. If this does not happen, Islam will be given carte blanche to colonize our customs.

UPDATE: Pamela Bone in The Australian today (which is International Women’s Day by the way. I do recall marching for it back in the Soviet Union as a child. Fun times!):

LET it be recorded that in the last decade of the 20th century the brave and great movement of Western feminism ended, not with a bang but with a whimper.

While you’re there, have a read of Janet Albrechtsen’s excellent report on the “Australia Deliberates” conference last week:

GROUP hugs get us nowhere. And that about sums up a talk-fest in Canberra last weekend called “Australia Deliberates”.

Here’s the transcript of her speech at the Quadrant dinner, in Sydney last Thursday night.

Extract:

What should be done? Simply, this. We all have to grasp that terrorism is not the biggest threat we face. The biggest threat is the ideology that drives it. It’s not enough to fight terror, vital though that is. The principal battleground is the world of ideas. The Islamists understand this. They understand that if they can hijack the human mind to the cause of hatred and lies, they have an army; and if they can further hijack the minds of their victims, they will win. They understand that psychological warfare – the fomenting of paranoia, resentment, hysteria and demoralisation — is their most effective weapon.

But we haven’t even understood that this is where the real battleground is. The liberal west, which worships at the shrine of reason and makes such a fetish of the power of intellect, will not acknowledge that ideas can kill – and we flinch from what we would have to do to address this. As a result Britain, Europe, America and Israel have all left the battleground of ideas totally undefended, allowing the unhindered advance of falsehood and hatred. Worse still, our intelligentsia and media often act as an Islamists’ fifth column.

It is only if we act against the ideology that is spreading such falsehood and hatred, and stop its advance under the umbrella of minority rights, that we have any chance of defending the free world. That means – while showing respect to Muslims who derive only spiritual sustenance from their faith – resisting the Islamism which uses religion to attack western values, life and liberty, reasserting western values and resisting any attempt to subvert them. It also means facing down in public the lies spread about the west. Only if we stop deluding ourselves and take such action necessary for our survival will we stop sleepwalking to defeat.