[lit-ideas] The Caged Virgin
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 12 May 2006 05:25:32 -0400
The Caged Virgin
Holland's shameful treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
By Christopher Hitchens
Three years ago, at a conference in Sweden, I was
introduced to a Dutch member of parliament named
Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Originally born in Somalia, she
had been a refugee in several African countries
and eventually a refugee from her own family,
which had decided to "give" her in marriage to a
distant male relative she had never met. Thinking
to escape from such confines by moving to the
Netherlands, she was appalled to find that radical
Islam had followed her there—or in fact preceded
her there—and was proselytizing among Turkish and
Moroccan and Indonesian immigrants. In ancient
towns like Rotterdam and Amsterdam, where once the
refugees from Catholic France and inquisitional
Spain had sought refuge, and where Baruch Spinoza
had been excommunicated and anathematized for his
opposition to Jewish fundamentalism, there were
districts where Muslim women were subjected to
genital mutilation and where the Dutch police were
afraid to set foot.
Entering politics to try to alert the European
left to this danger, she was first elected as a
deputy for the Labor Party, but after 9/11 she
changed her allegiance to the Liberals. This, she
explained, was because many Labor spokesmen
preferred to think of immigrants as possessing
"group rights." They had become so infatuated by
their own "multi-culti" style that they had
ignored the rights of individuals—especially women
and girls—who were imprisoned within their own
ghetto. (That, by the way, was precisely Spinoza's
problem as well. The Dutch rabbis cursed him and
condemned him in their own sectarian "court," of
which the Christian authorities approved because
it took care of dangerous secularism among Jews.)
At the Swedish event, Ayaan Hirsi Ali spoke calmly
and rationally about the problem. I never know
whether or not it's right to mention, with female
public figures, the fact of arresting and
hypnotizing beauty, but I notice that I seem to
have done so. Shall I just say that she was a
charismatic figure in Dutch politics, mainly
because of the calm and reason to which I just
alluded? She was the ideal choice of collaborator
for the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh (a distant
descendant of the anguished painter) on
Submission, a film about the ignored problem of
enslaved and oppressed women in Holland. Ayaan
Hirsi Ali wrote the screenplay and provided the
movie's voice-over.
You probably remember what happened next: Van Gogh
was bicycling to work one morning in 2004 in the
capital city of one of Europe's most peaceful and
civilized countries when he was shot down in the
street and then mutilated in a ritual fashion by
an Islamist fanatic. The murderer (who had
expected to become a martyr but who was only
wounded in the leg by the gentle Dutch cops) left
a long "martyr's letter" pinned to van Gogh's
corpse by an equally long knife. In it, he warned
Ayaan Hirsi Ali that she was the next target, and
he gave a long and detailed account of all the
offenses that would condemn her to an eternity in
hell. (I noticed, reading this appalling screed
when it was first published, that he obsessively
referred to her as "Mrs. Hirshi Ali," as if trying
to make her sound like a Jew. Other references to
Jews in the text were even less tasteful.)
She has had to live under police protection ever
since, and when I saw her again last week in
Washington, I had to notice that there were
several lofty and burly Dutchmen acting in an
unaffected but determined way somewhere off to the
side. I would urge you all to go out and buy her
new book, The Caged Virgin, which is subtitled An
Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam. The
three themes of the story are: first, her own
gradual emancipation from tribalism and
superstition; second, her work as a
parliamentarian to call attention to the crimes
being committed every day by Islamist thugs in
mainland Europe; and third, the dismal silence, or
worse, from many feminists and multiculturalists
about this state of affairs.
Before being elected to parliament, she worked as
a translator and social worker among immigrant
women who are treated as sexual chattel—or as the
object of "honor killings"—by their menfolk, and
she has case histories that will freeze your
blood. These, however, are in some ways less
depressing than the excuses made by qualified
liberals for their continuation. At all costs, it
seems, others must be allowed "their culture"
and—what is more—must be allowed the freedom not
to be offended by the smallest criticism of it. If
they do feel offended, their very first resort is
to violence and intimidation, sometimes with the
support of the embassies of foreign states. (How
interesting it is that the two European states
most recently attacked in this way—Holland and
Denmark—should be the ones that have made the
greatest effort to be welcoming to immigrants.)
Considering that this book is written by a woman
who was circumcised against her will at a young
age and then very nearly handed over as a bargain
with a stranger, it is written with quite
astonishing humor and restraint.
But here is the grave and sad news. After being
forced into hiding by fascist killers, Ayaan Hirsi
Ali found that the Dutch government and people
were slightly embarrassed to have such a prominent
"Third World" spokeswoman in their midst. She was
first kept as a virtual prisoner, which made it
almost impossible for her to do her job as an
elected representative. When she complained in the
press, she was eventually found an apartment in a
protected building. Then the other residents of
the block filed suit and complained that her
presence exposed them to risk. In spite of
testimony from the Dutch police, who assured the
court that the building was now one of the safest
in all Holland, a court has upheld the demand from
her neighbors and fellow citizens that she be
evicted from her home. In these circumstances, she
is considering resigning from parliament and
perhaps leaving her adopted country altogether.
This is not the only example that I know of a
supposedly liberal society collaborating in its
own destruction, but I hope at least that it will
shame us all into making The Caged Virgin a best
seller.
http://www.slate.com/id/2141276/
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