White Backlash in Holland

Co-Blogger Formosa (22 year old Taiwanese man, living in The Hague, studied in London) translates into English some interesting Dutch comments on the Hirsi Ali events of the past week.

In former posts, I have said enough about the shallowness of Hirsi Magan's convictions and about the misuse that has been made (with her collaboration) of the publicity they generated.

The Dutch consservative (Government-) party "VVD" states in its' party-programme (1947) that it derives its moral values from a "vrijzinnig christendom" (a liberal christianity), a statement that was repeated in 1993 by its main ideologue, Frits Bolkestein, the former European Commissioner, when, at the end of his book about Liberalism, he arrived at the conclusion, that Enlightenment values are no firm basis for a liberal moral attitude in politics.

That was no hindrance for hiring the "Caged Virgin" for a deputy post in 2002, knowing that she rejects ALL religion and knowing, that she deems it the real basis for all wrongdoing: for terrorism, for suppression of women, etc. What the VVD was looking for, was getting a part of the populist anti-immigration vote that came up with the Fortuyn hype in 2001/2002. And doing so, without risking themselves to be contaminated with racism and xenophobia.

The first major problems to the VVD party arose, when Hirsi Ali started to discuss the constitutional right of religious parents, to send their children to schools of their denomination. This typical Dutch historical compromise, embedded in the country's constitution (Art. 26) in 1922, was traded in those years, by the social-democrat- and liberal parties, against the christian-democrats' acceptance of the general right to vote for men and women. Now, that muslim parents were using this constitutional right, to create schools on an Islamic basis, populist politicians were looking for ways, to make that impossible. The major Government party, the Christian Democrats, were not amused at all, for the Christian Education constitues one of their main power bases.
This was the first instance, I remember, that Hirsi Ali had to make a compromise and promise to attack only muslim schools in the future.
Another, less publicised instance, was, when Hirsi Ali made a prposal to forbid, not only circumcision of women, but also of boys, thus endangering the jewish vote for the VVD party.
And the last, and least understood, moment was, when she declared that the condemnation of a Dutch muslim boy who had only taken part in meetings of the so-called "Hofstad Group", but who had not participated in terrorist actions, was unjustly condemned to many years of imprisonment, only for his "opinions".

The only explanation I am able to present for it, is this:

Hirsi Ali has the illusion, that her actions would lead to a general and irrevocable condemnation of Islam as a religion by the Dutch state. This religion is so devilish, that you cannot held reponsible common muslims for their opinions. They have been "indoctrinated", and, as she repeatedly stated, the only way to feel secure with their presence in the country, is to make them "non-muslims". Another indication of that state of mind are her remarkable comments on young muslim girls, who are completely integrated, who wear "naveltruitjes" (belly button pullovers), but who are the most dangerous infiltrators of all muslims, because of the fact that they still are from muslim families and "will" later on become -inevitably- fundamentalist headscarf-bearers who indoctrinate their sons.

The fact, that Hirsi Ali's slightly opportunist selection of subjects and methods she choose to discuss her ideas, has undoubtedly led to an unwelcome laying bare of the conformist and provincialist Dutch tendencies, should not obscure another fact, which is, that she, basically, was consistent, in her idea-fixe about Islam and religion in general.

It has to be feared, that in her new country, where "faith-based" social actions are being favoured above neutral ones, Hirsi Ali will have to make a still narrower selection among her priorities, in order to be accepted there.

But that is a subject we will take up when we continue our comments on the Weekly Standard.

For the moment, let us stay with Holland, and agree with most of the intellectually more enlihghtened commenters there: The Moor hath done her Work, The Moor is excused (Der Mohr hat seine Schuldigkeit getan; der Mohr kann gehn, [German, F.v.Schiller]).

Or, like a French urban planner (for the Dutch share their provincial culture with many other nations) once said about a muslim neighbourhood gang leader whom he had helped to gain and hold control over his group of friends, at the moment the featured boy started to issue opinions in a civic participation procedure about the projects in his neighbourhood: "He did his job, I paid him for it. Now he should not think he can exert his civil rights like any other!"

Who is sabotaging who's integration here?

The Hirsi Ali Case: Not: "Voltaire and Erasmus Are Spinning" but the topspinners of the neocon AEI

Spiegel Online's Henryk Broder: The Hirsi Ali Case: "Voltaire and Erasmus Are Spinning in their Graves" - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News. The lamentable Dutch handing of the newest Hirsi "Ali" sensation hasn't helped to prevent the neoconservative project with her: As a collaborator of the AEI, she will be a witness for the proposition, that Islam creates terrorism. All by itself.

During the 1.300 years that Islam exists, there have been, at given points in time, interesting precursors of the AEI's newest proposition. The Crusaders (Century XII) were awed by the "Assassins", whom they killed indiscriminately, the Spanish Inquisition (Century XVI) condemned muslims (and jews) to be burned at the stake (Erasmus was the foremost protester against it in his time) and Serbs and Croats roughly did the same during the nineties of Century XX to Bosnian Muslims.

Voltaire, another supposed "spinner" in his "grave", makes his "Candide" (XVIII Century) finally find rest and civilisation in Muslim Constantinople, after having visited all the horrors of Christian fundamentalism of his time.

Neither Erasmus, nor Voltaire would have felt much intellectual kinship with this modern "passionaria".

In spite of the fact that she was born in a well-to-do powerful family-clan, with a liberal attitude to religion (her brother was educated at a christian school in Nairobi), that she got a good education herself from age 12 to 22, paid for by the UN refugee fund, at a girls' college in Nairobi, organized as a British boarding school, she managed to make believe European authorities and public, that she is a victim of radical Islam who saved herself from an awful forced marriage. Too many of the stories she told, are frauds.

The AEI people know that, as well as her former patrons from the Dutch Conservative party did, when they engaged her to catch some of the xenophobic vote at the elections, three years ago.

A second aspect of the neoconservative projects is the contribution they hope to get from her in presenting the weak old European ruling elites as "appeasement"-prone-, also unreliable allies in the struggle for a new American century. A forerunner for that was to be found in the "Wall Street Journal" of Monday 5/15, where Ajaan is cited as condemning the "social-democrat" European authorities for their misunderstanding of the dangers of the muslim religion and their "appeasement", where an all-out Inquisition were needed.

Hirsi Ali is wicked enough, not to repeat such statements in her declarations in Holland. With tears in her eyes, she thanked her colleagues-parliamentarian deputies for their "understanding" and their fair ways of debating, only hours after the publication of her opinion in the WSJ!

Her arrangement with the AEI includes apparently also a clause, that she stops pleading for womens rights, for free marriage and freethinking. Her press representative in The Hague released: "Ms. Hirsi Magan is going to work on terrorism. Subjects like headscarves will not be discussed by her in the U.S." So much for the "Caged Virgin"'s attachment to women's liberation.

All this is spin. But in Erasmus, Voltaire's and other great humanists' graves, no spinning is observed.

Someone else is spinning.

Hirsi Ali leaves Holland for a job at the AEI in Washington

Breaking news: Dutch press reports today that Ajaan Hirsi Ali will announce tomorrow, that she has been engaged by the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative thinktank in Washington. As a consequence, she will step down as a deputy in the Dutch Parliament.
Hirsi Ali (Hirsi Madan by her real name) was exposed last week as a fraud on Dutch television, as has been reported in the precedent post on this blog.
She will probably charge the Dutch for their "shameful treatment" of her, saying that she has been forced to flee for a second time a country full of Djimmis.
I do not expect that the idyll between the neocons and the black virgin will last more than two or three years.

...And the Virgin appeared to Christopher Hitchens...

...in the "hypnotizing" shape of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Listen to the story of this epiphany as it occurred in magic Sweden to a sinful soul:

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?

(Christopher Hitchens: Holland's shameful treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. in "Slate Magazine", 05.08.06)

(To be continued)

That is what I wrote, three days ago. I had some text in mind, where Joan of Arc, the Virgin of (New) Orleans, would be compared favorably to this latter-day "Caged Virgin" (Title of Ajaan's book, published recently in the US).

But that is not needed any more, now that Dutch VARA television (in it's "Zembla" programme) on May 11, featured a 40-minute research into Ajaan Hirsi's story. Confronted with testimony by her brother, her former teachers, her aunt and her former husband (living in Toronto), she had to admit that she "lied" about

• her family, (who are not fundamentalist at all),
  
• her story as a refugee (during 10 years, from the age of 12 to 22, she lived in Nairobi, Kenya, the UN paying for her studies), living in a relative prosperity,
  
• the story of her marriage (her Canadian-Somalian husband accepted her divorce plans without any problem)
• her being menaced by her "clan" or extended family - in fact, she stayed all the time in contact with them. Although they did not approve of her behavior, they did not let her down.

Ajaan Hirsi Magan, for Magan is her real family name, is a fraud.

She is an obsessed person. Obsessed by an unquenchable hatred of Islam. If her story of being clitorextomized by her grandmother at the age of 9 (this would have happened in Ethiopia then, for the Magan family left Saudi-Arabia, for Ethiopia after one year), is true, this hatred is understandable, but we have to doubt all the stories Ajaan has told up to now.

But, even if it has happened, clitorextomizing is not linked to Islam at all. Islam condoned it in countries of Northern Africa where it has been (and still is) practiced since thousands of years, but it does not exist in countries like Morocco, Turkey or Indonesia. It is still practiced under Christianism (Copts) in Egypt and among Christians and animists in Central and Western Africa. Of course, neither Christianism, nor Islam, should have condoned this kind of practices.

That is why I agree, like every enlightened, and serious christian or islamic, person, with Ajaan, that suppression of women, let alone mutilating them, should be condemned and not be accepted in any form. Ajaan Hirsi Ali/Magan turned into a militant non-believer, while she was a member of Dutch Parliament. She had a relationship with a Dutch Professor of Leiden University, who is an extremist anti-religious pamflettist and she wrote a preface to his last book: "Atheïstisch Manifest en De onredelijkheid van religie" [Atheistic Manifest and The Unreasonableness of Religion] (Herman Philipse, 2004, Ed. Bert Bakker, Amsterdam, 198pp).

For the American public of her new book ("The Caged Virgin"), she deemed apparently inopportune to feature her rejection of all religion.

People like Ajaan Hirsi Ali are an easy victim to abuse by persons and movements who have other agendas. The Dutch "Liberal" Party, which made her MP in 2002 (as Hitchen's readers probably do not know, "liberal" in Europe means "conservative"), has (ab)used her as an easy vehicle to attract racist and islamophobic voters, without committing itself to racism. Now, Hitchens uses her as an easy vehicle to attack European double standards in the shape of the Dutch embarrassment with an anti-islamic "passionaria".

And, this is the only point, where Hitchens is right: Maybe the reaction of the apartment-owners in the rich neighbourhood (many of them members of- or voters for- the "Liberal" party she represents in Parliament) where she became a nuisance because of the surveillance she needs, provided by the Dutch Government, is only too understandable. But the fact, that no person, nor group or organisation in Holland, who say they are so engaged with her and her struggle, offered a housing for her, that is of a "double-dutchness", even I have difficulty to understand.

Now, even if she lied, even if she is a fraud, she needs protection more than ever. The leadership of the Dutch "Liberal" Party, who knew from the beginning about her fraud, but kept it silent, should be made to pay for it and explain themselves before the Dutch public.

And Hitchens, if he has some decency left, he should apologize to his readers.

From the Dutch daily NRC-Handelsblad, May 12, 2006: Caricaturist comment on television programme.
Naive, slightly racist, Fokke and Sukke say: "We understand Hirsi "Ali" completely - you should see it within the framework of a culture .... of lack of feelings of shame and honor".