SPEAKING WELL, SPEAKING ILL

It has been a while since I wrote about Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Attentive readers may remember that Ms. Ali resigned her parliamentary seat and left the Netherlands after the Dutch liberal party (VVD) showed their most quisling behaviour in years - not that one should have expected much better since they bailed on Hans Wiegel nearly two decades ago.

[Wikipedia article on the VVD:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Party_for_Freedom_and_Democracy
Bio-data on Hans Wiegel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Wiegel
Note especially this sentence: "He has 'threatened' to return to national politics a number of times, usually resulting in the VVD going up in the polls".]

That does not mean that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has disappeared. Her book 'INFIDEL' has gotten good reviews (and, as a worthwhile backgrounder, you might want to read Ian Buruma's 'A MURDER IN AMSTERDAM' at the same time.
[I encourage you to buy both books]

Expect more from her over the next several years - this is not a woman who is easily silenced.



Here's an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (in English) in Der Spiegel:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,399263,00.html

It's well worth a read, especially as it would never be published in the Netherlands - too divisive.

Quotes:

"---The cartoons should be displayed everywhere. After all, the Arabs can't boycott goods from every country. They're far too dependent on imports. And Scandinavian companies should be compensated for their losses. Freedom of speech should at least be worth that much to us."

"---Not a day passes, in Europe and elsewhere, when radical imams aren't preaching hatred in their mosques. They call Jews and Christians inferior, and we say they're just exercising their freedom of speech. When will the Europeans realize that the Islamists don't allow their critics the same right? After the West prostrates itself, they'll be more than happy to say that Allah has made the infidels spineless."

"---Oddly enough, my critics never specify how far I can go. How can you address problems if you're not even allowed to clearly define them? Like the fact that Muslim women at home are kept locked up, are raped and are married off against their will -- and that in a country in which our far too passive intellectuals are so proud of their freedom."



Information on MS. Ali can be found on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali

She's currently in the United States, working for the American Enterprise Institute.
http://www.aei.org/scholars/scholarID.117,filter.all/scholar.asp


The Netherlands loss is our gain. How ironic that even when bright people are attracted to Europe, they still braindrain right on over to the United States.

In this instance, that probably has to do with the Dutch government being a bunch of paper-pushing wussies ever since they caved in to Napoleon over two centuries ago. Red-tape-ism, political cowardice, and apathy have long since become endemic diseases in the Netherlands - they've hardly amounted to a hill of beans after the assassination of Johan de Witt in any case.

And yes, I enjoy speaking ill of the Dutch. It's a lovely job, someone has to do it.