Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an exile yet again has finally come home. At least to her spiritual home, according to George Will. She has left the Netherlands and is now living in the United States, working at the American Enterprise Institute. She's working on a book that will, undoubtedly, get her even more death threats than she already lives under. She cares not at all. Home at last.
She calls herself "a dissident of Islam" because, given what Allah supposedly enjoins and what she knows is right, "the cognitive dissonance is, for me, too much." She says she is not "a militant atheist," but the emphasis is on the adjective.
Slender, elegant, stylish and articulate (in English, Dutch and Swahili), she has found an intellectual home here at the American Enterprise Institute, where she is writing a book that imagines Muhammad meeting, in the New York Public Library, three thinkers — John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper, each a hero of the unending struggle between (to take the title of Popper's 1945 masterpiece) "The Open Society and Its Enemies." Islamic extremists — the sort who were unhinged by some Danish cartoons — will be enraged. She is unperturbed.
Neither is she pessimistic about the West. It has, she says, "the drive to innovate." But Europe, she thinks, is invertebrate. After two generations without war, Europeans "have no idea what an enemy is." And they think, she says, that leadership is an antiquated notion because they believe that caring governments can socialize everyone to behave well, thereby erasing personal accountability and responsibility. "I can't even tell it without laughing," she says, laughing softly. Clearly she is where she belongs, at last.
Read the whole thing. Hirsi Ali is a true inspiration, despite what some of the Dutch did to her at the end. They lost a lot. We are all the richer for their shortsightedness.
UPDATE: Clarified that it was not all of the Dutch people who tried to get rid of Hirsi Ali. Michael van der Galien pointed that out in comments. I knew Michael was a very strong supporter of hers and was very upset with the government over the treatment of Hirsi Ali.
Gaius: I am Dutch as well. Not all the Dutch are opposed to Ayaan. Those who support Ayaan whole heartedly are, I admit, a minority, but we do exist.
I understand that, Michael. Not everyone over there did this. I know you have been a strong supporter of her. It is too bad that not enough of your countrymen realized what a treasure they were losing.
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Gaius: thanks for the clarification. I also want to point out that I did not mean it as an attack on you or anything of that kind. Just as a… nuance.
I didn’t take it as an attack. Not to worry.
I noticed you put in “some of” the Dutch as well. Thanks man, greatly appreciate that.
In this campaign in the West, to stop ostrich like behavior, we all need eachother. We cannot afford to generalize too much. Something with the old and new Europe
Ok, but we still have to make fun of the French every chance we get. Or at least I do!
O I agree with that of course. The French áre bastardly appeasers