Hirsi Ali Comes to America

George Will, Sun Times, RCP interviews Hirsi Ali, the outspoken Muslim legislator in the Netherlands, who became a marked woman after making a film protesting beating of women under the Quran. The film was made with a descendent of Van Gogh, who was brutally murdered in the street with a warning that she was next. After her neighbors objected to the security risk, she was essentially forced out of the country and came to the US.

According to Will, "Holland evidently tolerates everything except skepticism about the sacramental nature of multiculturalism." Liberals take note. Free speech is more threatened by Islamofascism than any measures we've seen here in the US under the Patriot Act. Liberals who want to preserve the right of terrorists to freely use the internet at libraries should think about filmmakers being murdered in the streets. Here is Bret Stephens, WSJ, quoting Ali on liberals blinded by nonjudgemental multiculturalism, letting others fight this battle where they are most at risk:

But the really "lethal mistake," she says, "is the confusion of Islam, which is a body of ideas, with ethnicity." Liberals especially are reluctant to criticize the content of Islam because they fear that it is tantamount to criticizing Muslims as a group, and is therefore almost a species of racism. Yet Muslims, she says, "are responsible for their ideas. If it is written in the Koran that you must kill apostates, kill the unbelievers, kill gays, then it is legitimate and urgent to say, 'If that is what your God tells you, you have to modify it.'

Ali, now based at the American Enterprise Institute, is writing a book about the open society and its enemies, and is herself the subject of another, "Murder in Amsterdam". She seems happy to be in America:

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.

From a survivor from the front line of Western civilization, welcome words of warning to America where the debate is still raging.

UPDATE: One of my friends emailed me about this important essay I somehow overlooked, by Bernard Lewis, noted authority, Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton. Via RCP, "Bring Them Freedom, Or They Destroy Us".