Jewish Chronicle, 12 May 2006

I had the enormous privilege last week of appearing on a platform with Ayaan Hirsi Ali at the centennial meeting of the American Jewish Committee in Washington.

Ms Hirsi Ali is the Somalian-born Dutch MP who now lives under round-the-clock police protection, because her uncompromising opposition to Islamist fascism has resulted in a death sentence upon her by the people whose monstrosities she has devoted her life to defeating.

The daughter of a Muslim intellectual, she fled an arranged marriage and sought asylum in the Netherlands. There she observed the hidden plight of many Muslim women, suffering from such obscenities as genital mutilation or ‘honour killings’ when family members suspect them of sexual impropriety.

This led her to help write an 11-minute film called Submission about the violence practised against Muslim women and its justification in religious doctrine. As a result the film’s director, Theo van Gogh, was murdered and Ms Hirsi Ali went into hiding for her life as the Dutch finally woke up to the horrendous madness that now threatened to engulf their society.

Subsequently, however, Ms Hirsi Ali emerged from the shadows and went into politics, where despite the threat to her life she continues to call for reforms both to Islam and to immigration. Muslims, she says, must openly debate why their religion has provided justification for acts of terrorism, and Europeans need to grasp that their failure to assimilate immigrant Muslim communities derives from a tolerance that has gone too far.

Her courage is simply astounding. In the flesh she appears quiet, demure and modest. At the AJC conference she spoke briefly and simply, and you could have heard a pin drop. What she said was devastating. ‘I used to hate you’ she said. In her Somalian Muslim family, she said, she was brought up to hate the Jews.

She was taught that the Jews were to blame for the war in Somalia, for driving the Palestinians out of their homes, for the fact that no water came out of Somalian taps. ‘If my mother was unkind to me, I knew the Jews were definitely behind it’, she said. The Jews, she was taught, were evil, had evil powers and used these to evil ends.

But somehow she managed to grasp that she was being taught lies, and she determined to fight them. That was hard; learning to hate was easy, she said, but unlearning it was very difficult. Yet she did it; and now she stood before an audience of more than 1500 Jews and said: ‘I am ashamed of my prejudices against you in the past’.

Her personal moral and physical courage obviously make her a most unusual and outstanding person. Even so, there were, she said, many Muslims like her who, having been taught in similar fashion to hate the Jews, had learned that this was wrong and that they had been fed a diet of lies. But the tragedy was that there were many more who were still driven by this hatred, blaming the Jews for 9/11, for the Iraq war, for the Danish cartoons and for every ill they could think of.

The conclusion she reaches from all this is one that should be rammed home to the pusillanimous governments of Britain and Europe. The lesson of the Holocaust, she said, was ‘never appease evil’. The choice over what to do about Iran’s President Ahmadinejad was not between peace and war. It was a choice between war against an Ahmadinejad who possessed the nuclear bomb and war with an Ahmadinejad who did not possess a nuclear bomb.

For such moral clarity, she was applauded to the echo. Later that evening, some 2000 people packed into the AJC’s gala dinner where an extraordinary line-up presented itself on the platform – President Bush, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. And just in case anyone might have thought the AJC’s pulling power was waning, there were video presentations from Israel’s Ehud Olmert, Australia’s John Howard and Poland’s President Lech Kaczynski.

President Bush declared that he would never let Israel be destroyed. Angela Merkel said rather more emotionally that Germany’s Chancellor would never let Israel be destroyed. Everyone applauded wildly except for Kofi Annan, who appeared to have difficulty moving one palm towards the other.

In the end, though, none of them delivered anything more than platitudes. We were left none the wiser about how Ahmadinejad was to be stopped from getting the bomb. We heard nothing about how free societies were to defend themselves against cultural submission. President Bush praised his wise best friend Angela Merkel. The AJC Director David Harris praised Angela Merkel. Prime Minister Olmert praised the AJC.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Europe where organisations like the AJC are presented as the world Jewish conspiracy, it’s appeasement as normal.

Posted by melanie at May 12, 2006