taking freedom for granted

The Somali-Dutch provocateur and politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali was interviewed in New York this past week during the PEN World Voices event.

Like an increasing number of immigrants in the West who refuse to have a “victim” label pinned to their lapels, the Dutch-Somalian actress, author, and politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali represents something of a problem for liberal intellectuals. A short film she cowrote, “Submission,” was shown on Dutch television in August 2004. Its subject was the mistreatment of Muslim women at the hands of Muslim men.

Deliberately provocative, the film projected words from the Koran onto exposed female flesh. Just over two months later, the director, Theo van Gogh, was savagely murdered by a Muslim fundamentalist….

[PEN president Ron] Chernow’s introduction was curiously ungracious. It consisted largely of a warning that the audience might find itself in agreement with only some of what Ms. Ali had to say, or perhaps just a small portion of it, or even none of it. Nevertheless, he assured us, we could all agree that she is a woman of uncommon courage and integrity….

“My criticism of the West, especially of liberals, is that they do take freedom for granted,” Ms. Ali [said]. She noted that Western Europeans born after World War II are unused to conflict. “They have lost the instinct to recognize that there can be such a thing as an enemy or a threat to freedom, and that’s what I’m witnessing in Europe now,” she stated. “[There is] a pacifist ideology that violence should never be used in any circumstances, and so we should talk and talk and talk. Even when your opponent tells you, ‘I don’t want to talk to you, I want to destroy you,’ the reaction is, ‘Please, let’s talk about the fact that you want to destroy me!’”…

At the end of the interview, the Dutch politician and author was given rousing applause, and it became clear that whatever cognitive dissonance had been in the room belonged less to those who had paid to listen to her than to those who had invited her to speak.

(from the New York Sun, via Atlas Shrugs)

Two things of note here:

1) the hostility to Hirsi Ali before she even had a chance to open her mouth (which I find curious, since her film Submission was nothing if not “transgressive“—and for a while now “transgressive” has been the highest compliment paid by the critical establishment to a work of art. I guess it’s going out of fashion, or is it only out of fashion if it disapproves of breaking the cultural taboos of “the Other”?)

2) Hirsi Ali’s allusion to the nub of the problem: the liberal West’s denial of the existence evil.