Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s uncomfortable message

On March 25, the International Herald Tribune published an op-ed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in which she made an appeal on behalf of the 1.5 to 3 million women who go “missing” each year due to “gender-based violence or neglect.”

This cause is, of course, supported by many well-known people: Hillary Clinton has spoken out, as has Laura Bush. Jane Fonda is a very vocal advocate for women’s rights, and a big supporter of Eve Ensler’s V-Day Movement to End Violence Against Women and Girls—which is an international organization.

In her op-ed, Hirsi Ali called on “us” in the West to act:

Women are not organized or united. Those of us in rich countries, who have attained equality under the law, need to mobilize to assist our fellows. Only our outrage and our political pressure can lead to change….

Tnitial steps could be taken by world leaders to begin eradicating the mass murder of women:

A tribunal such as the court of justice in The Hague should look for the 113 million to 200 million women and girls who are missing.

A serioternational effort must urgently be made to precisely register violence against girls and women, country by country.

We need a worldwide campaign to reform cultures that permit this kind of crime. Let’s start to name them and shame them.

All of which sounds sensible and smart. And she was quite serious about calling out some of the worst offenders

The Islamists are engaged in reviving and spreading a brutal and retrograde body of laws. Wherever the Islamists implement Shariah, or Islamic law, women are hounded from the public arena, denied education and forced into a life of domestic slavery.

as well as their “enablers”:

Cultural and moral relativists sap our sense of moral outrage by claiming that human rights are a Western invention. Men who abuse women rarely fail to use the vocabulary the relativists have provided them. They claim the right to adhere to an alternative set of values - an “Asian,” “African” or “Islamic” approach to human rights.

This mind-set needs to be broken. A culture that carves the genitals of young girls, hobbles their minds and justifies their physical oppression is not equal to a culture that believes women have the same rights as men.

This, I believe, is the source of the continued hostility toward Hirsi Ali: She doesn’t sweep the problem under the carpet in the name of “being nice.” She is unafraid to stigmatize the villains. She names names.

Christopher Hitchens alludes to this when he writes

[Hirsi Ali] is an author and a politician who has made the transition from early Islamic fanaticism (she initially endorsed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie) to a full-out acceptance and advocacy of secularism and of Enlightenment ideals. Hirsi Ali calls for a pluralist democracy where all opinion is protected but where the law does not—in the name of some pseudo-tolerance—permit genital mutilation, “honor” killing, and forced marriage. One might have expected a more robust defense of this position from the Dutch, and indeed the international left, but instead there has been a response of extraordinary and sullen ungenerousness, as if a lone woman defying taboo and standing up to violence has in some way let down the side and become a menace to multiculturalism.

And Marlise Simons, writing in today’s International Herald Tribune reports:

Hirsi Ali urged the Dutch to stand firm and not to appease immigrants, asserting that Dutch Muslims, like much of Islam, were largely backward. She said they needed to free themselves from the control of an archaic clergy who preached the subjugation of women and ostracized homosexuals. The many Islamic schools and mosques could breed militants, she argued, urging that they be closed.

All this disturbed the Dutch culture of consensus.

Apparently, it isn’t only the Dutch culture of consensus that is disturbed. The New York Times, carrying Marlise Simons’s IHT piece in a different form, published those two paragraphs this way:

Ms. Hirsi Ali urged the Dutch to stand firm, and not to appease immigrants. She said Dutch Muslims needed to free themselves from the control of clerics who preached subjugation of women and ostracized homosexuals. The 40 or more Islamic schools isolate children and could breed dangerous militants, she argued, so they should be closed.

All this disturbed the Dutch culture of consensus.

Missing from the Times’s account is this seemingly crucial assertion by Hirsi Ali.

asserting that Dutch Muslims, like much of Islam, were largely backward.

The American culture of consensus seems to be that we can talk about the problem in a general way—on that we can all agree. But when it comes time to doing something about it, we cannot even name the problem.

Wretchard writes on a related point over at the Belmont Club, and he gives it a name—”the Great Polite Silence.” He says it’s over:

Until September 11 it was possible for the more “enlightened” segments of society to regard patriotism, religion and similar sentiments with the kind of amused tolerance that one might reserve for simpletons. Nothing that a little institutionalization and spare change couldn’t straighten out. The problem for the Democratic Party is that the Great Polite Silence is over. People like Chomsky and President Bush have stopped being hypothetical and become all too real. Bring it on.