Ayann ali Hirsi is a Dutch MP, born in Somalia, who has been criticial of funadamentalist Islam. This has, as you might imagine, earned her death threats. For example, she worked with Dutch filmaker Theo Va Gogh on Submission, a film critical of Islam's treatmet of women. After Van Gogh was brutally murdered, ali Hirsi was forced into hiding. (You can read more about it in her new book, The Caged Virgin.)
Because of all this, the Dutch government has placed her in a high security apartment in the Hague.
In a new variation on the NIMBY syndrome, her neighbors have sued. They claimed, among other things, that by making them feel unsafe, the presence of ali Hirsi violates Article 8 of the European Covention on Human Rights which guarantees respect for person's private and family life. A Dutch court has agreed and ordered that she be removed in four months.
The irony of using the concept of human rights to essentially turn a person into a pariah because she has had the temerity to exercise her right of free speech is staggering. Ali Hirsi has become a "nuisance" because she is the target of mysogynistic fascists who are bent on the destruction of human rights, yet the response of her neighbors and the Dutch courts is to proclaim a fundamental right to throw her to the wolves. The court has, essentially, proclaimed a constitutional right of surrender.
I understand the anxiety of those who feel exposed because of ali Hirsi's presence (although the police claim her building is now the safest in Holland), but the Islamofascist threat, by its very nature, attempts to impose costs on having a free society. Publish the "wrong" cartoons and people riot. Make the "wrong" film and buildings get blown up. Perhaps there would have been a better place for ali Hirsi, but to recognize a constitutional right to be free of this is to be complicit in one's own destruction.
Christopher Hitchens reports that ali Hirsi is considering resigning from parliament and leaving her adopted country.
She tried, but perhaps the Dutch can't stomach a hero in their midst.
1 comment:
In order to have a stomach, you have to have a backbone. As we've seen, most in Europe don't. Pity. A larger pity it that it's happening here. Woe to high and low alike, when the people lose their courage.
Post a Comment