You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (13 page)

She linked up with Theo van Gogh, a distant relative of the painter. Friends and critics alike described him as a provocateur: a typical loud-mouthed showman, who was always trying to get himself noticed by épatering the bourgeoisie.
Submission
, the ten-minute film he directed in 2004 from Hirsi Ali’s script, belied much that critics said about him, and much of what he said about himself. It is a formal, sombre work, in which the camera flits over the faces and bodies of young women. The first woman describes how she fell in love, and was whipped in accordance with the Koranic injunction that ‘The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication, flog each of them with a hundred stripes; let no compassion move you in their case, in a matter prescribed by God, if ye believe in God and the Last Day; and let a party of the believers witness their punishment.’ A second describes how her family compels her to marry a man who repels her. She pretends to be ‘unclean’, but when she can pretend no longer he forces himself on her. She submits because the Koran tells men, ‘When they have purified themselves, ye may approach them in any manner, time or place ordained for you by God.’ A third is raped by her uncle. ‘When I told my mother, she said she would take it up with my father. My father ordered her – and me – not to question his brother’s honour.’ Now she is pregnant, and knows her father will kill her for losing her virginity. She wants to kill herself, but cannot. The film ends with her saying, ‘I know that in the hereafter the one who commits suicide shall never count on Your mercy. Allah, giver and taker of life. You admonish all who believe to turn towards You in order to attain bliss. I have done nothing my whole life but turn to You. And now that I pray for salvation, under my veil, You remain silent as the grave I long for. I wonder how much longer I am able to submit!’

If van Gogh had produced a film on the religious oppression of puritan women in seventeenth-century Holland, or Orthodox Jewish women in nineteenth-century Poland, the jury at Cannes might have applauded. But he and Hirsi Ali wanted to challenge contemporary injustice, not to excavate the past.

He laughed when the first death threats arrived. ‘No one kills the village idiot,’ he told Hirsi Ali.

On the morning of 2 November 2004, Mohammed Bouyeri, a second-generation Moroccan immigrant who had joined the local jihadist sect the Hofstad Network, approached van Gogh on an Amsterdam street with a handgun. Van Gogh’s last words were, ‘Can’t we talk about this?’

There was to be no conversation.

Bouyeri shot van Gogh eight times in the chest, slit his throat and stuck a letter to Hirsi Ali onto his warm corpse with a butcher’s knife.

In the millions of words that have been written about Hirsi Ali, few commentators discuss what Bouyeri, or the ideologue who drafted the letter for him, said. The contents were too embarrassing, for they placed Europeans under an anti-fascist obligation to stir themselves. Hirsi Ali was going to be next, Bouyeri said. Because she had argued for women’s rights, she, like Salman Rushdie before her, had become the tool of ‘Jewish masters’: ‘It is a fact, that Dutch politics is dominated by many Jews who are a product of the Talmud schools; that includes your political party-members.’ Hirsi Ali was not Jewish – how could she be? – so the Hofstad group decided that because she had renounced religion she was ‘an infidel fundamentalist’ manipulated by the Elders of Zion. She did not ‘believe that a Supreme Being controls the entire universe’. She did not ‘believe that your heart, with which you cast away truth, has to ask permission from the Supreme Being for every beat’.

You can find the same reasoning among all varieties of religious rightists. The American evangelical Jerry Falwell said the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington were God’s punishment on ‘the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America’. Like Bouyeri, Falwell saw a vengeful God enforcing his punishments on decadent secularists.

In Amsterdam, the city of Spinoza and Anne Frank, anti-Semites had murdered a director for making a feminist film, and forced a black liberal into hiding. Hirsi Ali had good reasons to criticise European liberals, but she might have expected that they would have stood with her as she faced down murderous enemies. She was to learn a hard lesson. The response to van Gogh’s murder could not have been more different from the response to the attempts to assassinate Salman Rushdie. Instead of defending the victims of armed reaction, liberal opinion turned on them.

The New Anti-Jacobins

Liberal immigrants to Europe are caught on a fork. Native conservatives in their new country are against them because they are immigrants. Religious conservatives in their ‘community’ are against them because they are liberals. They ought to be able to turn to white liberals for support, but liberalism in Europe has turned septic. In the name of tolerance it is happy to abandon its friends and excuse its enemies.

The Dutch media went to work on Ayaan Hirsi Ali after van Gogh’s murder. A television crew travelled to East Africa and revealed that she had not fled from the war in Somalia, as she had said on her asylum application, but from a comfortable home in Kenya. The story was true, but it was not a revelation: she had told the leaders of her party long before that she was fleeing an arranged marriage. The journalists then alleged that she was not fleeing an arranged marriage. Of course I was, Hirsi Ali replied. My father had said that I must marry a distant cousin – and ‘My father is not a man who takes no for an answer.’

Once, attacks on bogus asylum seekers and illegal immigrants were confined to the right-wing press. But those who attacked Ayaan Hirsi Ali used the language of the left. One Dutch commentator explained that the Dutch public did not support her because the ‘neo-conservative wave that swept Holland in recent years is running out of steam and turning in on itself’. Let me remind you that Hirsi Ali and van Gogh had made a film that criticised rape, wife-beating and the flogging of ‘immoral women’. The response of elements in the Dutch left was to assert that opposition to the oppression of women made a feminist a neo-conservative. Ordinary Dutch society behaved no better. Just as the neighbours of Penguin’s Peter Mayer did not want him or his children near them, so Hirsi Ali’s neighbours wanted to remove her from the safe flat where the Dutch police had hidden her. Appeal court judges accepted a suit from families living in the apartment block. In a ruling beyond satire, the court said that the decision of the Dutch police to put her in a place of safety was a breach of her new neighbours’ human rights. Because Hirsi Ali defended the rights of immigrants, she was a threat to the human rights of the natives. Her presence endangered their security, the court said, and lowered the value of their properties – an unforgivable offence in the eyes of the European bourgeoisie. Of the fourteen apartment-owners in the complex, only three were prepared to offer her their solidarity.

Rita Verdonk, a leading figure in Hirsi Ali’s Liberal Party, moved against her next. Verdonk was a populist, who gave the Dutch electorate a tough line on immigration. True to form, she said that because Hirsi Ali had lied in her asylum application, the state must strip her of her Dutch citizenship. Her attack on Hirsi Ali split her party, and Verdonk had to back down. But it remained an eye-opening event. After the courts ejected an atheist feminist from her place of safety, Dutch politicians threatened to make her a stateless woman again. If they had succeeded, the Dutch authorities would have been under no obligation to protect her. They could call off her police escort and leave Hirsi Ali in a free-fire zone. Such was the price elements in the Dutch establishment wished Hirsi Ali to pay for upholding the ideals they professed to hold themselves.

Nor were the majority of the wider liberal intelligentsia prepared to offer support to a woman hitmen wanted to assassinate because she had protested against patriarchy. Their assaults on Hirsi Ali were ominous in the extreme, for they revealed the retreat from universal values.

Even before her neighbours demanded that the courts eject Hirsi Ali from her secure apartment, anyone could see that large numbers of European liberals did not want to defend their principles, if defending them put their lives and property at risk. The Dutch journalist’s accusation that standing up for human rights made you a ‘neo-con’ was widely held by his contemporaries. They could not maintain a belief in universal human rights and criticise George W. Bush at the same time. The accusation became a self-fulfilling prophecy in Hirsi Ali’s case. Rejected by Dutch leftists and the Dutch Liberal Party, she eventually found a home at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. She became what her enemies said she was because when her natural allies abandoned her, their opponents were the only people who would take her in.

Identity politics played their part too. The proposition that ‘Europeans believe defending Muslim women from mutilation and abuse constitutes a racist attack on Muslims’ is an oxymoron that is so morally and logically contemptible it demolishes itself. Few of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s enemies could admit to holding such a detestable notion, although many behaved as if they did. Liberal intellectuals did not force their readers to be honest with themselves. Instead the Anglo-Dutch journalist Ian Buruma and the Oxford academic Timothy Garton Ash stepped forward to provide a ‘liberal’ critique of Hirsi Ali. The unthinking consensus in which they operated was best revealed by their failure to explain why they felt it necessary to add to her troubles. Nothing in their writing betrayed the smallest awareness that others would find it strange that men who called themselves liberals should turn on a woman clerical censors were persecuting because of her commitment to the equality of the sexes. When the fashion in Manhattan, London and Paris is to slide away from universal principles, those leading the slither can never admit that modern liberalism contains contradictions and dark motives that require an explanation. Self-awareness and self-criticism would puncture the assumption of moral superiority, which is liberal culture’s greatest strength.

In Buruma’s book
Murder in Amsterdam
and in a series of articles for the
New York Review of Books
and the
New York Times
, Buruma and Garton Ash acknowledged Hirsi Ali’s bravery with a passing nod, and then men who had no fear in their own lives passed judgement on a marked woman who could not step outside without bodyguards.

Her call for the emancipation of women marked her as an extremist, they decided. Van Gogh’s assassin had denounced her as an ‘infidel fundamentalist’; Garton Ash and Buruma adapted the insult, and denounced her as an ‘Enlightenment fundamentalist’. As if those who believed in the subjugation of women, the Jewish-conspiracy theory of history and the murder of homosexuals, adulterers and apostates were the moral equivalents of those who did not. As if there was nothing to choose between the two. As if the principled liberal response to the conflict between them was to dedicate time and energy to condemning Enlightenment ‘fundamentalism’ while ignoring the Enlightenment’s enemies.

Buruma decided that Hirsi Ali was not a victim but a victimiser, an elitist with contempt for ordinary women. The way she waved her hand at a guest arguing with her during a debate at a refuge for battered women unsettled him. It was a ‘gentle gesture of disdain’, he decided, an ‘almost aristocratic dismissal of a noisome inferior’. Her attitude towards the Dutch was no better. The ingrate immigrant regarded the inhabitants of her new homeland as being in a pit of ‘moral decadence’. She said she supported Enlightenment values, but Buruma maintained she had no right to compare herself to Voltaire. He was a brave man who fought the mighty Catholic Church of the eighteenth century. She was, he implied, a bully who was picking on weak Muslims, ‘a minority that was already feeling vulnerable’. By renouncing Islam, he concluded, she had made herself a woman of no importance. She had cut herself off from European Muslims. Her voice had no legitimacy among the women she sought to address, so she was an irrelevance as well as an elitist and a bully. It apparently never occurred to him that Mary Wollstonecraft and her successors in the nineteenth century had to take on established Christianity. Although devout women at the time would not have liked their repudiation of Genesis, their lives and the lives of their daughters could not have been improved until divinely sanctioned oppression had been challenged.

Garton Ash and Buruma dwelt on Hirsi Ali’s brief interest in the Muslim Brotherhood when she was young. She had walked away, as we saw, but they decided that the change in her politics was more superficial than real. She was a Muslim fundamentalist then, and an ‘Enlightenment fundamentalist’ now. Politic Europeans should have nothing to do with her. Garton Ash concluded by turning Hirsi Ali’s good looks against her. ‘It is no disrespect to Ms Ali,’ he said with the condescension Oxford dons habitually mistake for wit, ‘to suggest that if she had been short, squat and squinting, her story and views might not have been so closely attended to.’

The West still had intellectuals prepared to defend the honour of liberalism, and Garton Ash and Buruma’s attacks on Hirsi Ali, and the willingness of the liberal
New York Times
and
New York Review of Books
to run them, provoked rousing counterblasts in North America and Europe. The New York intellectual Paul Berman filled half of an issue of the
New Republic
with a dissection of how the affair exposed the ‘reactionary turn’ twenty-first-century liberal thought had taken. In a ringing conclusion, he declared: