IS THE PROBLEM IMMIGRATION OR ASSIMILATION?:

Somali refugee follows in Fortuyn's footsteps with attack on imams (Daily Telegraph, 11/01/2003)

The daughter of a Somali dissident imprisoned by the Siad Barre regime in the 1970s, she grew up in exile in Kenya, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia. She was subjected to the cruel ritual of female circumcision aged five, then ordered against her will to marry a kinsman in Canada, who wanted her to bear him six sons.

"I was sent to Germany to meet him but I couldn't face it," she said. "So I slipped across the border into the Netherlands at 11 o'clock on a November night in 1992 and asked for asylum." She would have gone to England but Holland had an open border under the Schengen treaty. She was 22 and did not speak a word of Dutch. Finding odd jobs as a cleaner, and learning fast about the underworld of abused Muslim girls hiding in shelters, she educated herself, ultimately studying political science at Leiden University.

"I wanted to understand why the western countries were doing so well when the rest of the world seemed to be collapsing," she said. "I studied the history of European political thought from the Greeks and Romans up to the Second World War." Her favourite thinker is John Stuart Mill.

"I learned that people in the West value the autonomous individual. They understand the importance of science, knowledge. They are capable of criticising themselves and there is an ability to record history to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. It is exactly the opposite in Somalia where all the institutions of record are missing, and my grandmother's memories of the clan wars will die with her," she said.

She was asked by the then ruling Labour Party to research why so many Dutch-born Muslim youths seemed to be at war with their host society.

Her conclusion was a blistering critique of the Dutch state policy of multiculturalism, which she described as a calamitous mistake born of "a misplaced sense of guilt or pity" that has allowed militant imams "preaching hate" to indoctrinate youths in segregated schools, all paid for by fat subsidies from the Dutch taxpayer. She is demanding an immediate end to state funding for 700 Islamic clubs, often run by hardline clerics.

"The Netherlands is a country that worships consensus and peace, but here you have newcomers who are not integrated into this system. They exploit the values of an open liberal society to reach illiberal ends," she said.

It's unfair to make her seem Pim Fortuyn's heir, since her emphasis appears to be much more on preserving traditional Western culture than on anti-immigration. As her own story shows, that culture is worthy of defending and there can hardly be any objection to requiring immigrants to accept it as a prerequisite for becoming citizens. Of course, the problem, as she's identified, is that the Dutch no longer accept it themselves.

MORE:
Fortuyn favoured depraved (MARCELLO MEGA AND JUSTIN SPARKS, 5/12/02, The Scotsman)

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 10, 2003 11:07 PM