Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Moral Canary

Cacophony Redux, with only one person asking relevant questions ...

- Radio Netherlands: "Dutch parliament queries Hirsi Ali security cut" - "The Dutch Lower House has called for a written explanation from Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin on the provision of security for Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The former conservative MP has returned to the Netherlands, apparently because the government is no longer prepared to pay for her protection in the United States. ... Last year she left the Netherlands for the United States to work for the conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute."

- Expatica: "MPs want explanation on Hirsi Ali" - "Parliament will not be holding an emergency debate on Ayaan Hirsi Ali's return to the Netherlands but it does want a letter from the cabinet on the Ayaan Hirsi Ali's security. ... The justice department has refrained from comment thus far. ... Parliament also wants clarification on the agreements that have been made with the American authorities and with Hirsi Ali. The letter should also inform Parliament whether Hirsi Ali's security in the Netherlands is guaranteed. She is currently staying at a secret address."

- Monsters & Critics: "Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali back in Netherlands" - "The former legislator for the Liberal VVD party was allegedly forced to leave the US as American authorities had refused to finance the expenses of her personal security measures. So far, the Dutch government has paid all those expenses, but after more than a year of residency in the US, the Dutch allegedly said they were no longer willing to continue this arrangement."

- Elsevier Magazine - "The Netherlands must protect Ayaan, wherever she is": author Leon de Winter: "... What would be the value of her life in terms of the minister's budget? And on what basis would he come to such an estimate? These are the relevant questions of the sort that Margaret Thatcher never posed in relation to the life of Salman Rushdie, wherever he might might have been." Update: Here's De Winter's entire article translated on the site of German Magazine Der Spiegel.

An open, Western, democratic society is in trouble if nobody is asking themselves anymore why this witch hunt is going on in the first place! That's how accustomed we've become to intimidation by a group of pocket potentates who don't tolerate any vision, other than their own death cult.

The mentality is also creeping in, that it's the critics' own fault for getting into trouble. Very much like: yeah, that's what you get when you enter a house on fire! I mentioned the other day remarks made by Dutch Anti Terrorism czar, Tjibbe Joustra which amounted to: "Since it's well known that Muslims are easily inflammable, the Dutch have only themselves to blame, should terrorist attacks occur", as if it were an Act of God!

This is blaming the victim, coupled with a refusal to hold the perpetrators responsible for their actions! This impunity in turn is undermining the rule of law and confidence in the state and politics itself.

Society seems to be caving in, the moral compass being lost since some time. Ayaan is once again acting as the proverbial canary is the democratic coal mine.

The New Left: the World's Naturalist Zoo Keepers

There was a time when the Left on occasion took the moral high-ground and spoke up on behalf of the world's poor and downtrodden. Or against the inequities of Apartheid, demanding sanctions against South Africa. But that was in another world, another era. Today - with Zimbabwe at long last on the brink of collapse - an opposition spokesman again badly beaten up when he tried to leave the country on Sunday - its people starved and made homeless by an tyrannical regime, led by an octogenarian who feeds on the grain and the blood of his people - the Left tells them that change must come from within: the Prime Directive [2] in action.

Before the irrationality of postmodernism took its toll and obliterated the dualism of good and bad, right and wrong, the Left sometimes was on the side of moral courage in support of the right thing. Now 'bringing democracy at gunpoint' only leads to disaster, we are told (and as we have seen in Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Germany) and that sanctions only cause the people more hardship, (as we have seen in South Africa).

Dutch author Leon de Winter today in Elsevier writes a polemic against a fellow writer, Geert Mak, the latter a prime specimen of today's Politically Correct and Fundamentalist Multicultural Left. Mak was invited to produce a free gift book on the occasion of the annual Book Week, a promotional effort on the part of the publishing industry.

According to de Winter, in the book Mak rants away about goings-on on an Istanbul bridge and confuses human dignity with the Turkish sense of honour that is still very dominant in modern Turkish society, as many Turkish women can attest to. According to Mak this highly developed sense of honour is a beautiful thing, a trait to cherish, an ethnic treasure, which we in the West should respect and consider in our dealings with the Turk.

Mak's attitude is one of the new Left, which takes some getting used to. It is not the posture of a Leftist idealist who is out to improve the lot of his fellow comrades, to who this variety of honour can only be an "anachronistic remnant of tribal social survival reflexes" that is keeping them from improving their economic and social situation, a shackle to the feudal, pastoral past

Instead the Fundamental Multiculturalist takes the position, already pointed out to us by Pascal Brucker in his polemic against Mak's fellow naturalists Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash: it is that of the neo-colonialist, dedicated to the preservation of the natives in their natural habitat; albeit in the present case an ultra right Islamic Nationalist one that abhorred the Danish Mohammed cartoons, but in which Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf has been the number one bestseller for weeks.

In the meantime there are a few dozen writers, critical of the Islamist government, that can only survive under police protection. In the wake of the recent assassination of Turko-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Orhan Pamuk, currently a refugee in the U.S., was driven to Ankara airport by heavy police escort. When I was in Istanbul for a brief moment fifteen years ago, the general atmosphere was one of fear - with kalashnikoved police officers at every street corner; apparently little has changed.

But the Left - presently in the process of reinventing themselves as the world's naturalist zoo keepers - have no problem with the Islamo-Nazist developments in Turkey and insist the country should be admitted to the E.U. at the earliest possible opportunity. That should be no problem, considering that we now know that:

- the E.U., as an organisation and as a bureaucracy, is modelled on the Soviet Union so as to facilitate easy convergence, and that

- it is a common mistake to think that the ultra Left and the ultra Right - the Communists and the National Socialists, the latter commonly known as the Nazis - were each other's totalitarian opposites - while on the contrary they mirror each other, and have a history of close cooperation.

STOP PRESS - Theo van Gogh Memorial inaugurated

In Amsterdam a Memorial has today been inaugurated in the memory of assassinated film director Theo van Gogh. The work was made by artist Jeroen Henneman and is called 'The Shout'. The work is a multi layered profile of van Gogh, the innermost layer mouth closed, the outer layer as he shouts out. The artist wanted to express the complexity of the freedom of speech. I think he's succeeded admirably.
And while we are on the subject of the psychological workings of the Left, I don't want to come across as petty but it is beyond me why a man Theo held in utmost contempt - Amsterdam City Mayor Job Cohen (Labour) - would want to play a prominent role in the proceedings, speech and all.

In the next post we continue with the serial "Treason".

I'm on a roller-coaster and apologize to the Armed Forces

I know I promised interesting stuff from the Town Hall and I also owe an instalment of life at the base after crisis point, but first things first.

- A public apologies on my part: yesterday in a misplaced attempt at being funny, I unawares insulted the blokes of the NATO Task Force in Uruzgan with my remark about them rabbit-holing over there, which is a bit demeaning for them when in actual fact they get shot at on an almost daily basis! Nobody knows that better than I do, what with them having all the muscles and the big guns on their side! As proof in point I've been forwarded a link with video material: here it is. A word of caution though: as things do tend to get a bit rough you are advised to watch it either from under a table, or at least don a protective saucepan over the head (hope that's not too flippant). Merry Christmas, laddies and keep it clean! I'm sincerely proud of you!

To which I'd like to add and stress at 23.50 L.T., having just seen a video of last night's Nova TV program, that my arrows are firmly pointed at those Dutch M.P.s who're having trouble fighting terrorists, indeed are shocked that our boys are actually fighting in Afghanistan, while they were sent (indeed marines!) to do reconstruction work. It's the hypocracy there I'm having trouble with. Socialist Party M.P. Van Bommel yesterday issued a press release calling the war on terrorism in Afganistan "a dirty war", no less! I rest my case ...

- The Middle East Forum published an article by Rachel Silverman in respect of a speech by Robert Satloff held in Philadelphia on Monday, about his new book Among the Righteous, which took him four years of study. He sees it as "a potential antidote to the trend of Holocaust denial and trivialization in the Muslim world". His search for an Arab Oskar Schindler resulted in two heroes. A former mayor of Tunis, who sheltered sixty Jewish workers, and the rector of the Great Mosque in Paris who saved Jews by supplying them with false identity papers. These are wonderful stories of course, were it not for the reasons they remained hidden for so long: Arabs don't want them to be known and Jews tend to see the Holocaust in an Ashkenazi context.

- On a another note, Ayaan's is in trouble again. It was not enough to get her career as an M.P. ruined and her identity stripped. Now some envious gutter journalist is trying to nib her career at the American Enterprise Institute in the but as well by suggesting her work is not her own, but done by people in her circle of friends and sympathisers. Leon de Winter in no uncertain terms (which I personally feel do him no justice) describes the attempt with feeling. Although it is exemplary of how people, one size too big are treated in Holland and stories like that regretfully tend to stick, it is a bit silly as well. Has the entire Society for the Promotion of Ayaan been moved with her to the U.S. to hold her hand, or was Ayaan's latest article a joint online effort? According to Leon de Winter, besides appearing in the International Herald Tribune the article was also syndicated to the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Die Welt, Corriere della Sera, El Pais, Expressen, Aftenposten and Le Temps. Good for you, gal!

- On today's calender:

The extent to which citizens trust each
other is equal to their sense of happiness.

Justice III

Just when I decided I'd write less about the old polderland in the future, I was confronted this evening with a rather unsavoury discussion on a TV program in re of the impending parliamentary elections on 22nd November; this discussion was vis-a-vis problems that have arisen in the labour party (PvdA). This party had just put a great number of candidates of Turkish descent on it's ballot list, when the discussion in France broke loose about the bill which prohibits the denial of the genocide of over one million Armenians in the earlier years of the last century. (I am linking here to the relevant website of Wikipedia which currently cannot be updated due to recent vandalization.)

In Holland meantime it transpired that although these candidates have Dutch passports or are native Dutch, their loyalties still lie for the most part in the old country. Apparently the Turkish government has been leaning hard on them so as to ensure there would be no crimes against Turkishness through acceptance of the term genocide c.q. holocaust.
To cut a long story short, a number of candidates have been forced by the party to withdraw. But the party was also anticipating with great regret the loss of all these Turkish votes. So the leader, Wouter Bos, came up with an ingenious political trick: Monday night he gave a press conference for the Turkish media, in which he stated that the term genocide is being used too loosely, on the whole. His number two, a female politician of Turkish descent clarified that in international law, genocide is only then genocide if it can be proved, which is decidedly not the case here; so no "Ermeni Soykırımi" and satisfaction all round that the matter has been smoothed so cunningly. Which is indeed the case, as apart from a weblog post in Elsevier magazine by Leon de Winter, there isn't a journalist, voter or politician who commented on the matter.

Apart from the shameless opportunism of the statement - it pictures once and for all Wouter Bos as the unscrupulous power politician that he is - this party (see also posts on Jan Pronk) was one of the first to acknowledge genocide when it transpired that three thousand Muslim men might have been massacred in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war. Their prime minister and his government even stepped down over the matter. But this, well let's be fair, is almost a hundred years ago (the passing of time is in Holland always a readily accepted mitigating argument), it costs the votes of the Turkish constituency, it hasn't been proved and it upsets a future EU member state, on which rests the duty to prove to the entire Umma that the EU is not a Christian club (God forbid!).

Everything else apart, this matter once again underlines my conclusion that The Netherlands has become a depraved country. The way this discussion is being conducted is shameful, is immoral (or worse I fear, amoral) and unsavoury; it is a slap in the face of the Armenian survivors and their families (yes, they do exist, even though a century has passed). The saddest aspect of it all is, that nobody even notices the depth and length of cases like this! The same politicians expressed today their full indignation about the death sentence pronounced on Saddam Hussein (as anticipated): a civilized country doesn't do hangings, you see (applause).

Eurika! The Trouble with Europe ...

For months now I have been trying to find a proper analysis of the problems facing us in Europe today. And last night at an unearthly hour (as usual) I found 'it'.
'It' is an article by George Weigel, a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., an adj. fellow of Discovery Institute and author of most recently God's Choice (HarperCollins) (review on this blog at a later date). The article on Discovery Institute DBase is dated 1st May and I am just wondering why I missed it, as it might have prevented me from feeling so totally alienated and confused all summer. But then, I might have taken better notice of a co-production written by Marcello Pera, an agnostic Italian academic turned politician and former president of the Italian Senate and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as Pope Benedict XVI was known before he was elected. Their exchange of views about relativism, Christianity and Western culture has been laid down in a book under the title "Without Roots" (review again later on).

The basic gist of the analysis is known in Holland under the paradigm Weg met Ons! (Down With Us!), a deep feeling of self-loathing which underlines all our actions and attitudes towards culture and religion. It comes forth from the Leftist conclusion how bad we have behaved in the past (slavery, colonialism, (commercially) exploiting noble savages and making them sick with our germs, spreading the faith through the sword, witch hunts, fighting endless Twenty Days' and Eighty Years' Wars and the unspeakable events of the Crusades, that absolute pit of medieval Christian "expansionism" commonly referred to as "colonialism" (see time-line issues). This is evidently only a preliminary shortlist: the actual list of Western civilization's crimes against other worthy and noble peoples (not to mention the animal kingdom) is of course much larger! This is the essence of the problem and it permeates all we do and all our views and reactions.

So it's time for a comprehensive culture shift ("the times, they are a-changing", remember that one?), but first let's read the books before passing judgment, eh? ... to be continued.

In the news today: the Sons of Peace are celebrating the end of the fasting period (to multi-culturalists also known as Ramadan) in their usual way, namely drenched in blood.