Hirsi Ali rips the multiculturalists

In a somewhat astoudning development, Ayaan Hirsi Ali today annouced she was switching political allegiance from the left-of-center Labor Party (PvdA) to the right-of-center Liberals of the VVD. Reasons for her defection from Labor are explained in an op-ed in today's NRC Handelblad (free registration required). It is unfortunate that it's in Dutch because it deserves much wider airing. No, I'm not going to translate it. I will point out some highlights from her commentary, which deals with the plight of muslim women in the Netherlands, and how they have been let down by Left. Writing about social democracy, she says:

Social democracy means standing up for the weak in society. Right now, that's mostly women and children in muslim families. They don't have the same basic rights that Dutch women and children have - they do on paper, but in practice they don't in everyday life. This causes mental suffering, but also physical suffering, as the population in women's shelters shows.

She explains the shame-honor values of the muslim immigrants in this country, which put enormous pressure on members of that community not be critical of their own. It also imposes a stifling conformity on them, consigning especially women to lifelong misery and oppression. But she is especially critical of the failure of the Left to support and protect the weak. Group identity politics, so beloved of the contemporaneous Left, lead to putting the maintenance of the ethno-religious group over that of the rights of the individual, in this case muslim women. She writes:

All freedoms that for some are a matter of course: falling in love, going out, staying with a friend, a shopping trip, swimming, cinema or going to the theater, is met with gossiping within the group of women and the inevitable screaming of a father or a brother or a husband: where were you?

[...]

It's the girl who're limited in their freedom of movement, they have to have their hymen repaired, they get beaten and kicked. We know it, but we don't want to say it. Thus these women pay the price for tranquility and thus the so-called supporters of the multicultural ideal can sleep soundly.

[...]

It shows how little real willingness there is to integrate within the mulsim leadership. And how much contempt they have behind closed doors for the culture and inhabitants of this host country: the heathens. The infidels will burn, the Dutch muslim television said on September 11th last year.

The marginalization of the muslim immigrant community is self-imposed and widespread, but also facilitated by the Dutch socialist welfare system. Two thirds of the muslim immigrants live on government handouts.

In other comments she made today about her decision, she's also quoted as saying that the Labor party can only start to make a constructive contribution to this discussion, once "it saves itself from the stanglehold of the multicultis and muslim conservatives."

Much of what she has said is also relevant in the wider discussion in the west about the folly of multiculturalism. Those who prided themselves on being defenders of individual liberty on the left have become enablers of brutal repression, all because the hatred of America and western culture has become more important to them then the individual rights, the rights which we hold to be self-evident and which are most respected and protected exactly in the West they despise so much.