THE ex-Muslim Christian convert Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an admirable and brave individual. Her autobiography Infidel highlighted the brutality of growing up in radical Islamic Somalian culture, being subjected to FGM as a child and later escaping a forced marriage and seeking asylum in Holland.
Once in Europe, she gradually came to the realisation that Islamic fundamentalism is inimical to individual liberty and human flourishing and became an outspoken apostate, thus putting her life at risk. She was forced into hiding after Theo van Gogh, the director of her short film Submission, was murdered by a Moroccan-Dutch Islamic terrorist. She is a fully integrated immigrant success story who has literally put her neck on the line to warn the West about the threat from Islamic fundamentalism.
Her 2021 book Prey: Immigration, Islam and the Erosion of Women’s Rights is an important work concerning the culturally transformative effects of mass Islamic immigration on women’s rights and safety.
It is impeccably written and researched. Hirsi Ali delves into the data from several European countries which reveals how non-European male migrants, especially from Islamic countries, are significantly over-represented in sexual offence statistics. Britain’s Islamic rape gang scandal gets a whole chapter.
Hirsi Ali explains the ingrained cultural and religious factors with regard to the attitude in Islamic societies that women are inferior, and how those attitudes are imported into Western society and are a significant factor in increasing levels of male violence towards women in Europe.
The rational conclusion to draw from this book is that mass immigration from the Islamic world to Europe is inimical to the interests of Western women and the preservation and dominance of Western culture.
Regrettably and bizarrely, Hirsi Ali draws very different conclusions. On page 256 she asserts: ‘I would be a monstrous hypocrite if I lent support to the proponents of deportation and immigration restrictions. What I want to see is many others like me enjoying the same opportunities that I enjoyed and contributing, as I believe I have, to the health of the West’s open societies.’
The glaringly obvious problem with Hirsi Ali’s aversion to immigration restriction is that all the associated risks of mass immigration from the Islamic world are borne by indigenous Europeans and well-integrated ethnic minority European citizens, as a significant cohort of Muslims are openly hostile to European cultures. As she states on page 176: ‘Many Muslims believe that they are superior . . . Even if the West offers greater economic and personal freedoms to Muslim migrants, its moral system is seen as inferior. En route from Muslim-majority countries, many migrants are forewarned by friends and family to “take care when entering a morally degraded society”.’
Islamists certainly don’t have the moral high ground with their toxic patriarchy, but equally we have suffered moral and social collapse which makes us easy targets. After all, it is the naively ‘progressive’ doctrine of cultural relativism which views all cultures as equally valid that has influenced our elites to embrace globalism and abandon our borders and thus flood Britain and the wider West with hostile Islamists.
Hirsi Ali’s proposed solution to her own well-demonstrated argument that mass immigration from the Islamic world comes with immense challenges and risks to the security and safety of Europeans is a ludicrous assertion that we should continue with it anyway and that the onus is on Europeans to do more to integrate Islamic migrants. On page 162 she states: ‘The West is failing migrants by refusing to prepare young men for the culture clash they will experience and then by refusing to hold them accountable for their lack of self-control.’
With respect to Hirsi Ali, the conclusion that many will draw from her book is that Western governments should focus on how they are failing Western citizens, not the Islamic male migrants they are importing against the wishes of a large swathe of the population. She would never have needed to write a book about how mass Islamic immigration harms Western women if we had strict limits on immigration from the Islamic world in the first place. Britain didn’t fail the men who comprised the Pakistani Muslim rape gangs by not sending them to night classes to teach them that we find rape and the abuse of children to be the most evil of crimes. They already knew that Western culture views these to be among the worst of crimes. The only people the British state failed were the victims of the Pakistani Muslim rape gangs who are an inconvenient reminder of how the state’s favoured immigration policies puts its most vulnerable in harm’s way.
In Chapter 18, she makes well-intentioned but extremely naive proposals about how to integrate the incessant flow of Islamic immigration into Europe: ‘Those migrants who are unwilling to embrace the laws and values of the host society should be given a reasonable time frame to demonstrate their adaptation to the West, say a year or two, and if this is unsuccessful, they should be ordered to leave or be deported.’
As a former Islamist herself, Hirsi Ali has apparently not considered that these Islamic migrants who are showing hostility to their host countries could simply engage in the Islamic tactic known as Taqiyya in which they lie to infidel bureaucrats whom, as she has pointed out, they view as inferior in order to advance their own interests and agenda.
Also, unless one possesses mind-reading capabilities, how do you recognise a successful case of integration? In 2019, the jihadist Usman Khan murdered two young people in London at a conference at which his victims were championing him as an example of an Islamist who had been successfully rehabilitated and integrated.
Instead of spending taxpayers’ money and investing time and resources to try to teach potential child rapists from Pakistan not to rape, or hiring some suicidally naive Guardian-reading ‘restorative justice’ workers to ask an Islamist such as Usman Khan if he could please not stab any of us and then just taking him at his word, there’s a much simpler, cheaper and foolproof solution. It starts with an almost total prohibition on immigration from the Islamic world and deporting anyone involved or sympathetic to Islamism.
We should be investing our time, money and resources and focusing on the moral rearmament and improvement of our own people. Continuing to import large numbers of Muslims, many of whom are openly hostile to basic Western freedoms, and hoping that a few taxpayer-funded sessions demanding that they must integrate into our morally decadent societies is not only hopelessly naive but is also a recipe for further social fragmentation.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is astute and perceptive in diagnosing what ails the West. However while in Prey she successfully outlines how European immigration policies are harming women, she not only refuses to call for strict restrictions on immigration from the Islamic world but offers a range of ludicrous solutions (including extending the surveillance state) which have already been shown to be ineffective at countering misogyny and Islamist radicalism and that are inimical to the security and cohesion of Western countries and its citizens.
As a high-profile ex-Muslim who lives with death threats from Islamists, her opposition to restrictions on Islamic immigration is one of the most perplexing examples of what the Lebanese-Canadian writer Gad Saad has termed ‘suicidal empathy’.
