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HIRSI ALI ON 60 MINUTES
Sunday, March 13, 2005
HIRSI ALI ON 60 MINUTES
UPDATE: Well, it wasn’t just Hirsi Ali, they crammed the entire Van Gogh affair and Holland’s immigration issue into a 15-minute segment with of course to spice it up some shots from Amsterdam’s red right district and marihuana cafes, crucial ingredients in any story about the Dutch for a foreign audience. Once more: no, drugs are not legal, small amounts of soft drugs have been decriminalized, that’s all. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a brave, intelligent and unique woman but she is a spent force in Dutch politics. Yes, she’s a star and that is precisely her problem. If you want to succeed in Dutch politics the one thing you can’t have is star-status and on the policy front you need to be able to show some ability for compromise and moderation. Hirsi Ali fails on both counts. She has caused her party, the right-leaning liberals, incredible headaches and they have not been doing well in the polls at all. It’s not Hirsi Ali’s fault of course, but I expect that her outspoken manner, star-status and the fact she’s a security issue will all be huge liabilities for the party going forward. So in a way it wasn’t surprising to hear Hirsi Ali answer to the question how an asylum seeker could make it from factory worker to Dutch parliament as follows: “the American Dream”. She pointed to her journey so far but she is now well positioned to continue her mission on the other side of the ocean, the book she’s working on for instance is written in English rather than Dutch. She’ll be an asset to any think-tank and be able to influence a far larger audience if she’s given the time and room in a less politicized and much safer place. But she’s right on many counts. Her argument during the interview that it’s indeed a weird kind of tolerance for Dutch society to let Muslim women be abused, tortured and murdered is precisely the kind of message that doesn’t go down well in Holland. It reveals the clueless way in which immigrants have been treated and it underlines what I have pointed out before: the Dutch aren’t tolerant at all, at best they are pragmatist, at worst indifferent. 
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