The scapegoat
THE UPROAR IN the Netherlands over its Somali-born member of parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is much more than a national controversy. It goes to the heart of the culture of appeasement that currently grips Europe, and that is undermining the defense of the West against Islamist terror.
Hirsi Ali, who says she fled an arranged marriage in Somalia and who has renounced her Muslim faith, has spoken out against both the oppression of women under Islam and unrestricted Muslim immigration into Europe. As a result, she has to be guarded day and night against threats to her life.
But now her adopted country has turned on her. A Dutch court has told her to leave her home because her presence poses a threat to her neighbors. And after a TV program "revealed" that she had told lies when claiming asylum in the early 1990s, the Dutch immigration minister, Rita Verdonk, announced that Hirsi Ali therefore was never a Dutch national -- a position that has softened in the resulting uproar.
Of course, Hirsi Ali was wrong to have told lies about details on her asylum claim. But the TV "revelations" were nothing of the sort. Hirsi Ali had already publicly acknowledged -- and had even told her party leader when she first ran for the Dutch parliament -- that she had falsified her age and name, out of fear of discovery by her family, and had lied about coming directly from Somalia when she applied for asylum. Yet, until now, no one seemed to care.
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Hirsi Ali is being used as a scapegoat. Remove this symbol of the threat being mounted against Dutch society, goes such thinking, and maybe the threat would be removed along with her.
Such a propitiatory sacrifice is all the more egregious because no action is being taken to remove the actual threat from Dutch soil, in the form of those Islamist clerics and rabble-rousers who are abusing Dutch freedoms to whip up extremist feeling.
The failure goes far beyond the Netherlands and Hirsi Ali. Britain, Washington's principal ally in the war on terror, has succumbed to just the same cultural cringe. It allowed Islamist demonstrators to parade on the streets with placards proclaiming, "Death to the Infidel," and it even initially threatened to arrest those citizens who protested at such displays (it was subsequently shamed into arresting a demonstrator). Meanwhile, Tony Blair's government is inviting Muslim Brotherhood radicals into the heart of his administration in the hope of drawing the sting from the Islamist scorpion.
