Hirsi Ali: Freedom of Education Hinders Integration

From the desk of Alexandra Colen on Mon, 2005-12-12 00:05

ayaan-hirsi-ali.jpg
Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The 36 year old Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the most famous member of the Dutch Parliament. She is not only a Naomi Campbell lookalike, but is an outspoken and courageous critic of Muslim extremists, who have consequently threatened to kill her. One can only admire her resolve. Two weeks ago, however, Hirsi Ali became controversial within her own party, the Dutch center-right Liberal Party VVD, with her proposal to abolish Article 23 of the Dutch constitution. This article guarantees freedom of education. Ayaan Hirsi Ali wants all religious schools banned.

Is Islam dangerous because it is a religion? Do Muslim values differ from European values because the latter are rooted in Christianity or because they are secular? These questions are at the heart of the debate in Europe today. Theo Van Gogh, the Dutch moviemaker who was murdered by a Muslim fanatic last year believed that religion was what made people intolerant. Van Gogh was anti-religious rather than anti-Islamic, as he had previously shown by insulting Christians and Jews and attacking traditional morality before shifting his attention to the growing segment of Muslims in Dutch society.

Van Gogh was a friend of Hirsi Ali’s. He was murdered shortly after completing Submission, a ten minute documentary, written by Hirsi Ali, which dealt with the abuse of Muslim women. Hirsi Ali recently finished the script for a sequel to Submission, in which she criticises the oppression of homosexuals in Muslim societies.

In the secular Netherlands, the rejection of homosexuality by Islam is considered proof of its backwardness and intolerance. This argument was also used by the assassinated anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn, himself a theatrical homosexual, who argued that he was no racist because he had sex with Moroccan boys.

Hirsi Ali’s demand that religious schools be abolished in the Netherlands has caused a row within her own Liberal Party (VVD), especially after she attacked Hans Wiegel, a former leader of the party and one of the VVD’s most prominent members. In an interview last month Hirsi Ali called Wiegel “a reactionary,” who “denies reality” by defending freedom of education. She said Wiegel has no idea about the problems relating to the integration of immigrants into Dutch society and compared him to a “Turkish or Moroccan father” who is “living in a country of yesterday.” Hirsi Ali believes that Article 23 hinders the integration of Muslim children because they end up in Islamic schools. According to her, the state should educate all children in state schools in order to ensure that they learn tolerance.

The 64 year old Wiegel, who is considering running for the position of Prime Minister in 2007, said he did not mind being called a reactionary, “on the contrary.” He said Hirsi Ali’s proposal to abolish Article 23 of the Constitution was “intolerant” and suggested she should “not be so fanatic”. The quarrel within the VVD, which is in government with Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende’s Christian-Democrats, deepened when a third prominent party member, Frits Bolkestein, the former European Union commissioner, lended his support to Hirsi Ali. Bolkestein said that freedom of education was not essential for the Liberal Party: “My ideal is: all children in state schools. So, as far as I am concerned, Article 23 can be abolished.” According to Bolkestein the VVD only supports freedom of education for the sake of its Christian-Democrat coalition partner.

Bolkestein has always protected Hirsi Ali. The latter started her political career in the Dutch Labour Party, but when the Socialists objected to her demands that Muslims should be forbidden from entering the Netherlands, Bolkestein, who was the leader of the VVD at the time, offered her a place in the Liberal Party.

After the assassination of Pim Fortuyn in May 2002, Hirsi Ali rode the tide of outrage that launched a fierce and comprehensive debate on immigration and multiculturalism. Hailed by a nation only newly released from the taboos of political correctness concerning immigration and the problems of multiculturalism, she captured the attention of the Dutch with her criticism of the attitudes of her fellow Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands. Hirsi Ali was raised a Muslim in a wealthy Somalian family, but fled from an arranged marriage and ended up in the Netherlands. She has been a fierce critic of Islam ever since, calling Mohammed a sexual pervert and a pedophile.

The Dutch were enchanted with this beautiful and outspoken black woman pleading the case for integration and pointing out where the policies aimed at integration had failed, and why. Unlike her white, indigenous compatriots, she could not be accused of racism, and she passionately devoted herself to the task of chastising the Muslim immigrants who refused to participate wholeheartedly in Dutch society. She left the feminist socialist circles where she had started her career and became the darling of the more conservative Dutch parties.

Hirsi Ali became known worldwide as a paragon of the successful immigrant: bright, loquacious, a modern woman readily assimilated into Western society, and aware of the necessity to adopt the values of the nation that she has made home. But how Dutch is she really? This seems to depend on whether or not secularism is seen as the core value of Western society, or rather the Judeao-Christian heritage.

Her recent clash with Wiegel revealed an appalling insensitivity to issues relating to religion but also to classical liberalism, where parents, rather than the state, have always been allowed to decide about the education of their children. Though Hirsi Ali exercises her freedom of speech to the full (and rightly so – it is an indication of the intolerance of certain Muslims that she needs constant surveillance at the expense of the taxpayers), she seems never to have heard of freedom of religion and freedom of education – basic freedoms which have always been as central to the concept of the free society as the freedom of the late Theo Van Gogh to shout abuse at people he did not like.

One may also wonder how much Hirsi Ali really knows about the history of the Dutch. Like other European peoples, they have waged fierce political battles over education and the right to organise independent schools where children could be educated in accordance with the religious values of their parents. Without this system, all traces of Christianity would have long since been eradicated from Dutch society by the secular, anti-religious, “enlightened” establishment. As it is, Dutch society has become largely secular and anti-religious. In all its “enlightenment” it has refused to procreate and, in the name of tolerance, it has accepted alternative lifestyles and multiculturalism. To compensate for the demographic void it created, it has opened its doors to millions of immigrants from an entirely different cultural background, thereby creating the problems that some, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and even Frits Bolkestein, now hope to fight by restricting the existing freedoms of the West even further for the small band of remaining Christians. Their children will be forcefully secularized by the state, because the latter is frantically searching for a means to forcefully secularize the children of Islam.

Generalizing doesn't work; Secular is not total reality or Meta

Submitted by tim (not verified) on Thu, 2005-12-15 16:17.

I wonder if Ali has ever heard of Pol Pot's 'memory sickness'?

Or his cure?

The secular itself has always been and will always remain the emotional police/demons that protects the fallen human heart (as if it were not fallen and did not have demons in it) and nothing more. A breach of its etiquette is what it calls "a human rights issue" as if to totaly and completely encapsulate what it is to be human in that very heart. "What soul? What spirit? Everything is heart!"

Secular is anti-Christ in that it is a very rigid and explicit denial of the non-metaphorical, literal, new creation in Jesus Christ in which an outright new heart and spirit and saved soul is give n by God and it particularly denies the Word of God/Creating Speech that creates that new creation in Himself as Word. Supposedly, in the secualr, however you got here on this earth is how you will stay forevermore and people do not ever change. Thus it is always mooning about 'racism' and 'culture'/'religion' as supposed poster-issues for how-you-got-here.

Those of the secular are absolutely deceived that all religion grows from within the meta of the human heart and the emotional common sense therein and functionally that no such thing exists as Creating Speech/Jesus Christ. Being encapsulated in non-creating speech as they are and deceived that a change from one 'religion' within the non-creating speech to 'another' proves the secular to be the giant meta of total reality, they will never see or understand Christianity or Christ as being completely alien to the secular (as Christ Jesus and anti-Christ are alien to each other) but will only hate genuine Christians as supposedly denying the truth of the secular's emotional common sense (not worshipping it) and therefore slowing down its 'progress' towards ..whatever.

In truth, the change within non-creating speech from one religion to another is simply the exchange of one group of demons for another as niche tumors in the mind of anti-Christ: nothing has changed in that they are all still possessed by anti-Christ/non-creating speech: they are still the same creature with only a different emotional lens/set-of-demons (which they falsely perceive to be a skill set in that they are deceived they have free will and that the emotions steer the will) on the same 'issues'.

Totalitarianism always comes via non-creating speech in that the speech itself, which is anti-Christ, cannot create anything and yet moves the heart to desire. The inability to satisfy the desire forces a search for emotional opportunity elsewhere, even in once-forbidden areas.

Thus the secular devours it own (those who don't actively contribute to its overall emotional economy are euthanised: the aged, the weak, the 'retarded'(can't share the same emotions on the same 'issues') ) and attacks what threatens it (Christ Jesus)--and that in the very middle of its crying "Inclusion!" as if generalization were the answer to everything.

In the end, those who call for totalitarian policies as governance do so explicitly as anti-Christ as their native speech to contain the supposed 'improper use of the free will' of their neighbor as removing a supposed impediment to their own. Not only do they devour each other, they do so over what does not exist. In the meantime they are stupid locusts, devouring resources to satisfy pure emotion and not planting any more. They not only must kill their own but you too when their food runs out.

Because their non-creating speech gives them a lens and agenda of non-creation, they falsely perceive total reality to be void of new creation and so must perpetually fight over 'their share' of what they faslely perceive to be perpetually limited resources. Not only can they not be satisfied as a fundamental "condition of the human race" in their eyes, but to be their neighbor and be satisfied at all is in their eyes to be weak and stupid.

You cannot get along with anti-Christ as a neighbor. He will pretend to speak your language until he takes what he cannot produce. There is no future in his words and he cannot stop speaking or devouring merely for strength to speak again. When he becomes the sole speech of governance, its time of a revelation in revolution or get out with your life if you can.

Luke 22:35-38 And he said to them, When I sent you without purse and scrip and sandals, did ye lack anything? And they said, Nothing. He said therefore to them, But now he that has a purse let him take it , in like manner also a scrip, and he that has none let him sell his garment and buy a sword; for I say unto you, that this that is written must yet be accomplished in me, And he was reckoned with the lawless: for also the things concerning me have an end. And they said, Lord, behold here are two swords. And he said to them, It is enough.

1. they already had two swords (what does that tell you?)

2. God gave a divine command to be armed and prepared

3. The protection was not for Himself as He stopped them from protecting Him and healed those of His enemies who were harmed by those defending Him

Matthew 15:18-20 but the things which go forth out of the mouth come out of the heart, and those defile man. For out of the heart come forth evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witnessings, blasphemies; these are the things which defile man; but the eating with unwashen hands does not defile man.

In the Name of Jesus Christ, Amen

Freedom of Education

Submitted by Snouck Hurgronje (not verified) on Tue, 2005-12-13 22:06.

Hirsi Ali is on a Jihad against religion. She reminds me very strongly of Turkish people belonging to the secular elite of Turkey. For these people the attraction of secularism lies purely in its opposition to Islam. If tommorrow China would be a world power they would support Taoism or Confucianism AS THEY UNDERSTAND IT. Hirsi Ali and her ilk do not really understand liberalism, nor how liberalism is grounded in Christianity and the Bible. The words of Jesus: "give the emperor what belongs to the emperor" and the vision of St. Petrus at Jaffa are foreign to them. So they use a rootless liberalism to cobber Islam with.

Abolishing article 23 of the Dutch constitution would entail a severe curtailing of the freedom of choice and self organisation in the realm of education of Dutch citizens to the benefit of the power of the state. Sounds like Socialism, doesn't it?

Yes, article 23 is an obstacle to intergration of non-western immigrants, primarely Muslims. But the Dutch White populace, who have never been asked whether they wanted Multiculturalism and immigration in the first place would lose rights that have been fought over for a long time. Basically it is a solution for problem caused by the state taking rights away from the citizens by taking more rights of the citizens.

Those who oppose Multiculturalism should think again before supporting Hirsi Ali.

Snouck
http://Snouck.blogspot.com

Nonsense, as I said

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 2005-12-15 18:41.

Nonsense, as I said before:

Article 23 of the dutch constitution is NOT about freedom of education, it is about the equal funding by the state of religious schools and public schools. Abolishing article 23 would in NO way abolish religious schools, it would stop state funding of religious.

NO choice is taken away, but anyone who wants to give a child a religious upbringing should pay for it themselves not the state (I myself believe that to give a child a choice it should get a secular atheist upbringing, without being scared with tales of fire and brimstone, so he or she can make an informed choice)

socialist claptrap

Submitted by melodius (not verified) on Tue, 2005-12-20 10:31.

Nonsense ? If you send your children to a private school, you are not exempted from taxes that fund state schools. In other words, if you want a choice, you have to pay twice. That is socialism in action : you have a choice, but only if you are rich enough.

Article 23 of the dutch

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 2005-12-12 19:54.

Article 23 of the dutch constitution is NOT about freedom of education, it is about the equal funding by the state of religious schools and public schools. Abolishing article 23 would in NO way abolish religious schools, it would stop state funding of religious.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali started her

Submitted by melodius (not verified) on Tue, 2005-12-13 13:50.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali started her political carreer with the PvdA, a socialist party. She left the PvdA, not because she suddenly understood that socialism is wrong, but because her party didn't want to go all the way with her anti-islamic crusade, the only issue she seems to care about. Moreover, in her interviews, she clearly states that Islam should go "the same way" as Christianity, i.e. become an emasculated relic of obscurantist times that has been duly sacrified on the altar of progress.

Mrs Colen is naïve to think that Hirsi Ali would only be "insensitive" to Dutch history: Hirsi Ali is a militant atheist who is as opposed to Christianity as she is to Islam. Being able to attack all religions by using the current unpopularity of Islam is not a problem, but a bonus for these people, and it's already happening, under the guise of non-discrimination of course, as the recent French legislation on "conspicuous" religious symbols at school has proven.

This article isn’t just

Submitted by Charles Copeland (not verified) on Mon, 2005-12-12 18:29.

This article isn’t just ‘interesting’ – it’s the most insightful of the dozens I’ve read on the ‘Hirsi Ali – Van Gogh’ issue over the past year.

Firstly, it is full of information one is very unlikely to come across in the English-language press.

Secondly, the logic is so compelling it is hard to find anything to quibble about even if only for the sake of flaunting one’s intellectual prowess. I’ve been poring over it for the past half hour and still haven’t come up with anything to add to it.

And since I haven’t anything to add, I won’t.

Slán

Charles Copeland