May 4/2007

AYAAN HIRSI ALI

FUNDAMENTALLY COURAGEOUS

I've been reading Infidel, the powerful and necessary autobiography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, about her caged life inside Somalia and authoritarian, fundamentalist Islam. This is a system that by its hatred for freedom of expression deforms the human spirit and suppresses perhaps the greatest gift of being human: creativity—and the most beautiful aspect of all: creativity with love, be it in art or relationship.

Hirsi Ali writes on the book’s last page:

“When I approached Theo to help me make Submission [Submission was a film about Islam, and Theo van Gogh, the director, was, after its release, horrendously murdered by a Dutch Moroccan Muslim—shot, his throat slashed, and a five page warning letter threatening to kill Hirsi Ali stabbed into to his chest with a knife], I had three messages to get across.

First, men, and even women, may look up and speak to Allah: it is possible for believers to have a dialogue with God and look closely at Him.

Second, the rigid interpretation of the Quran in Islam today causes intolerable misery for women. Through globalization, more and more people who hold these ideas have traveled to Europe with the women they own and brutalize, and it is no longer possible for Europeans and other Westerners to pretend that severe violations of human rights occur only far away.

The third message is the film’s final phrase: “I may no longer submit.”

It is possible to free oneself—to adapt one’s faith, to examine it critically, and to think about the degree to which that faith is itself at the root of oppression.

I am told that Submission is too aggressive a film. Its criticism of Islam is apparently too painful for Muslims to bear. Tell me, how much more painful is it to be these women, trapped in a cage?”

I can only bow to this soft-spoken woman’s unstoppable courage and grace at speaking her truth. In an interview with Philip Gourevitch in 2006, she says:

“The West is not a monolith like Islam. You have many different groups and different people and different individuals. Of course many people have called it different names, but this is liberal betrayal.

The liberals who were critical of Christianity and Judaism and all kinds of obscurantism now stand up and defend Islam because Muslims in the West are a minority. They are perceived to be vulnerable and they attach a lot of meaning to their religion, so the liberal response has been to say, “If it’s so valuable for them to hold on to these beliefs and they don’t want us to touch on it, then we shall not,” thereby preserving this culture of backwardness.

That annoys me. It makes me very angry.

I can only describe it as betrayal because in saying “Welcome, we love you to be here,” you indulge this escapism, this self-denial, this shutting yourself off from reality. You’re actually freezing this culture in place and thereby, without intending to, helping those tyrants in Islamic countries that use Islam as an instrument to oppress their populations.”

EVOLUTION

Hirsi Ali’s evolution in the book is painful, nuanced and deeply courageous. She’s at the mercy—and I use that word liberally—of the Somali culture and the religion it uses. Escape is her only real hope.

“I didn’t know how I would escape or what freedom might mean. But I knew what course my life would take if I went to Canada. I would have a life like my mother’s, and Jawahir’s, and like the life of this woman with whom I was staying in Bonn.

I would not have put it this way in those days, but because I was born a woman, I could never become an adult. I would always be a minor, my decisions made for me. I would always be a unit in a vast beehive. I might have a decent life, but I would be dependent—always—on someone treating me well.”

And having escaped and told her story, she is now under constant protection, a price she accepts as necessary to stand up for the right of free expression. The constant threat of death by fatwa, of course, speaks volumes—in fact, in the words of free speech, says it all.

It is somehow encouraging that Hirsi Ali herself once agreed with the fatwa on Salman Rushdie for the blasphemy he’d been accused of writing in his novel The Satanic Verses.

FAITH AND FREEDOM

For religious and non-religious groups and individuals to live together peacefully and democratically requires what Hirsi Ali has called, “The right to offend.” The balance between the rights of the individual—which by definition can take away the rights of other individuals—is a never-ending struggle and paradox within a democracy.

Hirsi Ali, who now works with the Right Wing-labeled American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington, writes unequivocally:

“I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and forced marriage for the world of reason and sexual emancipation. After making this voyage I know that one of these two worlds is simply better than the other. Not for its gaudy gadgetry, but for its fundamental values.”

Who, given the freedom to speak ideas, to search out alternatives, to not be legally beaten, would disagree? Well, perhaps some. But are not those who have called Hirsi Ali an “Enlightenment Fundamentalist” ideologically and logically confused, possibly by their own freedom?

Labeling myself, say, ‘mystically-oriented’ at heart, (for probably genetic reasons!), I can relate to religion, even if that for the believer is heretical, and I long for reason, even if that for the scholar seems unreasonable.

Nonetheless, I must state the obvious: being fundamentally opposed to the use of violence or killing (or even invasion), as a punishment against non-violent free expression, is not fundamentalism.

Freedom of expression has been fought and died over for millennia, success coming not from a single leader—which is the Martin Luther or Martin Luther King or even Gandhi myth—but from courageous, expansive solidarity against powerful institutions of Church, State, Business and Culture.

Those who disagree with this are fundamental idiots, and I mean that with love.

RESERVATIONS FOR ONE

Hirsi Ali is a remarkable, courageous champion of the individual rights of both Muslims and non-Muslims. I am pulled to her, and humbled by the fire that smolders inside her to be the person she is—and her stance for the freedom and rights of all people.

Hirsi Ali is not pushing for women to leave Islam, she is pushing for their right to leave Islam (or any other religion) if they so choose, and the right to ask questions within Islam, and the right to not be beaten.

I was thus heartsick to recently read her own descriptive sweep of American foreign policy in general and America’s invasion, slaughter and selling-off of Iraq in particular. In an interview in Guernica Magazine, Hirsi Ali says:

“I think [the invasion of Iraq] was just another romantic naive moral adventure.” (my italics).

Naive? Romantic? Moral? Adventure?

I find Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice and others who have been caught drastically and repeatedly manipulating Intelligence and reality to fit a foreign policy agenda, anything but moral, naïve or romantic. In fact, I find them profoundly aligned with varying degrees of cynicism and disrespect for lives both at home and abroad.

The occupation of Iraq has resulted (obviously) in an increase of death and misery and, simultaneously—according to Intelligence reports—a significant increase in Islamic extremists and terrorists.

It should be noted that much of this was unequivocally predicted by many pundits, intellectuals and lay people long before the invasion.

Finally, there has also been a simultaneous scraping of the US treasury paid for by the pathologically indebted taxpayer—my American sisters and brothers—with unspeakable fortunes made by Halliburton, the Carlyle Group and others directly related to the President and his sidemen and women.

I see nothing “romantic, moral” or “naive” about this, any more than there’s something nostalgic or naive about that ol’ time Islam.

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS

I suggest here that the myth of “naïve, moral, romantic adventures” has been a huge part of a free country allowing and even supporting countless invasions and acts of aggression over the centuries.

Hirsi Ali’s fight of unremitting courage and grace to throw off the shackles of Islamic fundamentalism has, upon finding a greatly deserved refuge from that madness, somehow led to her internalizing (and thus ignoring) not the miracle of a free America, but the brutality of American Foreign Policy ideology.

The ideology is this:

Whatever invasion American foreign policy undertakes, even against countries that have neither threatened nor pose a threat to America, and no matter how many civilians are killed—from the Indian Wars to the Spanish-American War to Haiti to Panama to Korea to Vietnam to Nicaragua and the Iran-Contra scandal and on and on to Afghanistan and Iraq—the efforts were and are always described “moral” but, if things don’t go well, “misguided” or “naive.”

In the same Guernica interview, Hirsi Ali perfectly repeats the doctrine:

“The mistake that the Bush administration should admit to is not so much that they made the wrong choices. They made the right analysis; they made the right choices. But what they did wrong was the execution of those choices. That was wrong.” (my italics)

What is telling in this interview in which Hirsi Ali calls Iraq “just another moral, naive romantic adventure,” is the interviewee’s non-response to Hirsi Ali’s choice of words—so ingrained, in my opinion, is the internalization of this belief in constant morality.

Similarly, perhaps, Muslims who hate what Hirsi Ali has to say about their religion and its prophet, just can’t—by their own indoctrination—hear the repulsive, dangerous hypocrisies of certain scriptures, let alone actions.

Given the great freedoms found in America and the West, as compared to many theocratic and dictatorial Middle Eastern, Asian and African countries, one could justifiably argue the two examples are incomparable. But tell that to a Cambodian, Vietnamese, Lao, Iraqi, Panamanian, Angolan, Granadian, Iranian, Dominican, Afghan, Chilean, Sudanese, Nicaraguan, El Salvadoran, Haitian or even Somali civilian (etc).

It would be naïve—but neither romantic nor moral—to deny that pre-emptive US aggression against smaller countries is consistent throughout the historical record, and made possible by superior military might.

TRADITION

This doctrine of “morality” still remains today in response to the Vietnam War—an invasion in which former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara estimated that 3.4 million Indochinese were killed.

Included in this “morality” were the secret, criminal bombings of Cambodia (and Laos), making it, according to some historians, the most heavily bombed country in history—all before the inconceivable genocide. Recently declassified papers from former President Clinton revealed the bombing to be even more extreme than previously believed.

So what is the precise formula for creating the correct tension in the fight against “undemocratic” forces?

I’m not sure, but to invade overwhelmingly less-armed countries, to support heinous dictators for business and geo-strategic reasons, to train generals and torturers, and dress these actions as “…just another romantic naive moral adventure” betrays on balance not only democracy and the hope of the Enlightenment, but millions of people all over the world, and any ideas of self-determination.

THE LIST

Was the overthrow (backed by British and American intelligence for oil interests) of democratically elected Iranian leader Mossadegh in 1953 moral, too, and a push for democracy?

What paltry percentage of Americans—or Westerners—even know that Iran was a democracy in the 1950s?

And what about the overthrow of the democratically elected Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, at the “request” of ITT and other corporations to President Nixon, and the subsequent imposing of the brutal General Pinochet as dictator? Was that moral?

To quote Henry Kissinger at the time, who was against the democratically elected Allende:

“The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

Are there logical reasons to believe Kissinger and similar power brokers feel any differently about American voters today?

These installed dictatorships invariably had and have two simultaneous policies: huge domestic human rights abuses and an openness to foreign business interests.

The list of 'invasions' goes on and on, and so will the excuses of why all of them were justified—or almost all of them. Even at their most heinous, these slaughterings will almost never be called immoral, just unfortunate or misguided.

In 1965, was that mass murderer Suharto in Indonesia, replacing Sukarno with American help, put into power to bring in democracy? A CIA study about the post coup d’etat purges stated:

“In terms of the numbers killed [up to a million] the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century…”

What about the CIA supported overthrow of democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz (who was elected in the first ever remotely peaceful transition of power in the country) in Guatemala in 1954?

The CIA in a memorandum had supposedly called Guatemala’s economic reforms “…an intensely nationalistic program of progress colored by the touchy, anti-foreign inferiority complex of the ‘Banana Republic.’”

What about the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba in Zaire in the early 1960s, helping the killer tyrant Mobuto come to power and hammer into oblivion what is today the hapless DRC?

By most anyone's estimations, American aggression in the 1980s was diabolical and criminal (Iran Contra and Nicaragua—the US found guilty by the World Court—to name just two instances) leading us to, among many other countries, Iraq.

GULF, ANYONE?

Even Saddam Hussein was supported over the years, until he was no longer useful. From Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, A Problem from Hell (pg 173):

“After the September 1988 [chemical weapons] attack [by Iraq on their own Kurdish people], Senator Clairborne Pell introduced a sanctions package on Capital Hill that would have cut off agricultural and manufacturing credits to Saddam Hussein as punishment for his killing unarmed civilians…

Pell argued that not even a U.S. ally could get away with gassing his own people. But the Bush administration, instead of suspending the CCC program or any of the other perks extended to the Iraqi regime, in 1989, a year after Hussein’s savage gassing attacks and deportations had been documented, doubled its commitment to Iraq, hiking annual CCC credits above 1$ billion.”

Hirsi Ali, who seems to me here romantically naïve—not unlike, perhaps, the “betraying” Liberals in Holland she talks about—said in the Guernica interview:

“I wish that Bush and Blair, instead of saying, “We are going to spread democracy in the Middle East,” would just say, “We will take it one by one, step by step, and fight for freedom of expression and other freedoms, like the freedom of movement for women.”

Then at least these people could first read about freedom, watch movies, laugh at themselves, and then grow toward making elections or taking part in elections.

When you are ignorant, when you know very little about the candidates and the programs that they have, what is [an] election worth?”

Invasions—from the Nazi invasion of Poland to the US invading Granada (pop. 100,000)—are by design wrapped in democratizing, liberating, civilizing rhetoric, which includes outrageous claims of self-defense.

David Lamb wrote in his book, The Africans, about colonialism and the “scramble for Africa,” which was compulsively described as a civilizing mission:

“If Africa’s quest for unity has failed so far, if Africa’s presidents get along no better than the European powers did with one another during the colonial period, no one, least of all historians, should be surprised.

Let’s step back a century [the book was written in 1983] to the time when Africa was Balkanized and brought under European domination. It happened in Germany at a conference that not a single African attended…

The acrimonious disputes [between the European powers], though all were solved peacefully, caused much apprehension in Europe, and it was finally decided the world’s powers had better sit down to determine some game rules for Africa.

Delegates from fourteen countries assembled for the Conference of Great Powers in Berlin in October 1884. Four months later, on February 26, 1885, they signed the general Act of the Berlin Conference, which provided that any power that effectively occupied African territory and duly notified the other powers could thereby establish possession of it.

The Berlin treaty, along with other accords signed during the next fifteen years, defined “spheres of influence,” which partitioned the continent among European governments and reduced their rivalry for domination.

After a flurry of public debate, anticolonialist protests subsided in France and Italy. Conservative governments ruled in England and Germany. Policies of mercantilism were prevalent from Rome to London. Europe was assertive and nationalistic. Its mood favoured colonialism.”

DEFENDING SLAUGHTER THROUGH CROSS-EXAMINATION

I realize that just for saying this, so many highly educated sisters and brothers at the American Enterprise Institute and elsewhere—assuming they care at all about some little Canadian voice, other than David Frum—will default me to the liberal Left Wing (which, as it currently behaves, I’m not) for going against the doctrine of ‘moral mass killing’—which is, at best, what it is.

‘Moral mass-killing’ seems to me an oxymoron.

And of course, supporters of the morality doctrine would and could, like effective lawyers—in fact some are—nit-pick and redeem virtually every invasion mentioned with justifications of moral, if misguided, execution.

This reasoning—used by Islam during its empire building, all through Colonialism and the Cold War, even Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan, and now during the War on Terror—to me, is nothing to be arrogant about, compared to the annihilation of the memory of those who have been exiled, maimed, and killed in the name of such a morality.

With Iraq, Hirsi Ali concludes:

“The assumption that the administration made was to think they could go in there for a short while and show the people, “See, we are your friends,” and everyone in Iraq would embrace democracy—from tribalism to democracy…”

Could any non-indoctrinated thinker, given the history of Empires, colonialism and nation state relations—given the specific objectives of so many Multinational companies in Iraq, from oil to security etc—really, morally, believe this was the line of thinking in this situation?

Iraq, it must be repeated—and I assume this includes the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children who are dead and maimed—were no more involved in 9/11 than I am, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali or David Frum, for that matter.

One could far more easily argue that, as in Vietnam, to destroy a country is to defeat a country, regardless of the official outcome. Obliteration, by definition, limits any chance of sane social or economic development, in particular the ability of a country to take control of its own resources.

Social pathology, and to be fair even exacerbated pathology, is a predictable side-effect of being endlessly bombed (see Cambodia, 1975 et al.). Scholar Mahmood Mamdani put it succinctly: “It’s historically interesting that most genocides have happened at the time of war and civil war.”

ONE MAN’S POISON IS ANOTHER MAN’S PROFIT

For a great free-thinker like Hirsi Ali to call these aggressions “naive moral romantic adventures” is an Enlightenment disaster.

At its core “democracy by bombing” is as oxymoronic as “peaceable Islam” in theocratic dictatorships.

In a strange way, these brutal forays are like Islam a sort of religion, but led by the infallibility of a different Profit, serving an untouchable celestial abode called the “free market,” beyond the riff-raff of this world or even evolutionary change, and guided by God’s well-manicured Invisible Hand.

Foreign policy has taught us to confuse “freedom” with “freedom to exploit” and “national interest” with “business interest.”

And believe you me, many in the West live well off it, myself included. But is it economic ease and access to goods that actually brings freedom?

Perhaps more revealing is this: if freedom and democracy are really the goal, why don’t corporations even remotely hold to Western standards when they set up shop in the Third World?

Again, this can be rationalized: because, for example, a corporation must firstly always follow the Western law of maximizing shareholder profits—even at the expense of human rights etc etc. Similarly, one could justify, Islam in a theocratic state must uphold Shari’ah law, even at the expense of human rights.

Both, in the end, are choices that reflect intention. Like legislation that allows the beating of a disobedient wife or violence against so-called infidels, slave labour, excessive work hours and not allowing a human being to defecate when necessary is not merely an issue of prophet/profit, it’s simply cruel and dehumanizing.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Echoing the words of so many Enlightenment writers, including Humboldt, Alex de Tocqueville writes in his 1835 classic, Democracy in America (pg 217-220, abridged version):

“When a workman is unceasingly and exclusively engaged in the fabrication of one thing, [he] every day becomes more adroit and less industrious; so that it may be said of him that in proportion as the workman improves, the man is degraded.  What can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life in making heads for pins? 

…When a workman has spent a considerable portion of his existence in this manner…his body has contracted certain fixed habits, which it can no longer shake off: in a word, he no longer belongs to himself…

In proportion as the principle of division of labor is more extensively applied, the workman becomes more weak, more narrow-minded, and more dependent.  The art advances, the artisan recedes…

I am of opinion, on the whole, that the manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest that ever existed in the world; but at the same time, it is one of the most confined and least dangerous.

Nevertheless, the friends of democracy should keep their eyes anxiously fixed in this direction; for if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrate into the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter.”

Thomas Malthus, who was a great influence on Charles Darwin, by suggesting life is inherently a struggle, wrote in 1803:

“A man who is born into a world already possessed if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand and if the society do not want his labour,
has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. 

At nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him.  She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he does not work upon the compassion of some of her guests.  

If these guests get up and make room for him, other intruders immediately appear demanding the same favour.”

For a world that appears to have choice, we certainly are constantly unable to create equality, social justice, or even a square meal a day for millions of children.

Some influential part of being human, it seems, is driven towards exploitation, dominance and justification.

Still, to make an excuse for corporations’ exploitation of Third World non-regulations when sweatshop wages and poor conditions are not at all mandatory, but a profit driven corporate choice, is, to me, as justifiable as a Western man moving to Somalia, beating a woman there, excising her, and then claiming it wasn’t his true nature, it’s just what’s done in Somalia.

And to call the aggressive imposition of misery, death and turmoil to free up business interests democracy-by-other-means is like calling Islam, with its promise of an afterlife, freedom-by-other-means.

FROM MORAL TO IMMORAL

I agree with so much of Hirsi Ali’s “non-liberal” beliefs about fundamental Islam in the West, and its discord with democratic values. I most likely agree with Hirsi Ali’s thoughts on Islam in the Middle East, too, and North Africa, India and Indonesia and Malaysia, evidently, where Shari’ah Law keeps invading and colonizing the rights of free, creative expression.

And this is not about America. I love America and what it stands for at its best: domestic free speech and human rights. I’m speaking of American Foreign Policy, which is neither “naive” nor “romantic”, and continues to bleed into its domestic policies.

What is it to invade a nation that is not threatening you, if not immoral?

How many deaths does it take to be an immoral crime as opposed to “a naive, romantic moral adventure?”

Iraq is a disaster of dying civilians. To call it a naive, romantic moral adventure reminds me of Cecil Rhodes—of Rhodes Scholar fame—whose dream was to conquer Africa, from “Cairo to Cape Town,” for his British Empire.

Rhodes once wrote, honestly:

“We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.”

And the flipside:

“Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.”

THE LOTTERY OF WHO WE ARE

I hope in my heart that Hirsi Ali will one day feel differently about the invasion and invasions, which are so much the words of Power apologetics—the party line of both government parties over the years and the so-called neo-conservatives of today.

All sides are pushed, tweaked, yanked, dragged, threatened and seduced by myriad forces and beliefs, internalized as true—and may we never forget that tentacled menace—the Military-Industrial-Complex—warned of so clearly in Eisenhower’s famous goodbye speech of 1960.

I AM FUNDAMENTALLY AGAINST UNAUTHORIZED POWER INSTITUTIONS

I apologise for neither Islamic repressive, misogynistic, violent fundamentalism—which, on behalf of the oppressed and brutalized, I must try to comprehend yet despise—nor American foreign policy—invading smaller countries because they can, killing thousands, hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of sisters and brothers—which I also must try to understand, yet despise.

Islamic fundamentalist hatred does not, by its ugliness, make American Foreign policy against other countries (Islamic or not) moral, romantic or naive. One has to decide for oneself when the killing of countless civilians can be considered moral.

That’s it, I’ve said enough. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an extremely courageous woman. Her story in Infidel is necessary, powerful and nuanced. I wish her an incredibly great life. I hope her strength, her power, her grace and her heart stay in accordance with subtle, beautiful freedom, creativity, the “American way of life” at its best—and do not solidify into a stance of support for the so often inhumane brutality of its foreign policy.

It should be remembered that even John Stuart Mill, one of Hirsi Ali’s favourite philosophers, was still indoctrinated enough by the now nearly-dead British Empire to be an apologist for its systematic decimation of India.

As Mill himself wrote:

“…the conquerors and the conquered cannot in this case [English India] live together under the same free institutions. The absorption of the conquerors in the less advanced people would be an evil: these [the Indians], must be governed as subjects…”

Live well, love more—I apologize for errors and polemics, and I also stand humbly in realising how little I know, and can know, and knowing there is so much that I can never know. May I always remember this. I send Ayaan Hirsi Ali my deepest respect and support for her courage and belief in Free Expression, and love,

Pete xo