Daughter of the Enlightenment By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL. On Nov. 2, 2004, Theo van Gogh, the director of the controversial "Submission Part 1", was murdered.
As the Netherlands suffered an explosion of mosque-burnings and attacks on churches, Hirsi Ali was moved under heavy guard from secret location to secret location, sometimes more than once a day. After six days of that, she had had enough. She was told that the only safe alternative was for her to leave the country for a spell. Hirsi Ali insisted on going to either Israel or the United States. "Those are the only places," she recalls thinking, "where people will understand what happened Nov. 2."..
In the early 1990's, Frits Bolkestein, then the leader of the country's pro-free-market party, the VVD, warned in articles and speeches that they could not. He argued that certain identities, unlike the old Catholic and Protestant ones, would, if maintained, undermine the individual rights that are at the heart of the Dutch constitution. He cited the practice of bigamy, for instance. Where clashes occurred, Bolkestein insisted, Dutch norms must prevail. For this observation, he was condemned as a rightist and a racist. Today, most Dutch accept the validity of Bolkestein's critique, even if they can't agree on what to do about it.
In 2002, Bolkestein's VVD persuaded Hirsi Ali to leave her Labor policy group to take a place on the VVD's parliamentary list for the next election. Some on the left greeted her departure with relief -- Labor usually competes with two other left parties for Muslim votes, and activists had threatened to withdraw support for Labor when Hirsi Ali began speaking out. Still, it is a natural question whether the VVD -- traditionally a businessmen's party -- is the right place for a Third World feminist.
Because, you see, Third World feminists must be anti-business.
It is not a question that troubles Hirsi Ali much. She says, "It gives me, intellectually and ideologically, an easier position to say, 'Listen, we are the party for the individuals, and Muslim women who are individuals.'"..
Hirsi Ali has taken positions on nonfeminist issues from the Iraq war (which she favors) to Turkey's candidacy to join the European Union (she calls it a "big gamble" for Europeans)...
"I confront the European elite's self-image as tolerant," she says, "while under their noses women are living like slaves." In this task, she sees a role for both activism and politicking, and she is particularly proud that almost all of her parliamentary motions have passed. "I may polarize on television and on the op-ed pages, but in Parliament, I always get my majority," she says.
Hirsi Ali claims a direct line of intellectual inheritance from the Dutch Enlightenment, and says she is merely laying claim as a Dutch person to freedoms won for her fellow citizens starting in the 17th century...
And as for her mentor, in
Politicus: Getting Wolfowitzed: Bolkestein as villain, John Vinocur describes him as
Frits Bolkestein, the Dutchman whose name has been transmogrified in some places in Europe (but particularly France) into an ominous, foreign-sounding label, the Bolkestein directive, responsible for an attempt to open up the European Union's protected internal economy to real competition...
Bolkestein has gotten Wolfowitzed. Over the past months, just as Wolfowitz before him had been marked as the plotter behind a world clash of civilizations, Bolkestein became the sinister personification of a perceived cabal to tear apart Europe's social protections.
In fact, it was the collective and unanimous decision of the European Commission last June, including its two French members, to put in place a measure opening the 70 percent of the EU economy that is the service sector to cross-border competition. For the politicians and activists who wanted it blocked, Bolkestein became their bloody shirt...
"In the broader sense, it's a lack of self-confidence all through Western Europe. They're afraid, they're scared and that's a big story."
As for France, a country that he truly likes but that helped turn his name into "scapegoat," Bolkestein said: "The French feel they are losing control in Europe. They don't like competition, the market, or enlargement. It's the fear of the unknown, and it's exaggerated because it's French."..
Like so many others, Bolkestein didn't like the war in Iraq either.
But Hirsi Ali did.
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