Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights - by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Date read: 2021-09-09
Tags:
See all books

Key ideas: Published in 2021. "This book is about mass migration, sexual violence, and the rights of women in Europe. It is about a colossal failure of the European political establishment. And it is about solutions to the problem, fake and real... I am writing this book not to help the proponents of closed borders but to persuade liberal Europeans that denial is a self-defeating strategy... For nothing else so clearly distinguishes Western societies from Muslim societies today than the different ways they treat women." (Ayaan Harsi Ali)

NOTES

Denying the reality

There is no shortage of people who want to deny the reality of what is happening in Europe. Part of the reason for this is, as we have seen, that sexual assault is often underreported by victims, wherever and whenever it happens. But it is also true that it is politically inconvenient for most European governments to acknowledge the existence of this particular crisis. Thus, much evidence remains wrapped in reams of red tape and buried under piles of bureaucratic paperwork.

"Ersatz proletariat" - immigrants as a new source of votes

Some people wonder why so many establishment institutions persist in their denial of the problem. They often assume it is out of naiveté. I think this is too charitable. What other motives might they have? Self-interest is one.

Take the case of the left-wing political parties that, having seen their traditional white working-class voter base erode over the decades, turned to immigrants as a new source of votes.

To earn the political goodwill of this “ersatz proletariat,” left-wing parties brush off issues such as sexual violence and gender discrimination in immigrant communities.

Once upon a time these parties stood for the emancipation of women, for gay rights and equality. Now they are in bed with Islamists who seek exemptions from these core values on religious grounds. This political partnership is now operative to varying degrees in France, Belgium, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. In Stockholm’s notorious immigrant enclaves of Rinkeby and Tensta, for example, Social Democrats campaign vigorously, giving out free food and playing Arabic music.

True, not all of this is cynical electoral calculation. Radical socialists in Germany identified the migrant crisis as an opportunity to “deal a blow to capitalism” and enthusiastically adopted refugee rights as an instrument in their “project of universal liberation.” Indeed, some have embraced the idea of open borders as an almost revolutionary project....

Center-left parties that have embraced the idea that growing numbers of Muslim immigrants are the new proletariat have lost the trust of their traditional voters. In elections across Europe, as we shall see, they have paid the price for their opportunism at the ballot box.

The concept of universal women’s rights yielded ground to the new ideals of multiculturalism and intersectionality

A question I have often asked myself is why there has not been a feminist outcry about the increase in sexual violence against women that I have described in previous chapters. Surely, women’s safety in public places should be a core issue for those who seek to uphold women’s rights.

I am omitting the descriptions of violence against women in Europe simply because many of the examples are shocking and disturbing. I encourage everyone to get the book and read it in full.

The omission is especially surprising as women have, as we have seen, never been more politically powerful. All over the Western world today, and especially in western Europe, a growing number of women can credibly aspire to hold the highest positions of political and economic power. At first sight, we are living through a triumph of feminism. Or are we?

For the irony is that, even as individual women in the West hold the offices of prime minister and president, managing director and chief executive officer, women’s rights at the grassroots are under increasing pressure from imported notions of female subordination. Worse, many of today’s female leaders in the West are doing little or nothing to stop this turning back of the clock on gender equality....

Meanwhile, the concept of universal women’s rights yielded ground to the new ideals of multiculturalism and intersectionality. Women in Islamic societies who demanded equal rights were told that those were Western values. Western feminists came to believe that imposing their values on the Muslim world was a form of neocolonialism.

Logic!

Women’s studies departments in universities are teaching the next generation of feminists that the only just cause is a relentless attack on the white man

In historical terms, the liberal feminist movement has been short lived. For two hundred years, women pushed to have autonomy and equality with men. But since the turn of the century, the women’s movement has stepped away from this goal. The feminist mission has drifted, and women’s rights have been trumped by issues of racism, religion, and intersectionality.

Liberal feminists today care more about the question of Palestinian statehood than the mistreatment of Palestinian women at the hands of their fathers and husbands. In the battle of the vices, sexism has been trumped by racism.

Feminism has also become deeply politicized, with women on the left claiming it exclusively for themselves. Conservatives and moderates are shut down as “right wing” if they talk about women’s issues.

Women’s studies departments in universities are teaching the next generation of feminists that the only just cause is a relentless attack on the white man. Liberal feminists excuse immigrant men of crimes against women because the perpetrators are victims of racism and colonialism.

In other words, "Liberal feminists" believe that "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." Some, according to their logic, have the right to commit crimes against women. That's how they understand equality of rights!

Polarization Among Feminists

There is a paradox at the heart of contemporary Western feminism. Ideological feminists insist on grandiose goals such as “ending the patriarchy.” Yet campaigns against men-only clubs or for female representation on corporate boards are elitist concerns far removed from the daily existence of the average woman. If we think back to the sociologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, the issues Western feminists prioritize today are in the realm of self-actualization: enhancing conditions at work, having access to state-sponsored child care, joining all-male associations, balancing housework duties with male partners, and gaining prestige. This is not to say that we should forgo laudable goals such as smashing the glass ceiling. But the freedom for all women to live free from violence should come first.

I do not want to mock feminists today, but I do want them to wake up. They have come to take for granted the more foundational needs such as basic safety in public. To me it looks as though they are busy fixing a leak in the roof of a house while the basement is collapsing into a sinkhole.

Female students on university campuses seem to inhabit a parallel universe. Protected by “safe spaces” from the threat of “microaggressions,” female law students ask not to be taught about rape cases as they are too upsetting and might “trigger” them. But every now and then the real world breaks in.

In October 2017, academics and students at Goethe University in Frankfurt protested against a speech titled “Police Work in an Immigrant Society” by the head of Germany’s police union. Fearing a backlash by students, the university authorities canceled the speech. Ironically, that same month, four women were victims of attempted sexual assaults at the university. In each case the attacker was described as 1.65 meters (five feet, five inches) tall, of North African appearance, and speaking German with a thick accent. In a dignified response, the police union chief said, “I am anything but happy that the university has been given this reality check.”...

Many Western feminists genuinely do not understand the deep-seated cultural antagonism of men from the Muslim world to the very notion of equal rights for women.

The Modesty Doctrine

Now that we have established that there is indeed a relationship between increased immigration and higher levels of sexual violence in Europe, the next step is to understand that relationship in the way that Europe’s elites have conspicuously failed to do.

Why would men who have traveled thousands of miles for a better life behave this way toward women in their new country?

The naive answer is human biology. It is a well-established fact that young men brimming with testosterone are designed by evolution to want to have a lot of sex.

But culture and civilization exist in large measure to restrain such primitive impulses. The more important point is that migrants’ attitudes to women are shaped by their circumstances and experiences in their countries of their origin.

An important part of the story is, of course, the influence of Islam on relations between the sexes. But closely related, as I shall show, is the role of a practice that almost certainly predates the rise of Islam, namely polygamy.

Cultures that tolerate or encourage polygamy tend to also impose extreme modesty on women and exclude them from public life. Polygamous cultures, because of the way they turn women into a rare commodity, often produce violent and misogynistic outcomes. A large number of recent migrants to Europe come from such cultures.

The commodification and objectification of women begins with polygamy

Seligson is a middle-aged, liberal Jewish scholar with curly gray hair and an unassuming attitude. He is a physicist and computer nerd who is applying the tools of science and technology to a complex cultural issue. Speaking to me in California, he explained his approach:

The commodification and objectification of women begins with polygamy. When one man takes two wives, he leaves another man without one. This creates scarcity, and we humans hoard resources when they are scarce. Men do not trust each other with their wives, so they sequester this rare commodity behind walls and veils and restrict their movement. Those without the scarce resource, typically young men, then have to maraud for it, leading to civil unrest and belligerence. And efforts to control those behaviors lead to authoritarianism and the corruption and poverty it begets."

I have run tens of thousands of models combining parameters to identify the sources of violence against women in societies over time. What I am tracking is the accumulation of cultural effects that indicate attitudes toward women on average. These attitudes go back well before monotheism; they predate even tribal culture. Islam is simply not there. Neither is colonialism. It’s polygamy, the marriage law, that produces distrust and patriarchal violence toward women. And the historical legacy of polygamy can be tracked down [through] the generations. It raises the social temperature, creating a hostile, angry culture.

Muslim migrants cost more than they benefit Europe

The US historians Walter Laqueur and Christopher Caldwell and the Dutch professor Paul Scheffer, among others, had published widely read books on the failure of integration in Europe. Numerous government reports and think-tank monographs had appeared on the same topic. The fact that an influx of low-skilled migrants from the Muslim world would cost more than it benefited European economies had been well established before 2015.

When I asked Die Welt journalist Robin Alexander why this well-known fact had not been taken into consideration before the German borders were effectively thrown open in the summer of 2015, he explained that “a decision was never taken.” Chancellor Merkel had simply refrained from enforcing the borders, and the migrants had poured in. The government, its advisers, the media, and the wider political class had simply not been focused on the likely consequences. “No one was thinking about hundreds of thousands of Arabs coming. That was only debated after it had already happened,” Alexander told me.

Segregation

If talismans do not work, how about segregation of the sexes? In an irony of history, the once discredited notion of segregation—sometimes on the basis of race as well as gender—is making a comeback on the Western left. In August 2018, the Statement Festival was held in Gothenburg. The idea was to create a “safe space” where women could party without fear of harassment.

No “cisgender men”—that is, men who were not only designated male at birth but also currently identify themselves as male—were allowed to attend. Similarly, in 2017, Berlin police cordoned off a “Women’s Safety Area” at New Year’s Eve celebrations near the Brandenburg Gate. A police spokesperson explained, “This is a good opportunity to offer women a place to retreat to if they feel harassed.”

That's how you solve the problem of harassment once and for all! (I'm being facetious, obviously)

The irony of such schemes seems to be lost on those who come up with them. For segregation of the sexes is precisely what most Muslim-majority countries practice, albeit to varying degrees.

The female-only festival in Sweden ironically coincided with the reforms introduced in Saudi Arabia in 2018, which finally permitted public concerts in the kingdom as long as the sexes did not mix.

Rolling back of liberal values

I asked Flemming Rose, the Danish newspaper editor who published the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten in September 2005, how this rolling back of liberal values had taken place. He described what had happened in his newsroom after he published the cartoons:

In 2006, my paper took the position that there should be no compromise on free speech. Then they started receiving terrorist threats and planned attacks. They soon changed their tune. Management said, “It’s no longer about free speech, it’s about protecting the newspaper and its staff against a terrorist attack,” as if there is no relationship whatsoever between freedom and security. That’s how the fear mechanism worked.

Was adapting to this new, constrained environment a deliberate coping mechanism? I wondered. He replied,

People are not very conscious of this; it’s happening at a subconscious level. The security concern is just the way life is now... it’s a normal thing for them. There is this human ability to adapt to any situation in order to survive.

When they start work in the Jyllands-Posten newsroom today, young journalists are taken through drills on how to get to safe (i.e., bulletproof) rooms in the event of a terrorist attack. More than a decade after publishing the Mohammed cartoons, Flemming still requires around-the-clock security protection. His bodyguards were hovering nearby as we spoke in a Copenhagen hotel.

I asked him how many journalists today were willing to follow in his footsteps or those of Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor of the Paris newspaper Charlie Hebdo, who was killed in the newspaper’s office on January 7, 2015. He gave a characteristically pragmatic response:

Very few, and I don’t blame them, but they need to be aware that freedom always comes at a price. People can have nice principles and values, but most of us have family and kids. We need work to provide for ourselves, and in that process you make compromises when there is a real threat.

Yet if Europe continues down this path, I can foresee a nightmare scenario: European societies will look more like the societies the immigrants have left behind them.