Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Muslim-American activist, activist, and writer. She is also the author of the books Nomad and Heretic and a new book, Nomad And Heretic, which we re going to talk about today. In this episode, Ayaan and Dr. Jordan B. Peterson discuss immigration, the changing safety of women in public, clashing values of Western cultures in Islam, and win-win propositions. They also discuss her latest book, Prey: Islam and the Erosion of Women s Rights. This episode is brought to you by Headspace, a meditation app advancing the field of mindfulness through clinically validated research. Headspace is also available in Kindle, iBook, Paperback, Hardcover, Audio, and Audio Book format. You can read or listen to hundreds of great books in bite-sized form in a matter of minutes, from old classics like Dale Carnegie s How to Win Friends and Influence People to recent bestsellers like Atomic Habits. This is the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. This is also a good place to start a free trial with access to Headspace s library of meditations for every situation. Headspace's meditation is the best deal offered right now! Headspace.org/JBP. If you want to challenge your preconceptions, expand your horizons, and become a better thinker, go to Thinker.org. That s T-H-I-N-K-R-R dot org. To start a FREE trial today, start a 1-a-day trial with a library of Meditations, to make you feel happier and more connected to the world around you, you deserve to feel happier. Go to headspace.com/jbp. JBP to start your free trial today! To get a discount on my dad s merch available on my Dad's merch, that s coming out on March 2nd, that has incredible illustrations available on them, that have incredible illustrations on them. That s JBP dot com and much more! JB Peterson's merch is available on JBP's merch coming out in my website. JBP is coming out March 2/My dad's Merch, that's coming out for your chance to win a giveaway on my website! I have merch available in the JBP s merch, too! JBP has merch available for you to get a free copy of my dad's merch!
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00:00:51.040Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, season four, episode seven.
00:01:00.120Ayaan Hirsi Ali joined Jordan on February 2nd for this episode.
00:01:04.540They discussed immigration, the changing safety of women in public, particularly in areas of Europe, clashing values of Western cultures in Islam, and win-win propositions.
00:01:15.960Ayaan outlined her arguments and concerns with current immigration practices and the ways that Islamic leaders and Islamic values clash with many freedoms of modern culture.
00:01:27.260They also discussed her latest book, Prey, Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights.
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00:05:30.840You are also one of my personal heroes, and I thank you for your courage.
00:05:34.980I was born in Somalia, and I grew up all over the place.
00:05:38.460My family left Somalia when I was about seven or eight years old, and then we lived in Saudi Arabia, in Ethiopia.
00:05:45.820I was in Kenya with my family for about 10 or 11 years.
00:05:52.200And most of that time, my father was absent.
00:05:54.720And then he came back in 1992 and took what he called his responsibility, which was to find me a husband.
00:06:06.940And I didn't agree with his choice of husband for me.
00:06:11.660This husband of mine then lived in Canada, and I was supposed to join him in Canada.
00:06:17.560But instead of joining him in Canada, I went along with the family plan, which was to go to a relative in Germany and find my way from Germany to Canada.
00:06:30.140But instead of doing that, I went to the Netherlands and I asked for asylum.
00:07:25.440Muslim terrorists, 19 of them, took passenger airplanes and started to bring down the Twin Towers.
00:07:34.200They wanted to bring down the White House.
00:07:36.080They had brought down a wing of the Pentagon.
00:07:38.780And you were old enough to remember that that was a significant moment in history for those of us who were old enough to understand what was going on.
00:07:51.140There were a lot of conversations people were having in the Netherlands and abroad.
00:07:55.380This has to do, some of them said, with American foreign policy.
00:07:59.120They said it had to do with injustice against the Palestinian people.
00:08:02.960They said that the 19 men were poor and oppressed and victims of, you know, economic challenges.
00:08:15.220And I said that it had nothing to do with any of that, that the leader of the 19 men left us enough information.
00:08:22.980And we were able to find enough information to point that what motivated them was the conviction, acting on the conviction of the religious beliefs.
00:08:32.680They were waging jihad and to pretend otherwise was wrong.
00:08:37.820And I didn't understand how sensational that would be.
00:08:41.000And I was given platforms by some of the Dutch newspapers, radios and television.
00:08:46.060And from being a complete unknown who had just graduated, I became this, depending on who you talk to, either famous or infamous person.
00:08:59.260And I think the rest of the story is public and documented and infidel.
00:09:05.760And you, you, are you, I know that at one point in your life you, you had guards accompanying you wherever you went.
00:09:27.460And aside from a lot of, you know, my family members acting disappointed and even threatening me, losing some of my Dutch friends because they thought that I was bending toward the right, Islamophobic.
00:09:43.860Yeah, I also had to live with death threats.
00:09:46.880And it's very interesting when you look at that, you know, if you go back in that time when we were discussing the threats to free speech.
00:09:55.920And I know a lot of people were in denial, probably are still in denial about it, but where they would say there is no, there's really no distinction here to see between Muslim civilization and Christian civilization, Western civilization, other civilizations, all cultures are equal and so on.
00:10:17.300And there's just, you know, there's just, you know, a handful of bad people who are giving everyone else a bad name.
00:10:22.460But then over and over again, we saw the threats to the freedom of conscience, the freedom of speech, women's rights, the freedom of association, the freedom of the press.
00:10:33.380And never, ever did I think that we would have what we now have, which is not a threat from outside forces, whether they are religious or not, but a threat from the inside, from our own universities, where a conversation like the one we're having now, or the subject of this book is going to be misinterpreted, which is a charitable way of saying it's going to be dismissed.
00:11:00.860Yes, well, I must say, I'm quite terrified to have this conversation.
00:11:07.300And I was also going to ask you immediately, what possibly possessed you to write this book?
00:11:15.100I mean, it's as if in some sense, you're looking at a sequence of hornet's nests, and decided to take a swing at the largest one.
00:11:22.560I mean, I think there's every reason to believe that, at least in the possibility, that when I air this episode, my channel will be demonetized, and that it could conceivably be taken off the air altogether.
00:11:35.420And I've had my fair share, not to the same degree you have, certainly, but I've had my fair share of public attack.
00:11:43.600And, you know, I'm rather embarrassed to admit that I don't have the same stomach for it that I once did.
00:11:51.380So, but anyways, onward and upward, hypothetically.
00:11:58.040So, back to this, I guess we'll start to talk about this book, Prey, Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights.
00:12:06.320I had an uneasy feeling reading it continually.
00:12:11.020I mean, you do say right off the bat, this is a trigger warning for the entire book.
00:12:19.540Well, I would say I was triggered by reading it.
00:12:21.620I was triggered partly as a social scientist, I would say, to begin with.
00:12:25.760Because as I went through the initial part of the book, in particular, which deals with statistics pertaining to the sexual assault of women,
00:12:36.680I was reminded of the many studies that I've been involved in dealing with complex, multifactorial problems.
00:12:44.180And it's very, very difficult to deal scientifically, or mathematically, or statistically, with a complex social issue.
00:12:55.200And you run into that problem, or encounter that problem over and over, among many other problems,
00:13:01.180when you're formulating your argument to begin with.
00:13:04.120For example, you're, and stop me if I get any of this wrong,
00:13:09.320you're making a case that there is some threat to women's rights in Europe, particularly,
00:13:17.640and that that's associated with immigration.
00:13:19.460And that some of that threat takes the form of enhanced susceptibility, increased susceptibility to sexual assault.
00:13:28.200And then you start to delve into the sexual assault statistics.
00:13:31.800And then you run into the immediate problems.
00:13:35.740And it's perhaps worthwhile to walk people through what some of these problems are.
00:13:41.500How do you define sexual assault, for example?
00:13:47.420Now, you could define it as the, if you define it by the most severe crimes, let's say, rape.
00:13:57.460Then you miss all the data that might be obtained when you consider all the other forms of sexual misbehavior
00:14:05.660that might be regarded as assault, unwanted touching on a street, for example.
00:14:11.580But if you include those, then you risk minimizing the magnitude of the extremely serious forms of sexual assault, like rape.
00:14:23.300And especially if you do it over a lifetime and crank up the prevalence rate so high that they start to become meaningless.
00:14:30.900Now, I know it's an appalling thing that a very large percentage of women, and perhaps an unknowable percentage,
00:14:37.760face unwanted physical, unwanted sexual attention, psychological and physical.
00:14:44.020But if the definition of that becomes so lax that it's 100% of women that suffer from it,
00:14:51.540then you divert attention away from, for example, from the more serious forms of sexual assault.
00:14:57.040So it's, and then you outline as well, the difficulties of doing cross-cultural comparison,
00:15:03.720cross-country comparisons, because the definitions vary so much from state to state,
00:15:08.000and the difficulty of tracking change in sexual assault prevalence in any given country
00:15:14.080because of the changing definitions of sexual assault that occur within states.
00:15:18.620And so I was tempted to throw up my hands at one point and think, well, it's impossible to get to the bottom of this.
00:15:26.200So in the face of all that complexity, what argument have you laid out?
00:15:31.640And why do you think it's justifiable?
00:15:35.000So the argument I'm laying out, first of all, is an, it's the story of women and their safety in the public space.
00:15:46.220So in this book, I'm not making, I'm not laying out an argument about sexual violence committed by intimate partners.
00:15:56.700If you wanted that, it would probably be easier to get those statistics.
00:16:01.380It would be harder to find them categorized along ethnic lines, but still possible.
00:16:06.660And I'm not talking about sexual violence against women in, say, in the office, at work.
00:16:16.360The themes that were brought to light by the Me Too movement.
00:16:21.040So those two things are not the subject of this book.
00:16:24.040What I'm talking about is the public space.
00:16:26.220And so I don't start fast with statistics.
00:16:30.740So I, you know, I really want, I'm not a social scientist and I don't think of myself as a social scientist in terms of trying to acquire empirical data, analyze that and interpret it.
00:16:45.040What I do is it starts with experience.
00:16:47.300It is in Northern European countries, a decade and a half ago, maybe even a decade ago, women took it for granted that they were safe once they left their front door.
00:17:02.980Not all women, some neighborhoods are worse than others.
00:17:06.220But in general, in 1992, when I came to Holland, I don't recall ever being, feeling unsafe in the public space.
00:17:18.320I was with my Dutch friends and asking, I thought it was striking that women took it for granted in the Netherlands that they were safe in the public.
00:17:27.400And I saw that in other Northern European countries.
00:17:30.060And when I asked questions about that, they said, what is, are you out of your mind?
00:17:39.760And I described to them the societies that I grew up in and how incredibly difficult it was for a woman to get out of her front door and enter the public space without being catcalled after.
00:17:55.440And so then I go from the descriptions of verbal sexual violence or sexual propositions that are inappropriate and lewd and obscene and are harmful and hurtful all the way to rape.
00:18:17.700A decade later, I'm hearing from white women in some of these countries describing situations that I thought were, but that's weird, that's very interesting, that's a real change.
00:18:32.280And Jordan, I know you know a little bit of my background, but I've also been engaged in this debate about Islam, integration, immigration, the unintended consequences of immigration and all the taboos around that.
00:18:45.280And so when I first proposed writing this book, it was, for instance, my husband saying, the argument will not, it won't go anywhere because you will not be able to get to the statistics.
00:19:00.900And so I started calling up these justice departments of these various countries, and they would provide me with the reports they had made of sexual violence against women in the public space.
00:19:13.380And some countries, again, totally as you described, the definitions shift.
00:19:22.260Some countries say, we do record sexual violence against women, but not the ethnicity of the perpetrators or the religion of the perpetrators.
00:19:34.620In some countries, you would find the testimonies of the victims, and they would say, that was an Arab-looking man, that was a black man, that was a man who spoke with a foreign accent.
00:19:45.900And I would ask the people who say that they've collected these statistics, why don't you have that information input?
00:19:52.400And then you would always run, it would always be off the record, but you would always run into the issue of, well, the issue of immigration is really controversial.
00:20:05.780The issue of Islam is really controversial.
00:20:08.500And if you take those two and then you link it to sexual violence, oh, my God, you're going to empower the right-wing populist parties.
00:20:17.740You're going to stigmatize Muslims and Islam.
00:20:25.120And I agree with all of these things, but we still have a problem.
00:20:30.060The safety of women in general in the public space is compromised.
00:20:35.740So how can we collect statistics if, as a social scientist, you start shrouding all these issues with complex cultural and political factors?
00:20:49.700Please, Jordan, let me give you an example.
00:20:55.040From January of last year to January of this year, I think today is what the last day was, the first of February.
00:21:02.420We have had all to live with the pandemic.
00:21:08.560We've had a lot of conversations and disagreements about it.
00:21:12.380But in one year, we've been able to collect the most important data, statistical data that we need about what the virus is, who's affected, who's likely to die, who's likely to survive.
00:21:26.900What are the things that we need to do?
00:21:29.520And we have, in response to that data, in response to that knowledge that we gather, put policy or policies in place that constrain our liberties to a great deal.
00:21:45.900So the problem I'm talking about, this public safety and the safety of women, I want to date it back at least for two decades when it comes to women in the general public space.
00:21:57.760And we can never even agree on what data is important, let alone collect it effectively and let alone produce effective policies to address that.
00:22:06.940So I'm going to ask you rude questions, because they're the sorts of questions that are going to be brought to bear in relationship to this book.
00:22:19.580And so they popped into my mind constantly.
00:22:23.600In light of the fact that it's so difficult to gather data on something, let's say, as definable as rape, a physical, and we could narrow that down even more, unwanted physical sexual penetration of a vagina by a penis.
00:22:41.920How do you go about ensuring that your sense that the safety of women, which is a much vaguer construct, say, term, concept, that the safety of women in the public domain has been compromised?
00:23:00.200That's the first thing, because if that isn't the case, because I kept wondering, well, what exactly is the problem here?
00:23:06.540And I did believe, as a consequence of reading your book, that your primary concern was that as the public domain, if the public domain becomes less safe, then women are going to have to retreat from engagement on all sorts of public fronts.
00:23:24.820And that there's nothing about that that's good.
00:23:27.240That, I believe, is the main thrust of your argument, and that that and so then we'd have to ensure that not that women's safety is in fact being compromised, that they feel that it's been compromised.
00:23:41.840And then the next part of the argument is that that can be associated with an increase in immigration, specifically from Islamic countries.
00:23:51.520And you even have some doubt about that, I believe, because at one point in your book, you talk about the problem, the cultural problem that might be behind this being perhaps not so much Islam, but polygamy itself and its influence, its influence on Islam.
00:24:07.840So I'm not disputing your claims, I'm trying to adopt, as I always do when I read anything, well, anything, I would say, the most critical stance to find out what's solid.
00:24:23.980And so you're obviously concerned about the safety of women.
00:24:26.760What makes you think that your concerns are warranted?
00:24:29.720So, again, I want to be, and I don't think it is rude at all, I think asking these questions is not only justified, it's crucial.
00:24:43.320Yes, it's absolutely necessary for this issue to ever be dealt with one way or the other.
00:24:49.860Yeah, or any other social issue that is of this magnitude, I think the most important thing that I can do, any other observer can do, is to say, I want this to be questioned.
00:25:03.040And one of the things about the hard sciences, for instance, is that you could replicate data, and then you could experiment, you can then falsify or verify.
00:25:15.440As you know, with these types of very complex social issues, that is very, very difficult.
00:25:22.200Having said that, if you were to go out and take the exact same steps that I have done, I challenge you, I will say, I bet you, you will reach the same conclusions.
00:25:33.480Now, it is very important to make the distinction between something as gruesome and as horrific as rape.
00:25:41.320And there is rape by one individual against another individual, but sometimes it's done in groups.
00:26:15.180And I didn't want this book to be just about that.
00:26:18.900When something like that happens in a European country, that is recorded.
00:26:25.500And, in fact, the authorities make an attempt at finding the perpetrators and bringing them to justice.
00:26:34.620Now, you can debate if the severity of the punishment fits the crime.
00:26:39.920I mean, in some of these countries, these conversations are going on, but no one is debating that that is horrific and that that should be, and that's, you know, you could only look at those statistics.
00:26:51.740If you did that, and then you ask those same authorities for the origins of the perpetrators, in many countries you are going to run into, we don't record, we just don't record that kind of data.
00:27:10.620Germany, for instance, because of the history of the Second World War and the Holocaust and what they had done to all sorts of minorities and other countries, like even the Netherlands, I don't think they would record the religious aspect of it.
00:27:30.840I've seen it in Austria, even in Germany.
00:27:32.880Germany, at a given moment, there was a recording of the testimony of the victim or witnesses.
00:27:42.900Or some of the reporters would say, today in court, case XYZ was tried and the perpetrator was from Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria or Somalia or whatever.
00:27:54.520And as things evolved, journalists were told not to do that.
00:28:01.360And victims would sometimes testify, those who survive the ordeal, and if this goes to justice, they would describe the physical characteristics of the perpetrators.
00:28:15.680Now, that is the most gruesome aspect of it.
00:28:20.320Let's just say the verbal abuse, the touching, the groping, stuff that in some countries is criminalized.
00:28:28.800Recently, in some countries, it's not yet criminalized.
00:28:31.580But stuff that is seen as inappropriate towards women, things that make women feel unsafe.
00:28:37.920And again, the victims of that kind of behavior will describe who the assailants are.
00:28:43.940And sometimes those recordings, at first, some of these countries would put down that information, these data points, and see them as important.
00:28:56.700But then in come the political correctness, the identity politics, immigration is sensitive, Islam is sensitive, we don't want to stigmatize.
00:29:05.740And then you will see these data points being dropped.
00:29:09.580You will see statistics that make it very clear that there is a correlation, at least, between a rise in sexual violence against women and immigration.
00:29:22.180And then someone else will be commissioned and will be told, okay, can you please give that a second look?
00:29:27.680And they would come and they would say, you know what, sexual violence against women is universal.
00:29:31.260Yes, well, that's part of the complexity of the problem, because I was thinking as well, well, you also point out, for example, that many cases of sexual assault are never, they're never brought to the police.
00:29:46.640And no one knows how many cases are like that.
00:29:49.240And that's even more likely to be the case for the more minor forms, if we're allowed to make a hierarchy of sexual crimes, which I think is absolutely necessary.
00:29:57.600It's even more true for the more minor forms of sexual harassment, which I would say would certainly be certainly be of sufficient unpleasantness to potentially restrict women's, at least their sense of freedom in the public domain.
00:30:16.760But, so, a critic, and you cover this in the book as well, a critic might object, well, this is going to happen under any immigration scenario, if the majority of the immigrants are male, because obviously males are implicated in this sort of crime, and if they're young, because young males are more likely to be criminal in all regards.
00:30:42.120And so, maybe it has nothing to do with country of origin, or ethnicity, or religious background, but it's purely a demographic matter.
00:30:53.760And then there's another issue, which is, even if it is true, that immigration policy tilts so that young males are more likely to immigrate, that doesn't necessarily mean that that should be stopped.
00:31:09.840There's a price to be paid for it, but there's potential benefits from it as well.
00:31:13.220And so, lay out for everyone exactly what you think the problem is, and why, see, because the other thing I thought too was, well, why did Ayan's critics are going to say, there's lots of contributors to violence against women that could conceivably be talked about.
00:31:34.880And you might say, well, you should attend to those that are the most dramatic, the most consequential, the most severe, but perhaps also to those that might be the most easily addressed.
00:31:46.740So, for example, I always think when I look at stats about violence against women, that we should have a conversation, a protracted conversation about alcohol.
00:31:54.780Because if you, alcohol contributes victims and perpetrators of violent crimes, about 50% of them are alcohol intoxicated.
00:32:05.440It's a massive contributor to violence of all types, domestic violence, every type of violence.
00:32:11.280And so, if the kind of violence that you're describing is, in fact, related to immigration, which is a difficult thing to prove, how high up in the hierarchy of things to be concerned about that should that be?
00:32:27.360Especially given the benefits of, the humanitarian benefits even, of a relatively more open immigration policy.
00:32:36.300So, here, I think, again, we're going to start talking about the trade-offs.
00:32:43.640And I think in terms of these trade-offs, what we're seeing is that the way I see it is that the rights of women and their freedoms and their safety is being compromised.
00:32:57.460When, say, you know, is immigration beneficial, is, and then, like the way you say it, even on humanitarian grounds, just being compassionate to fellow human beings, right, from Syria, different parts of Africa, different parts of South Asia.
00:33:17.700So, these men are suffering, and we should feel compassion for them.
00:33:23.260I think it should be possible to feel compassion for them and accommodate them in every way we can without selling out women.
00:33:33.620Now, in terms of the contention that that particular demographic, when you have young men of a certain age, in large groups, they tend to engage in violence, including sexual violence.
00:33:51.820Anywhere where you have any kind of conflict, the civil wars, the wars that Europe overcame, even gang violence here in the United States of America, look at places like Guatemala, El Salvador, all of those places where you have a cohort of young men with no jobs, with no purpose in life, and in a machismo type of society, there is violence, there's disorder, and then including sexual violence.
00:34:21.080So, that's not something I'm disputing or something that I want to exaggerate.
00:34:26.600In terms of the alcohol component, I think we have had and probably will continue to have that conversation about, say, the context I'm thinking of is in college, most colleges, where young men will drink and young women will drink, and then they will go off into their dorms.
00:34:49.580Both of them drunk, and up to a point, the young man involved will argue, I thought all this time, that it was voluntary.
00:35:00.660And the next morning, the young woman will wake up and say, it wasn't.
00:35:04.420And that is, I think, a conversation we will continue to have, and you're absolutely right.
00:35:09.620If you consume that amount of alcohol and you put yourself in a vulnerable place, I think you should hold yourself as an individual, and I'm talking about as the female as well, that you have agency, you have responsibilities.
00:35:24.140And we should raise our girls, if they don't want to have sex, then don't go to the dorm, then don't go to the room at 10 p.m., and don't drink as much as, you know, enough to overwhelm you.
00:35:37.580So, that's a debate that we are going, we will continue to have, but that's not the subject of this book.
00:35:45.660Jordan, but before, please, before we go to the next one, the cases I describe, let's just say, okay, the statistics, my critics, let's say my critics might look into these statistics and say there's nothing to see here.
00:35:59.880All right, then you go to the description that I get from the women, and I'm not talking about a context of women who are behaving in ways that might be confusing.
00:36:17.360I'm talking about a woman, a mother in a park who's pushing her toddler, pushing her baby with her toddler walking next to her, or a woman jogging, or a woman going to do her grocery shopping, or a woman coming home from work and taking the train and who is terrified by a group of young men who think it's a game.
00:36:37.200I'm talking about different things where you would say, I'd say, I'll give you another data point.
00:36:43.920There are now neighborhoods where European women have decided, no one is going to protect me, so I just won't go there.
00:36:52.860There are two documentary makers that I've spoken to who have, you know, because the phenomenon has been going on for some time, have decided they were going to make a documentary about this.
00:37:02.860Visit these women-free zones and actually confront the men, the proprietors of these places, and say, there's that one example where they order, I think, coffee, and they're asked to leave.
00:37:17.460And they have a conversation about, but why should I leave?
00:37:21.900These are female filmmakers who are doing this.
00:37:24.580These are female filmmakers who have seen in France, certain neighborhoods have become inaccessible for women.
00:38:14.960So there are ways of looking at the complexity of this issue.
00:38:18.740And not only relying on the statistics that are gathered by the institutions that are actually supposed to be enforcing the values, the rule of law, the protection of women, because they gather the data.
00:38:38.160And like you, when you said, I finished the book and then I throw my hands up in the air, what are we going to do about it?
00:38:45.020They throw their hands up in the air and they decide, let it be.
00:38:48.280Yeah, well, it's very difficult for me to understand in the present political state of the West.
00:38:54.600It's very difficult for me to understand how a conversation about this can really be undertaken because I don't think we're capable of doing it.
00:39:02.140I mean, which is partly why it's so stressful to undertake, to try to undertake a conversation like this.
00:39:10.340I guess what we're trying to do, the problem is, is that we're pitting two virtues against each other.
00:39:16.220And those are the most difficult moral conundrums.
00:39:24.560And on the one hand, there's compassion for the dispossessed, including dispossessed young men in war-torn countries, war-torn and catastrophically riven countries, and the benefits of immigration economically and on humanitarian basis.
00:39:43.860And then on the other hand, there's the safety of women, and it's very difficult not to be for both of those, but unfortunately, there are circumstances where the interests are not going to align.
00:39:57.680In a context like this one, and the context is where we have been having conversations, not just about having compassion for dispossessed men and not allowing them to then violate the rights of women.
00:40:14.740We've been having similar conversations about the limits of free speech.
00:40:18.620And what you sometimes see is people concluding, well, let's not have that win-win, where we protect free speech, but we also protect against incitement and violence.
00:40:30.480That would be a rational discussion to have.
00:40:44.560We can lift up transgender people and respect their freedoms and their dignity, and for them to live the way they want to live without compromising the rights of women.
00:40:54.460But that is the context we live in, and that's when you open this conversation.
00:40:59.000You said you were terrified of being deplatformed if we were to have this conversation.
00:41:03.560And I think it's very, very important in a free and liberal society that adheres to the rule of law to have these uncomfortable conversations.
00:41:13.280So let's walk through the central argument again, is that you're attempting to demonstrate in the book that using statistics, and you outline the unreliability of the statistics, and the difficulty of obtaining them, but using statistics and also on-the-ground anthropology and case reports, essentially, to make the case that there has been a deterioration in the public safety of women over the last, you'd say, 10 years.
00:41:43.640I think in the last 10 years, it's been more pronounced.
00:41:52.640But I think it's been going on for at least 20 years, depending on where you are.
00:41:59.840So certain neighborhoods in Paris, or Massaya, or Malmo, you could say, or in certain, you know, Tower Hamlets area in the UK, right around London, some of those places you could go as far back as 20 years, even longer.
00:42:18.880And that, again, that that deterioration is linked to poor immigration policy, or to what exactly is the problem?
00:42:33.000Is the problem the immigration policy?
00:42:35.080Because I might also say, I mentioned youth and masculinity as contributing factors to violent behavior.
00:42:41.520But unemployment as well is going to be a contributing factor.
00:42:48.260So all the socioeconomic factors, these are all contributing factors.
00:42:54.020And people actually are, I would say, more willing to talk.
00:42:58.820They feel like they're more licensed to talk about the socioeconomic factors than they are licensed to talk about the cultural factors.
00:43:06.440So if you have men and families, men and women, come from countries where men and women relate to one another differently, in the public space and in the private space, and then they come to liberal societies, and the values are different, then, yes, all the very complex socioeconomic aspects are there.
00:43:29.720But the question is, are those the defining ones, or is it the cultural aspects?
00:43:35.600And then my conclusion is, it is poor integration policies.
00:43:40.620In other words, poor assimilation policies.
00:43:43.660And it is not, it's very difficult to culturally assimilate minorities if the receiving societies are not confident in their own values.
00:43:55.580And so the process of assimilation and developing successful assimilation that is socializing these young men into the value of women, into the values of the host society, this is all compromised by that moral relativist attitude where we were saying, you can integrate, and we will only talk about the socioeconomic aspects.
00:44:22.060When it comes to the values, when it comes to the values, we're not going to question those.
00:44:27.220And so there was not, at any time there was a proposition to, yes, impose the values of liberal societies on the incoming minorities, there would be an opposition to that.
00:44:40.960There still is an opposition to that from within saying, to do that is to recolonize them.
00:44:48.280It's ethnocentric, it's Eurocentric, it's arrogant, it's racist, it's xenophobic, it's an excuse to keep people out.
00:44:58.820And so the integration process has been frustrated on the one hand from the establishment that is relativist, on the other hand, by the populist and extreme right-wing parties that are saying, we don't want anybody assimilating, we don't want them to deport them.
00:45:15.200And then you have this other third force, which is the Islamists, the radical Muslims, who are preaching in the mosques to Muslim minorities and telling them, do not adopt the values of the infidels, of the host societies, because they're un-Islamic.
00:45:34.280And so if you say, if you ask me what the greatest failure is, it's the failure of the assimilation process, of the integration process.
00:45:45.560If we had a more effective assimilation policy, what do you think that should look like?
00:45:52.420I mean, the obvious issue is employment, and perhaps the problem would disappear to a large degree if immigration policy was matched to employment policy.
00:46:04.460I'm obviously not sure how that could be done.
00:46:09.340But perhaps one policy shouldn't be developed in the absence of another.
00:46:13.960But I'm wondering, so people read your book, and let's say they accept your conclusions that, and I'm going to get you to state again,
00:46:22.500and we've sort of developed the first part of your statement, which is that women are being compromised with regards to their safety in public spaces,
00:46:32.880and that's starting to impose counterproductive restrictions on their activities.
00:46:38.240And the second part is, and that's importantly a consequence of poorly designed immigration policies that allow for the arrival of people from cultures where women's rights are not valued.
00:46:54.080I'm not doing a disservice to your book to make that summary, I'm hoping.
00:47:00.280So I think it is totally possible to make the case that you can get people to come from societies that are very different in their cultural outlook and in their socioeconomic outlook.
00:47:17.960But if then the receiving society acknowledges that there is a problem and develops an appropriate integration or assimilation regime,
00:47:27.840then you could continue to have that flow of people coming in.
00:47:32.420So yes, first of all, the immigration policies are themselves poorly designed.
00:47:38.820There's a lot of talk of asylum and refugees and humanitarianism and compassion,
00:47:45.060and very little about the consequences on the ground for the receiving societies as the scale, as the number goes up and up.
00:47:53.800Well, you use Germany as an instructive example, and maybe we can just walk through that a bit,
00:47:58.800because you stated quite bluntly in your book that Angela Merkel was motivated to switch her attitude towards refugees and the borders of Germany
00:48:10.740as a consequence of an emotional response, as a compassionate response, and that well-thought-through policies weren't in place to back up her transformative actions.
00:48:23.440And I spoke to German citizens who were livid with her, livid.
00:48:28.220They voted for her, or they voted for the SDP, the Social Democratic Party in Germany.
00:48:34.720So these are not right-wing extremists who want to close the doors to immigrants.
00:48:43.020But these are people who are livid, livid, very angry, and saying this was spontaneous, it wasn't thought through.
00:48:53.120And they pointed to all the integration issues that were already straining, let me say, relations between various ethnic groups.
00:49:05.160And they said we hadn't even attended to that, these are people who were in the second generation, and we were having assimilation issues with those.
00:49:13.980And now you open the gates and you say, okay, everybody come in because I feel sorry for this little girl who's really upset, and the cameras are on me.
00:49:29.220But again, I still don't think that that answers the question, the deeper question, which most Europeans, maybe right now, most people on the left side of this issue don't want to face, which is, it's not the socioeconomics that changes the culture.
00:49:50.380It is the culture that changes the socioeconomics.
00:49:53.840This is a conversation ongoing right now in the United States as we speak about inequality and all sorts of facial confrontations.
00:50:03.940If you come from a culture where young women are pulled out of school, where there is polygamy, where violence against women is taken for granted, just because you cross the border and you get a job is not going to change your attitude to women.
00:50:19.480So at some point, we have to have that conversation about the relationship.
00:50:23.080It seems to me that the left is facing a sequence of contradictions in some sense that haven't been or won't be thought through.
00:50:32.800So, and I don't want to produce a straw man here at all.
00:50:38.840So, it's a common claim that societies are patriarchal, Western society perhaps in particular, but let's put that aside for a moment, that human society tends to be unfortunately patriarchal.
00:50:56.640So, we could accept that as a claim to begin with, and then we might say, well, that necessitates the proposition that some societies are likely to be more patriarchal than others,
00:51:07.460whichever society, when we could have a debate about which those societies are.
00:51:10.540And then the third thing we might conclude is that the more patriarchal society is, the more the men that belong to it are likely to oppress women.
00:51:20.800And so then the question would be, how do you rank order societies with regards to their oppressive patriarchal nature?
00:51:26.960And it seems to me that that's been done even by agencies like the UN, because it's easy enough to do research on which countries support women's rights most explicitly and implicitly and which don't.
00:51:42.880And my sense is that, well, there's a handful of countries that always rank at the bottom.
00:51:48.940I think the phrase patriarchy is not helpful in the least.
00:51:57.320You have patriarchal societies that have developed laws and norms and values that protect women and are still patriarchal.
00:52:09.240So this whole notion that, you know, it's the patriarchy that causes, then what?
00:52:16.400Then you get into this crazy language of toxic masculinity.
00:53:11.260Just let me attack this from a different perspective.
00:53:13.920I know, for example, the research literature on antisocial behavior, criminal behavior.
00:53:19.960And it appears that, first of all, antisocial behavior is unbelievably difficult to treat.
00:53:25.760It looks like it's stable, about as stable as IQ across the lifespan.
00:53:31.440If you're antisocial by the age of four, there's a strong probability that you'll be antisocial when you're a teenager and young adult, especially if you're male.
00:53:40.180And there isn't any evidence that I know of in the research literature that anything at all can be done to ameliorate that.
00:53:46.840The more hard-headed scientists that I've worked with who've concentrated on antisocial behavior basically end up making the claim that either addressing it has to be done at a very early stage of life, perhaps between the ages of two and four years old, for that minority of men who are males, who are aggressive even at that early stage.
00:54:10.180Or you wait till the antisocial males mature out of it, which seems to occur around the age of 27.
00:54:17.160So what makes you optimistic about the fact?
00:54:20.540Let's assume that the assumptions that you're making are correct and that this is a cultural issue and that it's a serious cultural issue and that it can be associated with particular cultures.
00:54:32.080What makes you think that it can be ameliorated?
00:54:34.480Like what sort of education or training would be necessary to have an effect on that?
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00:58:41.820The cultures I'm describing do not think in general that it is antisocial or negative in the least to be aggressive as a young male between the ages of 2 to 4 or beyond.
00:59:00.900That is the main difference between, say, evolved cultures like what we are now, you know, the cultures that have produced the laws we live under in Western society,
00:59:16.280and say the Islamic Republic of Iran, or the now civil war-torn Syria, or Saudi Arabia, or Somalia, where I come from.
00:59:27.640It's not described as aggression in males is not seen as a bad thing.
00:59:33.740And the ways of channeling that aggression are very different from the ways that male aggression is channeled in Western societies,
00:59:45.160and the way young boys are socialized into, you know, becoming less aggressive or...
00:59:55.020Well, they incorporate, the successful ones incorporate their aggression, I would say.