TRIGGERnometry - Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Women Are Paying the Price for Political Correctness

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantin Kissin. And this is

00:00:10.080 a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. It does not get better

00:00:15.980 than the guest we have for you this week. She's an author, activist and scholar. Ayaan

00:00:20.640 Hershey-Lee, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you very much for having me on. Ayaan, it's

00:00:25.900 a great pleasure for us to have you on the show. Listen, we were talking just before the show

00:00:30.180 started about the fact that there's now a whole generation of young people who may not even be

00:00:34.500 familiar with the entirety of your journey. They might be familiar with your later work, but not

00:00:39.060 with the whole journey that you've had through life. So for those people, give everybody an

00:00:43.620 overview of how are you, where you are sitting here talking to us. So, well, my name is Ayaan

00:00:51.260 and I was born in Somalia. I'm a very old woman. I think if you hit 50, then that's when age sort

00:01:02.440 of comes after you. I was born in 1969. My father was a politician and we left Somalia when I was

00:01:11.320 about seven or eight years old. And we moved around. I lived in Saudi Arabia. I lived in

00:01:15.980 Ethiopia I lived in Kenya and in 1992 when I was 22 years old my father decided that it was time

00:01:25.560 for me to get married and he picked a husband for me I didn't agree with that arrangement

00:01:33.280 but I also have to make it very clear that that's just how it works in our culture

00:01:38.380 he was trying to do what's best for his daughter and I think he had a sense of guilt because he

00:01:44.580 had been gone for 10 years. So he left when I was about 11 years old and came back when I was 22

00:01:51.180 years old. And at that time, I thought he had no business arranging anything for me, aside from me

00:01:57.420 not liking the man that he selected for me. I was then sent to Germany to stay with a relative

00:02:04.080 who was going to help us figure out the immigration process from Germany to Canada,

00:02:12.180 The man that my father married me off to was a Canadian Somali, but instead of going to Canada, I slipped into the Netherlands, and I asked for asylum, and I lived there for 10 happy years, and then 9-11-2001 happened, and I took a position in that debate that was not popular.

00:02:35.320 and that sort of launched me into I you know one day I was a complete unknown I had just graduated

00:02:43.620 and started my first job at a think tank and a few weeks later I was the sensation of the nation

00:02:51.360 and you talk to some people and they would say famous and some people will say infamous

00:02:58.780 and then fast forward I went into politics I served in the Dutch parliament for about three

00:03:06.100 years and then I made comments that were considered blasphemous by by Muslims including my family

00:03:22.120 and my relatives and the wider Muslim community.

00:03:26.240 And that led to the Dutch government deciding to put me in a security scheme

00:03:34.440 where I was, you know, I had guards 24-7.

00:03:42.880 And because I had guards 24-7, I didn't end up the way my friend Theo van Gogh ended,

00:03:50.480 who was killed by an Islamist who thought that he blasphemed Theo van Gogh.

00:03:56.860 Theo van Gogh and I made a small film together where we were trying to show

00:04:01.620 that the awful, horrible treatment of women in Islam is not just, you know,

00:04:13.220 it's not just incidental, that there is a whole ideology behind it

00:04:17.020 and that it's sanctioned by the Quran and that was offensive enough

00:04:23.080 to this young man called Muhammad Biyeri that he plotted to kill both of us,

00:04:28.100 but he was able to get to Theo because Theo didn't have the same security

00:04:35.040 or sort of 24-7 bubble that I was in.

00:04:42.580 And that kept me safe, of course, and I'm grateful for that.

00:04:45.160 but in short that's my background. And then you moved to America where I believe you still have

00:04:51.680 to have bodyguards. So tell everybody Ayan what are these great crimes that you've committed?

00:04:58.720 What are the words that you've said or the things that you've done that make you as you said infamous?

00:05:04.980 Well I think the first and I would say the crime that for instance my family think is unforgivable

00:05:13.180 is that I said, I'm no longer a Muslim.

00:05:16.560 I just don't believe in Allah or Muhammad.

00:05:19.040 And then I took it one step further.

00:05:21.980 And instead of just saying, I don't believe in the moral superiority of Muhammad,

00:05:28.040 I started to describe things that he said and did.

00:05:32.060 And to this day, people do and say it's justified in the name of religion

00:05:37.860 because they follow in the footsteps of Muhammad.

00:05:39.920 And so I judged Mohammed by the moral standards of our day

00:05:47.380 And that put me in even more trouble

00:05:51.520 And then in the Netherlands, like right after 9-11

00:05:57.640 We weren't just having conversations about terrorism in the Netherlands

00:06:02.180 We were also having conversations about the failure to integrate Muslim minorities

00:06:09.820 and not just the first generation but the second generation and sometimes even going down to the

00:06:15.980 grandchildren and I looked into it and I came to the conclusion that if we allow Muslim communities

00:06:26.160 to continue treating girls and women the way they do they will continue to lag behind and

00:06:32.400 integration is just not going to happen I was talking about such features as female genital

00:06:38.940 mutilation I was talking about pulling little girls out of school and marrying them off

00:06:43.600 abducting them sometimes taking them to the country of origin forcing them into marriages

00:06:48.900 that they didn't want to or importing young men from very remote parts of Morocco and Turkey and

00:06:55.560 other places and then having these girls who were born and raised in Holland and they would be

00:07:00.840 married off and and there was something transactional about that and inhuman and I wasn't

00:07:07.000 supposed to talk about that stuff. But my conclusion was, if you want integration to

00:07:11.720 succeed, emancipate these young women. And then as the conversations about terrorism

00:07:20.540 continued, because terrorist acts continued, most of our prominent leaders were saying

00:07:27.240 Islam is a religion of peace. And I thought that it was nonsense. I didn't just think

00:07:34.180 that. I also said it. I wrote about it. I tried to demonstrate that it's very difficult

00:07:44.880 to maintain this notion that political Islam is what I'm talking about. I'm not talking

00:07:52.880 about Muslims here who are just peaceful people and identify as Muslim. I'm talking about

00:07:57.460 the people who organize and raise money and preach and develop a narrative

00:08:04.800 and then act on that narrative and wage jihad or holy war.

00:08:11.540 And I just thought it was very strange to say that it's a religion of peace

00:08:16.260 when, in fact, we were seeing acts of violence from the beheading of Theo van Gogh

00:08:25.660 all the way to attempts to blow up innocent people

00:08:31.880 going about their business in recreational areas.

00:08:37.800 And so I lived through the time when the hotels in Bombay were attacked,

00:08:46.780 but also when Boko Haram, the leader of whom studied in Saudi Arabia

00:08:52.880 and, you know, he imbibed the ins and outs of Sharia law in Mecca and Medina

00:09:01.140 and then went back to Nigeria and then established an organization called Boko Haram

00:09:05.420 and then started terrorizing the population.

00:09:08.500 So it goes in terms of scale, it goes from, you know,

00:09:12.960 attacks against individuals all the way to the upsetting of countries

00:09:22.520 And then obviously we saw the phenomenon of ISIS, where these outfits that call themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria invaded and occupied large swathes of Iraq and Syria,

00:09:41.000 and subjected the people of Iraq and Syria to not only a theocracy that they justified in the name of Islam,

00:09:54.020 but that we were seeing in real time because this is the kind of world we live in now where those perpetrators were saying,

00:10:03.300 We're acting in this way, say, against Yazidi women, because this is what the Koran tells us.

00:10:09.920 This is exactly what Muhammad did. And so we're trying to replicate these things.

00:10:14.640 And so I think voicing these things, linking them to Islam, famous with a group of people, infamous with others.

00:10:26.100 So, Ayaan, why do you think that we're not able to have a sensible, rational discussion about Islam?

00:10:30.980 not about Muslims, but about the religion and the ideas behind it?

00:10:38.080 Well, here are some, I'm just going to run you through some of the reasons that I hear

00:10:43.000 to answer that particular question.

00:10:47.860 There are a lot of stories about, when you say we, assuming Western society.

00:10:56.480 Yes, absolutely.

00:10:57.300 that we have to atone for all the things

00:11:02.140 that Western civilization has done wrong.

00:11:07.300 Slavery, colonization, the occupation of other countries,

00:11:12.480 waging wars, the First World War, the Second World War,

00:11:16.800 the way the Jewish people were treated.

00:11:21.580 So I think there is this, and I hear that,

00:11:26.160 I acknowledge all of that history, but we end up just telling one side of the story.

00:11:31.800 We only tell the story of all the terrible things that Western leaders over the centuries have done.

00:11:44.400 We don't tell the other side of the story.

00:11:46.460 We don't tell the story of it was the British who took the initiative in ending slavery.

00:11:56.160 The Arabs didn't end it. The Chinese didn't end it. Other civilizations didn't end it. We don't tell that story. We had a war in America, a civil war that almost ripped the country apart. And that was about ending slavery.

00:12:12.560 We had subsequent conflicts about not just ending slavery, but ending segregation.

00:12:19.640 We had the whole story of civil rights.

00:12:23.320 We don't tell these stories.

00:12:25.860 We also don't tell the stories of what other civilizations have done wrong.

00:12:30.420 And so we are in this, we've got to atone for the past by, I would say, just talking about what we did wrong.

00:12:40.480 And we're pushed into a place where the only way we are told in the age of identity politics is the only way to atone for it is to look away from, in my view, injustices perpetrated by people of color and non-Christians.

00:13:08.600 So in this case, the religion of Islam. And I don't agree with that approach.

00:13:15.620 We're just being told, be quiet and let's sit tight and suffer.

00:13:20.580 Let the victims of those ideologies suffer. Let's be patient.

00:13:26.080 And then one day, I suppose, we'll wake up and what?

00:13:32.240 So, Ayaan, what would you say to those people who say that having these conversations,

00:13:36.920 putting forward these types of arguments is emboldening the far right?

00:13:41.480 Well, there are extreme rights groups, just like there are extreme left-wing groups.

00:13:46.640 But let me focus now on the extreme rights and the populists.

00:13:51.500 And they are the only ones in town right now who are talking about these issues.

00:13:57.780 And if you want to empower them, I think the way to do it is to censor and to self-censor rational people who are in the middle, people who are not hostile to immigrants, who are not necessarily hostile to Islam, who are not hostile to women, who are not hostile to immigration in general.

00:14:20.860 centre-left, centre-right, established and establishment parties and elites, when they say

00:14:28.600 we're not going to talk about these issues, then you leave the door wide open for these fringe

00:14:35.680 groups to come in and take control of the narrative of some of these big issues of our time.

00:14:42.800 And that's unfortunate. And you talked earlier about being infamous. And I can totally see that

00:14:49.260 with some of the arguments that you're putting forward, why someone who's a Muslim or even,

00:14:54.040 frankly, an Islamist, like the sort of people you're criticizing, would be angry with you.

00:14:59.240 What I understand a lot less, and I mean a lot less, is how somebody who grew up in the West

00:15:06.600 is a product of this sort of culture, who's not in any way affected by the words that you're saying,

00:15:11.520 why are they so angry with you? Because, look, you might be completely wrong,

00:15:16.020 but you have a right to express these ideas, surely.

00:15:19.260 Exactly. And I mean, it's all, everybody's welcome to dislike me, to challenge my assertions.

00:15:29.820 I think that's enriching. I think it's empowering. I think it's a good thing.

00:15:36.720 But I think we, and I know you've done a number of shows on this, but we live in this age where,

00:15:43.620 i mean here in america um we call it the culture wars don't worry ayan we import everything you

00:15:51.980 guys produce over there a couple of years later so thank you very much we've got our own culture

00:15:56.620 war we're very grateful for it i know i know we produce here in america a lot of good things that

00:16:02.600 go across the world and then we also produce really bad things like identity politics and

00:16:09.040 that also unfortunately goes across the world and here we are uh but there is um we live in

00:16:15.560 it's a crazy context because we live in and you gave you really described that very well

00:16:21.060 so people actually sane people rational well-educated people will uh make statements like

00:16:29.160 i don't like so-and-so uh and then you say but why would you like so and so you've never met

00:16:36.040 so-and-so you've never really engaged with so-and-so why don't you like them and it's just

00:16:41.240 that because they think that belong in that camp now when i discuss and i and that's what i was

00:16:50.340 doing in the past couple of decades uh islam or when some of my friends talk about christianity

00:16:58.780 or judaism you see people organized along religious lines and say i belong to this

00:17:05.260 particular religious camp and people who belong in that other camp,

00:17:09.540 I don't like them.

00:17:10.480 I don't think that their approach to God or morality or sanity

00:17:15.260 or society is a good thing.

00:17:18.420 But I think we understood it.

00:17:21.320 The framework was always religion.

00:17:24.340 And then we were trying, the rest of us, either moderately religious,

00:17:29.320 agnostic or atheist, we would say, well, we've got to compel

00:17:35.240 them to moderate. Now we're faced with this, and it's really amazing, this pseudo-religious,

00:17:44.340 a secular movement born out of this post-modernist web of ideas and thoughts. And it's, you know,

00:17:54.780 it's a mishmash of things, but it has now coalesced into, again, in America, we call it

00:18:01.480 cancel culture we call it woke it's got all sorts of different names um but they um they the people

00:18:11.640 who adhere to these post-modernist uh ideas they say they have the last word on justice they have

00:18:18.500 the last word on equality they have the last word on anything concerning race gender

00:18:25.440 and these people are not going to like me or people like me

00:18:31.780 because I just have the same attitude to them as I do to the Islamists

00:18:37.140 which is I don't really care what arguments you make to shut down free inquiry,

00:18:46.160 free discussion, free debate.

00:18:48.780 The fact that you're doing it is wrong and here's why you're wrong

00:18:54.620 and those people are not going to like me.

00:19:00.580 Hey, Constantine, are you feeling fragile?

00:19:03.360 Of course, I'm a full-blooded, toxic, straight white male.

00:19:07.120 Then I have the perfect book for you.

00:19:09.560 It's called Woke Fragility.

00:19:11.840 What's it about?

00:19:12.600 It's a satirical takedown of the woke movement,

00:19:16.020 poking fun at all the nonsense and the ridiculous arguments

00:19:20.080 we're forced to endure day after day.

00:19:23.320 Ah, so it's a parody of Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility, a favourite of middle-class white gimps everywhere.

00:19:29.600 There is nothing wrong with being a lower middle-class white gimp.

00:19:33.260 Anyway, the great thing about the book is that it's not gratuitous or incendiary.

00:19:38.400 It's a light-hearted and playful book written by someone on the left who's as incredulous at this idiocy as we are.

00:19:46.160 I'm guessing he hasn't been able to find a publisher because, well, for the reasons that we all know.

00:19:51.180 So where do I get a copy for my one remaining woke friend?

00:19:55.180 Search Woke Fragility on Amazon or just hit the link in the description.

00:19:59.600 All right, well, what happens if I don't read it?

00:20:01.280 I'll buy you a copy of Woke Fragility instead.

00:20:03.740 Get me a copy of Woke Fragility stat.

00:20:06.100 Finally, I've figured out what it takes to make him behave.

00:20:10.820 Francis, do you enjoy social media?

00:20:12.900 Of course. I love spending my days being called a fat bigot by strangers.

00:20:17.300 And do you think the woke bias on social media is getting ridiculous?

00:20:20.660 Yeah, what happened to Parler was a travesty for freedom of speech online.

00:20:25.240 What if I told you there was a brand new social media platform that encouraged free speech?

00:20:29.960 That's brilliant. Will it be able to show off my sick abs on it as well?

00:20:33.520 Hopefully not. The new platform is called Retalk and it is absolutely exploding right now.

00:20:38.760 They have discussion forums around any topic, from gardening to ancient history, all the way to current politics.

00:20:44.440 That sounds great, but a lot of these free speech platforms just attract all the worst people from both sides.

00:20:51.840 Or as we call them here, trigonometry fans.

00:20:54.400 Correct.

00:20:55.060 Joking aside, what makes Retalk different is it's moderated to keep away extremists.

00:21:00.000 But instead of being uber-woke, they take a balanced view to moderation.

00:21:03.940 Wow, how did they find so many moderators who don't have pink hair?

00:21:08.560 I don't know, maybe they hire people from all over the political spectrum.

00:21:12.880 Great joke, mate.

00:21:14.100 No big tech company would ever do that.

00:21:16.860 Retalk insists on civility,

00:21:18.560 and they're particularly keen to foster conversations

00:21:20.860 for people in the center and on the center right.

00:21:23.160 You can even go on there and discuss trigonometry

00:21:25.400 and your favorite episodes.

00:21:26.860 So all I need to do to access this great site

00:21:29.640 is click on the link, and it will take me straight there.

00:21:32.060 Yep.

00:21:32.280 And if you're a listener, go to retalk.com.

00:21:35.400 That's R-E-T-A-L-K dot com,

00:21:39.100 and start having intelligent conversations.

00:21:41.520 You know there'll be intelligent conversations

00:21:43.520 because Francis hasn't worked out how to join yet.

00:21:45.880 I haven't.

00:21:49.000 And so what I don't understand, right,

00:21:51.240 is the people we're talking about,

00:21:53.060 they would claim that they are all about protecting women,

00:21:56.600 all about protecting sexual minorities.

00:21:59.220 And you are criticizing what you call political Islam,

00:22:02.160 which let's be, you know, let's put it with British understatement.

00:22:05.220 It's an ideology that doesn't exactly have the best record on those issues.

00:22:09.440 shouldn't they be your allies on this?

00:22:12.480 You would think that.

00:22:14.280 You would think that when they say they actually are engaged

00:22:18.700 in speaking for and giving a voice to minorities,

00:22:24.920 groups that didn't have a voice, the transgender community,

00:22:29.600 women, blacks, people of colour,

00:22:36.140 any group that they identified as having been victimized in the past.

00:22:45.500 So, you know, in the first naive moment, that's what you think they're doing.

00:22:51.140 And then you dig deeper into the ideology and the logic of their ideology

00:23:00.780 and the way they express themselves and the way they use language

00:23:06.440 and these matrices that they've made to heterosexual male is at the top.

00:23:13.920 He's the oppressor, guilty of toxic masculinity.

00:23:17.480 And then you come down the ladder, people of colour, et cetera.

00:23:21.460 If you look into all of this, what you're going to discover is

00:23:25.100 that, in fact, they're not interested.

00:23:30.780 In protecting the rights of women or the rights of any of the other minorities that they have given, they've categorized them in this matrix of victims.

00:23:44.160 They're just not interested in it.

00:23:46.160 What they're really interested in, aside from virtue signaling and showing the world that they're morally superior, what they're really interested in is acquiring power and money.

00:24:00.780 And not doing or getting to these things the way the rest of us are expected to, which is through hard work and distinguishing yourself because you've put 10,000 hours into being accomplished at something.

00:24:17.960 But by guilt tripping people into saying, if you don't give me that particular position of power or this pay or that promotion, you're a racist, you're a sexist, you're this, that and the other.

00:24:35.240 And it's just, or I would say in terms of intellectual accomplishments, a lot of these people are inferior and they're just masking that inferiority with this type of narratives and storytelling.

00:25:00.220 We're now being told working hard, getting up in the morning, having a goal, trying to achieve all of that is whiteness.

00:25:10.580 There you go, mate. You're not as white as you thought.

00:25:12.560 Delighted. Absolutely delighted.

00:25:14.960 So moving on to your latest book, Prey, which I'm going to be honest with you is a brilliant book, but incredibly, incredibly difficult to read.

00:25:23.080 It's very, very challenging.

00:25:24.200 It deals with the issue of first-generation refugees coming to the West

00:25:28.620 and then the crimes that they commit against women in these countries.

00:25:34.020 Why did you feel that this was such an important topic to tackle?

00:25:40.200 First of all, it's a big problem that affects women.

00:25:48.480 It's a problem that I know people don't want.

00:25:52.220 Like we talked about earlier, people don't want to talk about Islam.

00:25:55.560 They don't want to talk about immigration.

00:25:57.200 All of these issues have been declared too sensitive to touch.

00:26:01.840 But the scale of immigration is growing.

00:26:05.760 And it will continue to grow.

00:26:08.720 Before I got on your show, I was reading United Nations reports

00:26:14.320 that were saying because of COVID-19, very frail economies will be disrupted.

00:26:22.220 that will lead to food shortages, that is going to lead to conflicts,

00:26:27.540 that is then going to lead to an exodus of young people,

00:26:30.640 mainly young men from Africa, Middle East, South Asia,

00:26:35.120 any number of the countries where many of these immigrants come from.

00:26:39.180 And they will be heading to Europe and other wealthy nations.

00:26:44.000 And many of them will not make it.

00:26:46.640 And some of them will make it.

00:26:47.920 now just let's say keep that in your mind and then you move on to the minorities from those

00:26:59.300 particular places first generation second generation in europe and we were having

00:27:05.620 great difficulty assimilating them into the value system of the host societies so

00:27:13.520 So we have this problem of assimilating people who have been coming since the 1960s, 70s, 80s.

00:27:20.080 Again, not all of them, but a large enough group that is causing social cohesion problems.

00:27:28.280 Now we are having this.

00:27:29.980 We had the waves of 2015, and according to the prognosis, there will be even more.

00:27:36.700 um that sort of uh i would say large-scale human movement always creates disruptions

00:27:45.340 the subject of this book is it's affecting women

00:27:49.820 in negative ways not and and for years i wrote about immigrant women themselves like i told you

00:27:58.180 muslim women were subjected to female gender mutilation subjected to child marriage subjected

00:28:05.680 to what we call, it's an umbrella name called honor violence, where it's basically the men

00:28:12.140 in your family who tells you what you can and can't do. And so the freedoms and rights

00:28:17.820 of immigrant women were constrained. We decided that was taboo. We weren't going to say much

00:28:22.580 about it. There have been conversations about it. There have been a lot of activism, but

00:28:28.200 we really didn't deal with the problem the way we should have. Now the problem is spilling

00:28:33.240 of and this is the subject of prey into the public space and it's affecting all women immigrant and

00:28:39.300 local or native or white or whatever you want to call them and it's affecting mostly and here i

00:28:48.200 think it's easier to talk to british people because you understand class it's affecting

00:28:55.400 working class women more than anyone else so we had the me too movement that started here

00:29:02.920 again that came to your shores and beyond i thought it was a good thing that movement was about

00:29:11.760 um about addressing the workplace as the workplace has to be a safe place for women

00:29:22.660 and it wasn't and and that erupted it was a good thing but it didn't trickle down to the masses

00:29:29.900 and masses of working-class women who are, in fact,

00:29:34.220 victims of sexual misconduct.

00:29:38.700 And what I focus on in the book is sexual misconduct perpetrated

00:29:43.800 by some immigrant men, many of them from Muslim-majority countries,

00:29:51.140 who were born and raised in places where the attitude to women

00:29:57.780 is radically different from the Western countries that they're coming to.

00:30:03.520 It's a taboo to link Islam, immigration, and the erosion of women's rights,

00:30:10.560 but it has to be done.

00:30:12.440 I know you had a gruesome debate in the United Kingdom

00:30:16.220 about the Pakistani gangs targeting working-class vulnerable children.

00:30:23.860 I want to call them children because that's exactly what they were, right?

00:30:27.560 They were under 18, most of them.

00:30:30.440 And it took, what, decades for British society to come out and protect these girls.

00:30:37.520 They were betrayed in every way possible.

00:30:40.360 All because the people who were supposed to protect them didn't want to be called racist, xenophobic or bigoted.

00:30:49.960 They made a trade-off.

00:30:51.420 And the trade-off was, I'm just going to have this, I'll ignore the abuse and betrayal of these children, because I don't want to be called a racist.

00:31:04.860 And this problem that I address in the book, same thing.

00:31:10.860 Everyone, every official that I have spoken to starts by saying, I really am not a racist.

00:31:19.120 it's even racism to raise the subject or some of them will admit that there is a problem but

00:31:26.620 they don't want their name because it's going to affect their political careers some of them will

00:31:32.200 say um i you know we acknowledge yes it's a problem it's a big problem it's a growing problem

00:31:40.820 but hey i am what are we going to do about it i've heard the phrase you take some of these

00:31:48.040 young men you send them to prison for perpetrating all sorts of sexual offenses and they go like

00:31:55.880 this or they're going as a rapist and they come out as a terrorist so it isn't only that there

00:32:03.140 is a taboo but when you cut across the censorship and people open up there is a sense of hopelessness

00:32:11.760 and powerlessness and resignation.

00:32:15.080 These are terrible problems, but what can we do?

00:32:19.240 And that frustrates me.

00:32:20.720 Yeah, it frustrates all of us.

00:32:22.340 As you know, we've had Dr. Ella Hill on the show,

00:32:25.300 who's a survivor of one of these gangs.

00:32:28.260 And, you know, it's obviously a tragic situation,

00:32:30.880 but the problem with it, we found,

00:32:32.980 is that, you know, the moment you start talking about these issues,

00:32:35.940 people start calling you names,

00:32:37.420 they start questioning your motives,

00:32:39.220 They start, you know, putting you in political groups in which you don't belong.

00:32:43.200 And, you know, you said it yourself right now, quote unquote, it's only the far right talking about it.

00:32:47.740 But really what happens is anyone who talks about it becomes far right in people's eyes.

00:32:52.700 Right. So how do we how do we break that deadlock?

00:32:56.060 How do you undo that? I think you unmask.

00:32:59.400 That the labeling, the accusations, bigotry and so on, it's a cover up for incompetence.

00:33:09.220 It's a cover-up for the fact that these people who have made their way to government positions where they're elected, positions of power, are basically saying shut up because they don't have an answer and they don't want to seek an answer.

00:33:31.500 So there is, I mean, I've seen it as a cover-up for incompetence.

00:33:36.500 I've seen it up close.

00:33:38.140 It's not that these people are bad people.

00:33:41.560 It's that very often they're focused on their careers

00:33:44.620 and the issues of immigration, Islam, women's rights,

00:33:49.440 that sort of thing, it's not a career enhancing.

00:33:53.780 Yeah, you're very good at British understatement, Ayaan.

00:33:56.900 Yeah, they're career-breaking issues.

00:33:59.480 I've spoken to one of the British members of Parliament for Labour

00:34:03.540 as champion, and she was punished.

00:34:07.540 when she spoke about these things so so then she was demoted and and now she had to go back and

00:34:14.100 we tried to talk to her again and she said i'm really sorry i think you know male aggression

00:34:20.260 is universal and and she mumbled something about uh all men being bad and it's just the attitude

00:34:28.660 was please leave me alone and i understand that because she she suffered but she isn't the only

00:34:34.340 one i spoke to a german minister who said please don't use my name i see these problems um but what

00:34:41.300 am i going to do i mean i think we need to then get to that next step of then what are we going

00:34:49.400 to do and let me give you why i'll just tell you one thing why i'm a little hopeful

00:34:54.900 for the last year all of us have been locked down

00:35:01.740 you would have been in your studio because I love coming to the UK and I think you're in London

00:35:10.000 London is one of my favorite cities in the world we would be sitting together now having this

00:35:16.680 conversation instead of having to do it virtually we're not doing that because our governments have

00:35:23.420 said um we are making um the decision that locking down the economy locking you down is going to save

00:35:34.020 lives so the thing is it can be done if you if you see protecting women and children as a priority

00:35:44.420 the government can do it and they can do it very quickly

00:35:48.280 So instead of having us muddle through this data that is not really data, it's a tool, it's really a tool for obfuscation, it is possible to gather the data of there's an increase in sexual violence against women.

00:36:09.580 who are the perpetrators we're going to note down not only the names and the dates of birth

00:36:15.760 but also their skin color their religion their background etc it can be done i know that denmark

00:36:21.220 is having a conversation about whether to do it or whether not to do it i see all the cons

00:36:25.740 but i also see the pros but to be honest with you it can be done and if you do it and you have this

00:36:34.480 kind of data, that then can open the door to assimilation programs that will be tailor-made

00:36:44.220 to, if you're from Syria or Tunisia or Pakistan, you've come from an environment that has shaped

00:36:51.680 you. And so in order to assimilate you, we're going to say, ah, so this is your background,

00:36:57.860 just like we have health background checks. This is what you need to know. If you come from India,

00:37:04.480 it's going to be something different.

00:37:07.620 If you come from China, it's going to be something different.

00:37:10.020 If you're from Poland, it's going to be something different.

00:37:14.400 But this attitude that all cultures and all religions are the same

00:37:19.340 and we really should not see these cultural differences,

00:37:24.420 that is what has led to, in my view, this sense of what can we do?

00:37:33.480 We can't do anything about it.

00:37:36.220 And Ayaan, what responsibilities does the West have to take in refugees, number one?

00:37:41.760 And number two, how do we integrate them once they arrive in our shores?

00:37:47.240 I think it just depends on how you define the word responsibility.

00:37:57.400 I came to Holland as a refugee.

00:38:00.060 and i'm really grateful forever for um the dutch taking me in and giving me

00:38:10.780 the pathway to the life that i now lead and did i see that as their responsibility no i saw it as

00:38:20.160 a gesture an expression of compassion and uh in that sense as fellow human beings and i believe

00:38:28.600 in universal human rights, universal human connections.

00:38:38.060 So I would say that gesture of compassion is really a fantastic thing.

00:38:47.200 Do you want to call it responsibility?

00:38:50.000 You can, but I don't want responsibility to mean then

00:38:54.620 that you can express the compassion

00:38:58.940 and then just let things be

00:39:04.800 because let me put it differently.

00:39:08.060 We live in nation states.

00:39:11.240 We elect our governments in Western society.

00:39:14.480 We pay taxes.

00:39:16.820 And so your primary responsibility as a government

00:39:19.800 is to the people who pay those taxes

00:39:22.940 and who votes you in government.

00:39:26.480 And if women in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium,

00:39:31.660 the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark,

00:39:34.020 are feeling unsafe in the public space

00:39:36.520 because of this, you know, immigration

00:39:41.920 or that gesture of compassion,

00:39:47.740 then I think I would use the word responsibility

00:39:50.340 in terms of protecting the rule of law,

00:39:52.520 protecting those women, protecting the freedom of speech, and so on.

00:39:57.860 Now, in terms of how we interact and react to the dispossessed

00:40:03.640 outside of our borders,

00:40:08.940 I don't think the time, the accurate time is a responsibility.

00:40:16.340 I think the accurate time maybe would be compassion.

00:40:19.760 it would be a rightly understood self-interest if we build the economies in Africa and the

00:40:28.120 Middle East and so on, maybe we wouldn't have these large waves of immigration in our borders.

00:40:35.160 In that case, yes, it's a responsibility, but you're still talking about a responsibility

00:40:40.100 to your own people. And a good outcome of that is that millions of other people are helped.

00:40:48.080 It's like the way we're discussing the virus.

00:40:50.280 It doesn't help to just develop a vaccine only for the rich West.

00:40:58.340 By vaccinating people in the South in poor areas, that's an act of generosity.

00:41:05.400 But it's also an act of rightly understood self-interest.

00:41:10.680 And so I think we should be having all of these conversations about what can we do about this mass exercise?

00:41:17.300 of people from continents like Africa, Middle East, South Asia, I mean, you can't absorb all

00:41:25.300 of them. You can't, you just can't. It's overwhelming. It's overwhelming the asylum

00:41:28.600 system. I tried to address in the book how the immigration and asylum system that was established

00:41:36.200 in 1951 just doesn't, that framework is not an answer to the reality of today, which is about

00:41:46.880 millions and millions and millions of people when that framework was established for individuals

00:41:52.900 that's a good point ian so imagine for a second and i know it will be a horrible thing to imagine

00:41:58.460 that francis and i are in charge of the british government and you've got an opportunity to talk

00:42:03.640 to us what would you say western governments should do vis-a-vis the current immigration

00:42:09.520 population uh the current immigrant population the the refugee population the future immigration

00:42:15.300 all of those things, what would be the policy recommendations

00:42:18.340 that you would have for a Western government

00:42:20.660 in that sort of position?

00:42:22.920 So if you start with the populations

00:42:25.380 that are already inside Europe,

00:42:27.620 you have obviously those immigrants

00:42:29.860 who have successfully adapted

00:42:31.420 and are just doing perfectly fine.

00:42:33.780 I would say listen to them.

00:42:35.540 And it does pay to see what is it that they did

00:42:39.320 that made them so successful.

00:42:41.620 And then you have the other groups

00:42:44.340 who have just failed at integration or assimilation,

00:42:48.880 whatever it is that you call it in the UK,

00:42:50.880 I would make it a top priority to try and assimilate those groups.

00:42:56.760 You're going to end up with a group that are just,

00:43:00.920 they somehow, they just won't do it.

00:43:03.740 And I think there you have to start talking about repatriation,

00:43:08.500 just offer them, and I know some of these programs exist,

00:43:11.360 where it is, you know, you live in London,

00:43:14.600 you've been on welfare for, what, 20-something years.

00:43:18.420 Would you like to go to your country of origin?

00:43:20.940 And we will give you some resources to start life then

00:43:27.780 to be around your family.

00:43:29.380 I've seen that happen.

00:43:30.300 I have seen success stories there.

00:43:32.140 That is the integration question.

00:43:34.580 Now, there's a subset of people that are saying

00:43:38.620 They completely understand the norms and the values, but they don't want to integrate.

00:43:43.100 They're the fanatics, the Islamists.

00:43:46.700 And those, I would literally give them the choice to say, we're not.

00:43:50.160 And here's where I think integration becomes a conversation about values.

00:43:55.180 And the government would then have to say the prevailing values are British values.

00:44:00.980 This is who we are.

00:44:02.320 This is our identity, our national identity, our values, our norms, our laws, and you don't like it, you get out.

00:44:13.740 So in terms of integration, you will always have that, the carrot and the stick, where you incentivize people to integrate.

00:44:24.260 And if they fail, there are other ways of looking at it.

00:44:27.200 When it comes to what we are looking, this isn't immigration, because I think immigration is just a cover-up word for the displacement of large numbers of people because of conflicts, famine, droughts, all sorts of things.

00:44:47.740 And that is, I would say, it's a foreign policy issue combined with the Defense Department, combined with allying with other countries to say, how can we help these economies and these other societies keep it together so that, you know, people don't just go around causing instability.

00:45:17.740 This is not COVID.

00:45:20.920 Bless you.

00:45:22.900 Yeah, I think it's the onset of spring.

00:45:26.420 But I think that big picture conversation about push factors, pull factors,

00:45:33.140 which was only in the realm of academics who study migration cycles

00:45:38.600 and migration numbers, I think this now really has to come into the government.

00:45:44.140 And I understand that the time is not right with the pandemic,

00:45:47.740 with Brexit, with all sorts of, you know,

00:45:51.940 whatever's going on in China right now.

00:45:54.920 I think China is on everyone's mind at the moment.

00:45:59.300 But still, again, reading those UN reports,

00:46:06.940 the number of people on their way who are attempting

00:46:10.780 is getting ever bigger, ever younger.

00:46:13.880 and most of them sometimes up to 70 percent of them unaccompanied young men now that's not going

00:46:22.300 to end well you can anticipate that as a government you can have maybe a minister or i don't know a

00:46:28.420 department look at it and say oh gosh this is coming at us what should we do unfortunately

00:46:34.860 most governments just think why don't we just close the borders and then discover

00:46:40.900 that there is such a thing as porous borders.

00:46:47.360 Ayan, what would you say to these people who say that these Islamists

00:46:51.040 are a tiny percentage of the refugee population,

00:46:53.660 and actually most refugees, all they want is to come to this country

00:46:58.160 or another country and have a better life for themselves and their children?

00:47:02.580 Well, the people who say that, if they said that in the 70s and 80s and 90s,

00:47:08.660 and those people was you know that particular point was interesting but right now it's a

00:47:16.680 distracting it's not it's it's just a euphemism for saying i have no idea what to do and neither

00:47:23.180 should you and so let's just lie back and just let things fall apart and i think again that's

00:47:33.300 where we are getting into competence issues because if you say that you come across you

00:47:39.680 want to come across as being virtuous and moral and reasonable but in fact voters just see right

00:47:49.340 through it and think what an idiot. Ayanna do you think that this is the only way that this can

00:47:56.900 happen if basically people feel strongly enough about this that they start putting pressure on

00:48:02.500 politicians. Is that the only way that this gets addressed? People looking at some of the things

00:48:07.620 you're covering in the book, some of the things that, frankly, have already happened. And, you

00:48:11.760 know, there's enough of a concern in the public that that starts to put a pressure on politicians.

00:48:18.300 Is that the only way that this ever gets addressed? Yes. I think the only way to focus

00:48:23.780 a politician's mind is the threat of losing votes. And what we're seeing now in several

00:48:29.460 European countries who took large numbers of immigrants, mainly from Muslim-majority

00:48:34.440 countries, is that there are parties emerging out of nowhere, some of them extreme rights

00:48:43.380 and far rights, some of them populist, but in any case taking on these topics, and it's

00:48:49.100 not just immigration, they're taking on also the issue of how much of our freedoms and

00:48:54.720 laws and rights and national identity should we outsource to brussels um and when politicians find

00:49:06.360 that oh god they're losing votes that focuses the mind and and then they start to address the issues

00:49:12.660 but then you get into these cycles where um i remember angela merkel saying oh multiculturalism

00:49:19.820 has failed in an election year and she won the election but then when she got re-elected

00:49:27.180 that whole issue of immigration and integration was put to the lowest part of the priority list

00:49:35.220 but now this party the I think it's called the AFD or something the AFD has emerged and it's

00:49:44.380 getting ever bigger and it's getting more voters and I think that's frightening the establishment

00:49:49.640 parties in Germany. You see the same development in France. Marie Le Pen keeps, you know,

00:49:57.040 she's France's nightmare. If you look at Sweden, and I think Sweden is really the basket case when

00:50:05.060 it comes to the failure of integration, you know, nurturing all of these taboos and censorships

00:50:13.080 and pretending that all is well.

00:50:17.960 They call themselves, and this is really funny,

00:50:20.560 they call themselves a moral superpower.

00:50:24.600 And so while they're trying to be a moral superpower,

00:50:27.580 on the ground, all these problems are getting out of control

00:50:30.900 and they have the Swedish Democratic Party.

00:50:33.080 I don't know, is that party far-right or populist or a bit of both?

00:50:37.640 But in any case, it's now focusing the minds of the Swedish politicians

00:50:42.100 into saying, okay, okay, okay, now we have a problem, now what?

00:50:46.980 And as a result of this, do you think that we're going to see

00:50:49.980 Western democracies in crisis?

00:50:52.780 They are already in crisis.

00:50:54.180 Western democracies are already in a crisis.

00:50:56.820 I think the answer is, sorry, the real question is,

00:51:00.320 how do we respond to the crisis?

00:51:03.240 And I think it will have to start with the crisis of addressing the values.

00:51:09.100 What is it that makes Britain unique?

00:51:13.020 What are British values?

00:51:14.400 What are Dutch values?

00:51:15.540 What are French values?

00:51:17.460 You know, the Republic.

00:51:19.480 What are American values?

00:51:20.980 And I think we, once, you know, we have this movement,

00:51:23.980 this post-modernist movement with all of it.

00:51:26.740 It's where we started with the selective telling of the history

00:51:32.480 of how we were all awful in the atonement thing.

00:51:39.100 But if you carry on doing life, if you maintain, you know, well, there's nothing unique about

00:51:45.740 Britain or Britishness. First that, nothing unique, nothing special about any of our values.

00:51:54.940 And then we were just really these bad people. We were colonizing and we were enslaving and we

00:52:00.700 were raping. The only story you can tell is we were just awful people.

00:52:04.940 why do you i mean it's really it's mind-boggling why wouldn't someone who actually comes from a

00:52:15.120 country where it's ingrained and inculcated into them that the islamic identity is superior

00:52:21.500 why would they adopt your identity when you yourself say we're actually nothing our values

00:52:27.600 mean nothing so i think we'll have to have that conversation about values and national identity

00:52:34.320 versus identity politics, what matters and what doesn't matter.

00:52:38.780 That's a really good point.

00:52:40.180 And frankly, music to my ears.

00:52:41.720 You know, I'm an immigrant first generation in this country myself.

00:52:44.920 Francis is from an immigrant background as well.

00:52:47.280 And it never made any sense to me that we have these conversations

00:52:50.740 where it's like, you know, people are embarrassed to admit

00:52:54.120 that there's such a thing as British identity, you know.

00:52:57.560 And as you say, it's a really good point.

00:53:00.140 If someone already has a strong identity,

00:53:02.500 Why on earth would they adopt some kind of wishy-washy, evil, bad history identity when, frankly, they've got better options?

00:53:12.400 Yeah, I mean, I know that this is a comedy show and we perhaps need to add a little bit of fun into it.

00:53:22.780 But I watched someone like Hugh Grant and maybe I'm from Afghanistan or Iraq or Pakistan and I'm male and I think, what the, I don't want to be like that.

00:53:38.020 And I think that that is the culture, that it's the attitude of, it's, you know, I remember the Dutch had the same thing.

00:53:47.800 what is dutchness and very quickly and say i don't know eating mashed potatoes

00:53:53.560 i don't think that's a big sell i don't think many grown-ups want to eat mashed potatoes

00:54:02.100 and also these are not the things that make the west unique i mean there are things that have

00:54:07.420 made the west as successful as it's been you know freedom of expression freedom of religion

00:54:11.560 the scientific method rationality you can go down the list these are the things that have made the

00:54:16.500 west as successful as it is uh but you know it's for some reason it's only people like us that are

00:54:22.800 allowed to talk about it if a british born british person was to say these things they'd be called

00:54:27.320 racist and it doesn't make any sense i've i've raised these questions so i'll say to the germans

00:54:32.860 just for the fun of it i mean what is really unique about being german they just shake their

00:54:38.060 heads and say oh eating sausages and drinking beer and the french will say he'll talk about

00:54:44.200 frogs and wine.

00:54:46.020 Well, to be honest with you, Ayan, the last time

00:54:48.220 the Germans tried nationalism, it didn't

00:54:50.300 end well, did it?

00:54:54.140 That is true.

00:55:02.300 We found out the hard way.

00:55:04.100 But now they want to atone

00:55:06.460 for that

00:55:08.440 past by

00:55:10.180 saying, okay,

00:55:12.520 immigrant men,

00:55:13.320 when they misbehave and fail to integrate, well, tough luck for their victims

00:55:20.500 because our past was so bad that, you know what, we're now morally frozen.

00:55:31.280 That's exactly, that's literally what they say.

00:55:33.260 They just talk about we can't do this because, remember, the Holocaust.

00:55:41.200 And here's an irony.

00:55:42.100 So the Jewish minorities in many of these European countries are now being subjected to a renewed anti-Semitism, where the far right is coming out of the woodwork because it's okay now to be anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic.

00:55:59.100 Semitic. But it's now hidden in this because the Islamists are coming in declaring that the

00:56:07.220 Palestinians are victims of Jewish hatred. And so suddenly it's okay to victimize the Jewish

00:56:13.680 minorities. But you see where that atonement mentality goes? So the Jewish minority in

00:56:19.960 Germany, for whom we're atoning, because we massacred their ancestors, and we said never

00:56:26.580 again are now leaving Germany, they're leaving France, they're leaving Sweden to come here to

00:56:33.680 the United States or go to Israel because we're in the throes of atonement. That's the logic I

00:56:43.140 don't understand. So going back to the theme of responsibility, Ayaan, what responsibility does

00:56:49.100 the West have to the Middle East when you can make a very, very simple and effective argument

00:56:54.340 to say that a lot of the problems that we now see in the Middle East

00:56:57.840 were caused by the West, drawing these arbitrary lines on a map,

00:57:01.820 creating countries which are fundamentally unstable

00:57:04.800 and can really only be held together by dictatorships or oppressive regimes?

00:57:10.380 I think nudging through diplomacy, through economic relationships,

00:57:16.700 maybe even through development aid,

00:57:20.200 And I would say there is also a place for defence.

00:57:26.240 But there are these big issues where I think you seek alliances,

00:57:31.400 you hold on to those alliances,

00:57:33.220 and you try and mitigate the problems locally in the Middle East

00:57:38.740 and elsewhere, not because you're atoning for your past,

00:57:43.760 but because it is the rational thing to do,

00:57:48.220 because the unintended consequences of mass movements of broken countries

00:57:54.380 is going to destabilize your own country.

00:57:57.640 That's a good point, Ayan, and I'm aware of the time.

00:58:00.720 We're very, very grateful for the time that you've already given us.

00:58:04.740 It will be a great pleasure for us to have you in the studio, of course,

00:58:08.260 whenever we're all allowed to be in the same space.

00:58:11.280 So we'll see you in 2027.

00:58:12.660 But until then, I thoroughly recommend the book, Pray.

00:58:16.560 and, of course, you've got a new podcast out as well, haven't you?

00:58:20.360 It's the Ayaan Hirsi Ali podcast

00:58:22.120 and we just launched the Ayaan Hirsi Ali website.

00:58:25.220 Fantastic.

00:58:26.000 And with that, we have one more question for you,

00:58:28.420 which is, of course, what is the one thing

00:58:30.380 we're not talking about as a society

00:58:32.560 that we really should be?

00:58:34.760 I think we're not talking enough

00:58:37.020 about what is happening to the Uyghur minority in China,

00:58:42.260 to the women who are being systematically raped,

00:58:45.300 to the women who are being systematically and forcibly sterilized,

00:58:51.660 to the so-called education, which is really brainwashing internments,

00:58:58.380 and the genocide that China is carrying out on its Uyghur community of roughly about 10 million people.

00:59:06.380 I am amazed at the silence from Muslim leaders in Muslim countries, and even Islamists, you know, the political Islamists who would rant and rave about the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad are now really silent, eerily silent.

00:59:29.800 or when their fellow Muslims are being subjected to genocide,

00:59:36.720 to internment, to sterilization, to mass rape.

00:59:41.100 That, I think, is a subject we're not talking enough about.

00:59:45.940 Ayaan Hirsi Ali, thank you so much for coming on the show.

00:59:48.980 We absolutely loved this conversation

00:59:51.180 and we're certain that our audience will as well.

00:59:54.180 If you want to catch a Trigonometry episode or a live stream,

00:59:57.860 They always go out at 7pm UK time.

01:00:00.980 See you soon, guys.

01:00:27.860 including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.

01:00:31.840 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here,

01:00:35.920 the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

01:00:38.720 April 28th through June 7th, 2026, the Princess of Wales Theatre.

01:00:43.180 Get tickets at Mirvish.com.

TRIGGERnometry - February 21, 2021

Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Women Are Paying the Price for Political Correctness

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