The Erosion of Women's Rights? | Ayaan Hirsi Ali | EP 155

[Music] [Music] i have the great privilege today of talking with ayan jersey ali she's one of my heroes i guess that's the case ever since i read her book infidel which i believe was published in 2006 she's also published nomad and heretic and a new book which we're going to talk about today a daring book i would say which is in keeping with her general courage all things considered pray the name of the book immigration islam and the erosion of women's rights all topics that i don't believe you can discuss without bringing a tremendous amount of negative attention to yourself um but which in principle still need to be discussed you've had an amazing life ayan um i don't know if it's the life anyone would choose for themselves necessarily maybe just for our viewers who aren't familiar with us if you could present a bit of biographical information about yourself that would be a good back drop to the to the investigation into your book that we're going to conduct today and welcome to this discussion i'm very pleased to see you jordan thank you very very much for having me and yes the feeling is mutual you are also one of my personal heroes and i thank you for your courage i was born in somalia and i grew up all over the place my family left somalia when i was about seven or eight years old and then we lived in saudi arabia in ethiopia i was in kenya with my family for about 10 or 11 years and most of that time my father was absent and then he came back in 1992 and took what he called his responsibility which was to find me a husband and i didn't agree with uh his choice of husband for me uh this husband of mine then lived in canada and i was supposed to join him in canada but instead of joining him in canada i uh went along with the family plan which was to go to a relative in germany and find my way from germany to canada but instead of doing that i went to the netherlands and i asked for asylum and this was back in july of 1992. how old were you then i was 22 years old and i took to a dutch society like a fish to water i learned the language i made friends i went on to do a masters in political science and by 2000 2001 uh in my early 30s i had just done 30 i was leading the life of the average dutch woman of my age and and loving it i had just accepted a job with a think tank a think tank that works for the social democratic party and then 9 11 2001 happened muslim terrorists 19 of them took passenger airplanes and started to bring down the twin towers they wanted to bring down a white house they had brought down a wing of the pentagon and um you're old enough to remember that that was a significant moment uh in history for those of us uh who were old enough to understand what was going on there were a lot of conversations people were having in the netherlands and abroad this has to do some of them said with american foreign policy they said it had to do with injustice against the palestinian people they said that the 19 men were poor and oppressed and victims of you know economic uh challenges and i said that it had nothing to do with any of that that the leader of the 19 men left us enough information and we were able to find enough information to point that what motivated them was the conviction acting on the conviction of the religious beliefs they were waging jihad and to pretend otherwise was wrong and i didn't understand how sensational that would be and and i was given platforms by some of the dutch newspapers radios and television and from being and complete unknown who had just graduated i became this depending on who you talk to either famous or infamous person and i think the rest of the story is public and documented in infidel and you you are you i know that at one point in your life you you had guards accompanying you wherever you went is that still the case that's still the case and jordan as you know with security issues um the main instruction i've had over these years is don't talk about that um but yes that's still the case and 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 yeah i also had to live with death threats and it's very interesting when you look at that you know if you if you go back in that time when we were discussing the threats to free speech and i know a lot of people why in denial probably are still in denial about it but where they would say there is no um 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 it's just you know a handful of bad people were giving everyone else a bad name but 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 and never ever did i think that we would have what we now have which is not a threat from outside forces whether they're religious or not but are threats 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 yes well i i must say i'm quite terrified to have this conversation um and i i was also going to ask you immediately what possibly possessed you to write this book i 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 i 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 and i've had my fair share not to the same degree you have certainly but i've had my fair share of public attack and and you know i'm rather embarrassed to admit that i don't have the same stomach for it that i once did um so but anyways onward and upward hypothetically um so back to this i guess we'll start to talk about this book pray immigration islam and the erosion of women's rights i had an uneasy feeling reading it continually i mean you do say right off the bat this is a trigger warning for the entire book reading it you should be triggered well i would say i was triggered by reading it i was triggered partly as a social scientist i would say to begin with because i as i went through the initial part of the book in particular which deals with statistics pertaining to the sexual assault of women i i was reminded of the many studies that i've been involved in dealing with complex multifactorial problems and it's very very difficult to deal scientifically or mathematically or statistically with a complex social issue and you run into that problem or encounter that problem over and over among many other problems when you're formulating your argument to begin with for example here and stop me if i get any of this wrong you're you're making a case that there is some threat to women's rights in europe particularly and that that's associated with immigration and that some of that threat takes the form of enhanced susceptibility increased susceptibility to sexual assault and then you start to delve into the sexual assault statistics and then you run into the immediate problems for and it's perhaps worthwhile to walk people through what some of these problems are how do you define sexual assault for example now you could define it as the if you define it by the most severe crimes let's say rape then you miss all the data that might be obtained when you consider all the other forms of sexual misbehavior that might be regarded as assault unwanted touching on a street for example but if you include those then you risk minimizing the magnitude of the extremely serious forms of a sexual assault like rape and cri especially if you do it over a lifetime and crank up the prevalence rate so high that they start to become meaningless now i know it's an appalling thing that a very large percentage of women and perhaps an unknowable percentage face unwanted physical unwanted sexual attention psychological and physical um but if if the definition of that becomes so lacks that it's a hundred percent of women that suffer from it then you divert attention away from for example from the more serious forms of sexual assault so it's and then you outline as well the difficulties of doing cross-cultural comparison cross-country comparisons because the definitions vary so much from state to state and the difficulty of tracking change in sexual assault prevalence in any given country because of the changing definitions of sexual assault that occur within states and 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 so in the face of all that complexity what argument have you laid out and why do you think it's justifiable so the argument i'm laying out first of all isn't it's the story of women and their safety in the public space so in this book i'm not making i'm not laying out an argument about sexual violence committed by intimate partners if you wanted that it would probably be easier to get those statistics it would be harder to find them categorized along ethnic lines but still possible and i'm not talking about sexual violence against women in say in the office at work the themes that were brought to light by the me too movement so those two things are not the subject of this book what i'm talking about is the public space and so i don't start fast with statistics so i 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 what i do is it starts with experience it 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 not all women some neighborhoods are worse than others but in general in 1992 when i came to holland i don't recall ever being um assault feeling unsafe in the public in the public space i 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 and i saw that in other northern european countries and when i asked questions about that they said what is are you out of your mind what's wrong with you where you come from don't you take it for granted and 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 cats called after and so then i go from the descriptions of uh verbal um sexual violence or sexual uh propositions that are inappropriate and lewd and obscene and are harmful and hurtful all the way to rape and these women were just stunned a 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 and 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 so when i first proposed writing this book it was for instance my husband saying the argument will no it won't go anywhere because you will not be able to get the statistics and i thought what i'll try and 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 and some countries again are totally as you describe the definitions shift some countries say we do record sexual violence against women but not the ethnicity of the perpetrators or the religion of the perpetrators in 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 and i would ask the people who say that they've collected these statistics why don't you have that information input and then you would always run they would it would always be off the record but you would always run into the issue of well the issue of immigration is really controversial the issue of islam is really controversial and 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 you're going to stigmatize muslims and islam it's not all muslim men it's a universal phenomenon and i agree with all of these things but we still have a problem the safety of women in general in the public space is compromised so how can we collect statistics if as a social scientist you start shrouding all these issues with complex cultural and political factors please join let me give you an example in from january of last year to january of this year i think today is what the last day was the first of february uh we have had all to live with the pandemic we've had a lot of conversations and disagreements about it but 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 what are the things that we need to do and 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 we've overcome huge taboos 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 and we can never even agree on what data is important let alone collect it effectively and let alone produce effective policies to address that so i'm going to ask you rude questions um because they're the sorts of questions that are going to be brought to bear in relationship to this book and so they popped into my mind constantly um in 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 how how 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 that's the first thing because if that isn't the case see because i kept wondering well what exactly is the problem here and 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 from engagement in all on all sorts of public fronts and that there's nothing about that that's good that i believe is 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 and then the next part of the argument is that that can be associated with an increase in immigration specifically from islamic countries and you even event 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 it's its influence on islam so 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 the most critical stance to find out where where what's solid and so you're obviously concerned about the safety of women and what what makes you think that your concerns are warranted so again i want to be and i don't think it is rude at all i think asking um these questions is um is not only justified it's crucial yes it's absolutely necessary for this for this issue to ever be to be dealt with one way or the other or any other social issue that is of this magnitude i think the most important thing that i can do any any other observer can do is to say i want this to be questioned and 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 as you know with these types of very complex social issues that is very very difficult having 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 now you it is very important to make the distinction between something as gruesome and as horrific as rape and there is rape by one individual against another individual but sometimes it's done in groups that's even more horrific and it's not nearly as horrific as somebody calling you bad names as you you know walk by or touching you or so in terms of what is most gruesome it is rape especially by groups and then very often that leads to homicide so some of the victims actually die and i i didn't want this book to be about just about that when something like that happens in a european country that is recorded and in fact um the the authorities make an attempt at finding the perpetrators and bring them bringing them to justice now you can debate if the severity of the punishment fits the crime in 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 if 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 recall we just don't record that kind of data and they have reasons for that germany for instance because of the history of the second world war in the holocaust and what they had done right all sorts of minorities uh and other countries like even the netherlands i i don't think they would record the religious aspect of it some of them will though record i've seen this in norway i've seen this in denmark i've seen it in austria even in germany at a given moment there was a recording of the testimony of the victim or witnesses or 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 and as things evolved journalists who are told not to do that and victims would sometimes testify those who survive the audio and if this goes to justice they would describe the physical characteristics of the perpetrators now that is the most gruesome aspect of it now go to the lightest let's just say the verbal abuse the touching the groping stuff that in some countries is criminalized recently in some countries it's not yet criminalized but stuff that is seen as inappropriate towards women things that make women feel unsafe and again the victims of that kind of behavior will describe who the assailants are and they sometimes they'll those recordings at first some of these countries would put down that information these data points and see them as important but then income the political correctness the identity politics immigration is sensitive islam is sensitive we don't want to stigmatize and then you will see these data points have been dropped you 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 and then someone else will be commissioned and will be told okay can you please give that a second look and they would come and they would say you know what sexual violence against women is universal yes well that's part of the complexity of the problem because i was thinking as well well you also point out for example that um many cases of sexual assault are never they're never brought to the police and no one knows how many cases are like that and 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 um it's even more true for the more minor forms of sexual harassment which i would say would certainly be certainly be um of sufficient unpleasantness to potentially restrict women's at least their sense of freedom um in in the public domain um but so uh a critic and you've covered this in the book as well a critic might object well this is going to happen in 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 yeah and um so maybe it's it has nothing to do with country of origin or ethnicity or or religious background right but it's purely a demographic matter and then there's another issue which is even if it is true that that immigration policy tilts so that young males are more likely to immigrate um that doesn't necessarily mean that that should be stopped there's a price to be paid for it but there's potential benefits from it as well and so the layout for for everyone yeah as exactly what you think the problem is and and why see because the other thing i thought too was well why did ian's critics are going to say there's lots of contributors to violence against women that could conceivably be talked about and you might say well you should attend to those that are the most dramatic uh the most consequential the most severe but perhaps also to those that might be the most easily addressed so 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 because if you alcohol contributes victims and perpetrators of violent crimes about 50 percent of them are alcohol intoxicated it's a massive contributor to to violence of all types domestic violence every type of violence and 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 especially given the benefits of the humanitarian benefits even of an of a relatively more open immigration policy so here i think again we're going to start talking about the trade-offs and i think in terms of these trade-offs what we're seeing is that the um in the way i see it is that the rights of women are being and their freedoms and their safety has been compromised um when say you know is immigration beneficial is and then like the way you say it's even uh on humanitarian grounds just being compassionate to fellow human beings right from syria parts to different parts of africa different parts of south asia these men are suffering we should feel compassion for them i think it should be possible to feel compassion for them and accommodate them in as much in every way we can without selling out women now in terms of the contention that that particular demographic when you have a young men of a certain age in large groups they tend to engage in violence including sexual violence that is true i don't dispute it i describe it in the book anywhere 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 uh look at places like guatemala el salvador all of those places where that you have a cohort of young men with no jobs with no purpose in life and in a machismo type of society and there is violence this disorder and then including sexual violence so that's not something i'm disputing or something that i want to exaggerate in terms of the alcohol component i think we have had and probably will continue to have that conversation about say um 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 both of them drunk and up to a point the young man involved will argue i thought all this time that it was voluntary and the next morning the young woman will wake up and say it wasn't and that is i think a conversation we will continue to have and you're absolutely right if 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 and we should we should raise our girls if they don't want to have sex and 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 so enough to overwhelm you so that's a debate that we are going we will continue to have but that's not the subject of this book 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 all 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 that's not what i'm talking about i'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 i'm talking about different things where you would say i'd say i'll give you another data point there are now neighborhoods where european women have decided no one is going to protect me so i just want to go there there 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 visit 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 asked to leave and they have a conversation about but why should i leave these are these are female filmmakers who are doing this these are female filmmakers who are con who have seen in france certain neighborhoods have become inaccessible for women they want to address that they go and talk to the proprietors of these cafes and things and who is it that brings up the cultural element it's not the women it's not the research or the statistician it's the men themselves who say no you're not safe here it's inappropriate and she says but this is his uh this is not like some place in algeria and he says this part is you better go we have another example in sweden uh northern europe where a politician is taken to a neighborhood and he's asked what is missing and he's baffled and he couldn't imagine what was missing and you looked around it was women so there are ways of looking at the complexity of this issue and 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 and like you when you said i finish the book and then i throw my hands up in the air what are we going to do about it many of them do exactly that they throw their hands up in the air and they decide let it be yeah well i it's very difficult for me to understand in in the present political state of the west it's very difficult for me to understand how a conversation about this can really be undertaken because i i don't think we're capable of doing it i mean um which is partly why it's so stressful to undertake uh to try to undertake a conversation like this i guess what we're trying to do the problem is is that we're pitting two virtues against each other and those are the most difficult moral conundrums it's not wrong versus right it's right versus right um yes and on the one hand there's compassion for the dispossessed including dispossessed young men in war-torn countries um war-torn and catastrophically catastrophically riven countries and the benefits of immigration economically and on humanitarian basis and then there on the other hand there's the 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 in 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 we've been having similar conversations about the limits of free speech and 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 that would be a rational discussion to have it would be a rational outcome it would be a good outcome for our society we have this other confrontation say between transgender rights and then compromising the rights of women we could have a win when we 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 but that is the context we live in and that's when you open this conversation you said you were terrified of being deplatformed if we were to have this conversation and 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 i don't care so let's walk through the central argument again is that you you you're attempting to demonstrate in the book that using statistics and you outline the unreliability of the statistics um and the difficulty of obtaining them but all using statistics and also like on-the-ground anthropology and case reports essentially to make the case that there has been a deterioration in the the public safety of women over the last you'd say 10 years perhaps um i think in the last 10 years it's been more more pronounced but i think it's been it's been going on for at least 20 years depending on where you are so certain neighborhoods in paris or messiah or malmo you could you could say or in certain you know the tower hamlets area in uh in the uk right around london some of those places you could go as far back as 20 years even longer and and that that that again that that deterioration is linked to to it to to poor immigration policy or or to or or to or to what's what exactly is the problem is the problem the immigration policy is that because i might also say i i mentioned youth and masculinity as contributing factors to to violent behavior yeah um but unemployment as well is going to be a contributing factor i know that's all true so all the socio-economic factors these are all contributing factors and people actually are i would say more willing to talk they feel like they're more licensed to talk about the socio-economic factors than they are licensed to talk about the cultural factors so 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 socio-economic aspects are there but the question is are those the defining ones or is it the cultural aspects and then my conclusion is it is for integration policies in other words for assimilation policies and it is not it's very difficult to culturally assimilate minorities if the receiving societies are not confident in their own values and so the the the the process of assimilation and developing successful assimilation that is socializing these young men into the valiant women into the values of the host society this is all compromised by that moral relativist attitude where we were saying you can you can integrate and we will only talk about the social economic aspects when it comes to the values you can keep we're not going to question those and 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 this still is an opposition to that from within saying to do that is to recolonize them it's ethnocentric it's eurocentric it is uh it's arrogant um it's racist it is xenophobic it's an excuse to keep people out and 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 deport them and 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 unislamic and so if you say if you ask me the greatest failure is it's the failure of the simulation process of the integration process okay and so let's decompose that if we had a more effective assimilation policy what do you think that should look like i mean the obvious issue is employment and perhaps perhaps the problem would disappear to a large degree if if immigration policy was matched to employment policy i'm obviously not sure how that could be done it's a very complicated problem but perhaps one policy shouldn't be developed in the absence of another but i'm i'm wondering so people read your book and let's say they accept your conclusions that and can i'm going to get you to state again we've sort of developed the first part of your statement but which is that women are being compromised with regards to their safety in public spaces and that's starting to impose counterproductive restrictions on their activities and the second part is and that's importantly a consequence of poorly designed immigration policies that allow for the um arrival of people from cultures where women's rights are not valued i'm i'm i'm not doing a disservice to your book to make that summary i i'm hoping no you're not so it's i think it it is totally possible to make the case that you can get people to come from um societies that are very different in in their cultural outlook and in their social socioeconomic outlook but if then the receiving society acknowledges that there is a problem and develops an appropriate integration or assimilation regime then you could continue to have that flow of people coming in so yes first of all the immigration policies are themselves poorly designed there's a lot of talk of asylum and refugees and humanitarianism and compassion and very little about the consequences on the ground for the receiving societies as this scale as the number goes up and up well you use germany as an instructive example and maybe we can just walk through that a bit because you're you yes you stated quite bluntly in your book that angela merkel was motivated to switch her attitude towards refugees and the borders of germany as a consequence of an emotional response a compassionate response and that well thought through policies weren't in place to to back up her transformative actions and i spoke to german citizens who lived with her livid they voted for her or they voted for the sdp the social democratic party in germany so they are not these are not right-wing extremists who want uh to close the doors to immigrants but these are people who are livid livid very angry and saying this was uh spontaneous it wasn't thought through uh and they pointed to all the integration issues that were already straining let me say relations between various ethnic groups and they said we hadn't even attended to that we hadn't these are people who were in the second generation and we were having assimilation issues with those and now you open the gates and you say okay everybody come in because i feel for sorry for this uh little girl uh who um who you know who's really upset and the cameras are on me so people were really angry with her but again i still don't think that that answers the question the deeper question which uh most europeans maybe right now most uh people on the left side of this issue don't want to face which is it's not the socio-economics that changes the culture it is the culture that changes the social economics do you do you know much about the immigration situation in canada a little bit yes and i know that canada in some ways looks more like europe than north america well because they took in large numbers of immigrant men and some of these situations that i described some of these anecdotes i think i could see a lot of them happening in in canada yeah well it's not been obvious to me that in cities like montreal and toronto that we've seen a palpable increase in the kind of street activity that has produced a decrement in women's feeling of safety i haven't that that's not something i've been personally aware of i i don't know if that means that canada might be doing something right it isn't obvious to me that our cities montreal and toronto in particular which have the biggest immigrant communities especially toronto hasn't fallen prey to segregation and the the development of communities that are distinctively separate from the other communities in the city i mean they're obviously ethnic enclaves in toronto but i've never had the sense that we have the same problem here for example as as has manifested itself in france you know and canada does have an official policy of multiculturalism and i don't think that we're walking down the um more intense assimilation route that you were describing i mean i'm obviously very pleased to see that it's certainly not been part of that the kind of problems that you're describing haven't really become part of the canadian national conversation i mean it's a strange time now of course with everyone locked down with covet but it's possible i don't know why things have perhaps turned out better here but they seem to have that well there is this one um again i'm not an expert on canadian immigration and integration policies but one thing that i found striking about canada is the selection at the gate so canada has its own resettlement policies it has a very aggressive i would say compared to some other countries trying to get in skilled labor for instance you have to speak english you have to you have to meet a lot of criteria before you can you can get into canada but there's also geography i mean if you look at the way it it it's become incredibly difficult for european authorities to keep out spontaneous immigration so everybody wants to select their immigrants and some kind for some countries it's easier than others and i think in canada and australia are some of the countries um that have that geographical right that's a very good one that's a good point yes absolutely we we weren't we're not as close to syria and so that protected or that that that distance dust from the the downstream consequences of the syrian conflict and not just the syrian conflict uh the economic travails of the continent of africa you know coming you can come through libya you can come through people just arrive in boats and the european authorities that uh you know that deploy the coast guards are confronted with do you let's these fellow human beings die or do you rescue them and bring them in and then when you bring them in whose responsibility are they and the conversation doesn't seem to go beyond that and i don't think you've seen something like that in god we've seen something like this in the u.s from some of these failed or failing latin american countries with the caravans and building the wall and so we we have those conversations in america but i don't know no i think that's a good i think that's a good analysis the simplest explanation could well be that canada's geographical position has protected it against many of the events or shielded us against many of the events that have made immigration such a contentious issue in other countries yeah because you can select you can select beforehand and also i think canada has uh canada departs uh canada requires as far as i know that if you want to wan if you want to go and work and live there that you have someone uh to sponsor you they have all of these requirements that they can actually enforce having said that you've had a number of honor killings in canada you've had a number of terrorist attacks in canada you have a number of extreme right-wing incidents in attacks in canada so it's not like you know you're protected from from some of these manifestations so you you suggested just a few minutes ago that this is an extremely contentious issue i mean one of the things i was struck when i read about when i read your book infidel it was so interesting to see how you responded to dutch culture because i got to see what one of the western countries looked like through the eyes of someone who was decidedly non-western i remember for example your amazement when you saw that a dutch bus that there was a sign indicating when a dutch bus public transportation bus was going to arrive and that it actually arrived at that time and and and i thought that was an extremely powerful part of the book because it is a kind of miracle that that sort of thing can occur it it requires an incredible amount of social organization and holland is a great example of a country that couldn't even exist without that large-scale tightly knit almost machine-like organization given that a huge proportion of their country would actually be underwater if it failed right and you you're making a you make a case in infidel you're making a case now that it in order for the west to develop an effective integration policy that would enable an effective immigration policy that we have to have faith in our own values the values that gave rise say to the idea of equal rights for women to accept that those the rise of that idea was something perhaps distinctively western and that we need to teach those we need to have enough faith in those presumptions to teach them to newcomers that strikes me that the probability that we're going to do that strikes me as extraordinarily low if that's what's necessary because i don't think i mean the last time i was in holland i was struck by the degree to which all the dutch people that i talked to seemed to accept the proposition that they didn't really have much of a culture at all that there was nothing particularly special about dutch culture perhaps that it even existed and certainly didn't feel that it was of sufficient quality to impose on other people i think we and and how would you address when you're criticized for being a neo-colonist let's say how do you you're in such a strange position because of your your your your where you were born and how you immigrated and don't do you think that there is a danger in in the western assertion of primacy of value for example and and is is that such a danger that it mitigates against any attempts to assimilate immigrants for example i think the way you started with you know the bus arriving on time and for something like that to happen um that a society that is hyper organized and you want to call that western i'm happy to call it western right you some people just call it modernity i don't know some people think it was just lucky i think there's a bit of everything but if you then look at societies where the bus doesn't come on time that is one factor and i just really like the time factor in fact we can we we should just have one podcast only about that things happening on time and in a predictable fashion for millions of people how do you organize that and i think that sort of makes western society distinct from societies that haven't managed to find a way of dealing with time effectively and efficiently the second thing is what we've been talking about all this time and it's violence that is suppressing male violence and channeling it so that it has other outlets instead of disrupting society and it being used against women the sec the third one i would say is money and it is for societies to have these large surpluses where they can actually take care of the weak they can afford compassion compassion is not just something you say i feel sorry for you we pay taxes so that we can pay for people's for the dispossessed and we can pay for their medical care we can pay for the housing we can so and that again greatly enhances stability and social stability and then finally it's sex which is not something that you can spontaneously have whenever whatever you know again it's not perfect but compared to some other societies unwanted diseases unwanted babies rapes and sexual violence all of that in western societies seem to be really different now you take those four factors and you say we're going to bring people in from or people from societies want who don't have that should we um bring them into this call it's first assimilation or just socialization or freeze whatever you want to call it but if we fail to do that and the number gets ever bigger then we are going to have unstable societies we're going to have and the dutch can say and i've had the swedes to do the same thing i've had germans say the same thing to me french there is nothing uniquely different from my culture maybe because they take it for granted because it's never been challenged they all look alike they think alike and then one day well you do take whatever's around you all the time for granted and it's clearly the case that we don't understand our own cultures let alone other people's cultures you don't understand what you you don't understand what you have until you don't have it anymore and what what did you what have you experienced the west as having the values that should be transmitted to the immigrant population that we're inviting in what's crucial in your estimation and how do you communicate it i mean you tried to do that when you wrote infidel right and i'm trying to do it again in this book and i've tried to do it in heretic i try to do in every book in using different sentences but pretty much saying the same thing which is before i came to the netherlands i i knew of the concept of freedom but to me it was a dream it wasn't something you had so when i came to holland i was stunned of course in a good way i i felt safe as a woman in any kind of space that's not something i was used to i was told that i had equal rights before men so when my the man that my husband was my father married me off to when he came to claim me the woman at the asylum seeker center told him you don't have to go with him you can call the police and we called the police and i didn't go with him right i can remember how stunned you were your account in infidel that the police were actually there to help you and that you could rely on them you can rely on them and she explained and this is and then i said what what can i do in retina she said you don't have to do anything interchange this is the law and that was the law when it was enforced and again that is something she was just as shocked as i was because she's so there are places where they do this sort of thing and it is oh my goodness so that i i can give you a whole list of things that i didn't have and i even took it for granted that i didn't have those things and then come to free societies and then you can read as many books as you want you can befriend whoever you want you can sleep with whomever you want you can you won't find you know you might be rejected from this job or that job but it is taken for granted that you can find your own employment and if you do you can keep the money that you make from that i i've been saying the same same thing over and over again you can associate with whoever you want again in our conversation when we started i i told you some of these things are changing and they're not changing just because of external factors like islam or immigration they're changing from within because a lot of us people who are born and raised here for generations have decided that they are disappointed in modernity they call themselves postmodernists or critical race theorists so whatever you name it but this is ideology that's taking on uh you can see it in newsrooms in you know publication houses tech world and there is an alarming rejection of the fruits of modernity of free speech of all the things that that i was impressed with when i came to the west so you contrast an islamic attitude towards women with a western attitude towards women so do we say that that's a contrast between the islamic attitude towards women and the judeo-christian attitude towards women is it reasonable to make that a religious issue and or what do you think about that i mean is this is it yeah it is a religious issue it's a cultural issue it's a it's also an issue of not only generating and being the motto behind modernity and constantly modernizing which is what western societies are constantly doing and then obviously the religious component for me when i analyze the leadership of islam is the disappointment with modernity and the rejection of that and again that is why what are they rejecting do you think that and that we've accepted what are the differences that it enables the emergence of the idea that women could be equal or that they are equal and that they should be that that equality should be fostered and treasured and developed what's the difference and maybe i mean i'm i'm not expecting you necessarily to know the answer to that but but it is the issue well the issue is when when you study the narrative that the radical muslims preach and and propagate there is this deep disappointment that islam is no longer the dominant force of the globe and the answer that they give to that question is because they strayed away from the pure doctrine and the behavior of the prophet especially when he was in medina and he had become so powerful he had conquered not only arabia but then went beyond and then his disciples went to almost every continent and they were dominant then what went wrong and i think people like baton russell and others have tried to give the answer that and they came late to the game of modernity and then had these debates about well if we want to move forward and catch up with the west when they looked down on then we have to become like them that was the attempt that kamal ataturk made in turkey but then another force a retrograde force this is these are our modern islamists said no that is actually the wrong answer we have to make them submit to us and when i say they reject modernity they they like the gadgets and the nuclear weapons and that sort of modern stuff that makes them feel dominant or strong but when it comes to adopting attitudes such as liberating women they recoil from that absolutely they recoil from that because they think that's what's going to take them about that's looking like them or running your societies according to this that time machine that the west does they think that that's all empty looking at the clock all the time so there are aspects about the west that they admire and want to incorporate but the end goal is that it is not it is not um their goal to adopt some of these western values but a lot of people are voting with their feet there are people who are poor dispossessed subjected to all sorts of violence who want to come to the west and start all over again and those are the people we are talking about and i think the people to give those people a chance to actually become a part of modernity and modern society is to assimilate them and the way to do it is just by admitting that some of these the voting with the fee says it all well you know the the classic response to that the classic criticism of that perspective would be that those dispossessed people wouldn't have had to vote with their feet if the west hadn't engaged in its colonial mission and devastated the economic uh opportunities of of two-thirds of the globe while elevating themselves to positions of unearned superiority and of course there's no shortage of evidence for that if that's the evidence that you choose to look at and sorting that all out seems to be impossibly difficult um the west is guilty for all the crimes that have been committed in its name and many of those crimes were real and so i don't we don't know how to uphold what we have of value while simultaneously atoning for our past sins maybe even the ways i i would say we could at least admit that our past sins were the failure of our the failure to live up to our values rather than the values themselves but it that's certainly not it's certainly not the case that everyone's going to agree to that it's a real mystery why the idea of equality between the genders or equality between men and things in general came about you know it to me it seems to have a deep rooting in the in the idea of the universal soul and the intrinsic value of each person and the intrinsic value of each person's capacity for speech and creative production i think that's a deeply judeo-christian idea its roots go deeper than that i don't understand i don't know if there is a an islamic equivalent i think first of all just by telling only one side of the story the story of um what is making a lot of people in the west feel guilty and that they feel that they have to atone for the colonization the slavery the segregation all of these well-documented terrible things that western societies have engaged in that is one side of the story but there's also another side of the story and the other side of the story is that it is westerners who took the initiative among humanity to change all of that to end slavery to end segregation to aspire for equality so if you're going to tell the story then it's better to tell both sides of the story now for the people who tell only the negative side of the story who are toppling statues and saying the only way to redeem westerners is for them to destroy everything and start all over again i think even with those aside from the the obvious nihilism the let's just destroy stuff and and and the selective telling of the story there's also an element of superiority in there an element of sorry an element of of superiority or supremacy because only whites and westerners are held for bad things they did in the past or do today do you mean about bad things that were that happened all together or specifically that bad things the bad things that were perpetrated by europeans i mean it's certainly the case that slavery was a human universal it's not something unique to european society by any stretch of the imagination and so was colonialism and so was and is segregation still to this day take a continent like india where the caste system is still vibrant and healthy or any take any of the arab countries where people with my skin color are still regarded as slaves so i think if you want to if you want to uh litigate history and all the things that were done bad by human beings selecting only whites and especially white men and saying only they have to forever atone for their sins is in itself an expression of supremacy because holding the arabs and holding the chinese and the chinese right now are engaged in a genocide against the uyghur people we have reports of them um forcibly sterilizing women why can't we hold them to the same moral standard that we are holding ourselves so you think it's what do you think it's inappropriately colonialist for white europeans to attribute universal human guilt to themselves it's an expression of of supremacy it's an expression of only we can meet those high very high standards not the rest of humanity they are all victims in one way or the other or we just take it for granted they just can't do it you know the chinese and the violations of human rights why even address it they don't know how to do it so we only do you see where there's the nihilism there's the selective telling of the story but like deep down when you when you read this stuff over and over again it's like actually what you're saying is you can hold those standards to yourself but not to me well i've never heard that argument before it's extremely interesting and very like darkly comical what conclusion would you like your readers and anybody concerned with public policy to come to as a consequence of reading well let's say your books pray in particular since it's your last book yeah is it you you you you think that there is a clash of civilizations and that we should be aware of that it's manifestations here and there um i don't want to put words in your mouth yeah you're right so there is indeed a clash at least even if you don't want to call it a clash of civilizations because people responded badly to that you can call it unmistakably a clash of values and in that encounter between the cultures and the value systems the conclusion of this book is we can assimilate or integrate whatever the europeans call it these young men who are dispossessed and who are vulnerable without sacrificing the rights of women but we can't do that unless we forthrightly confront the problems that are associated with an open with a more open immigration policy and that is the first step that is the first step and even maybe even a step ahead of that is we have to have these conversations so let's um let's stop putting these issues putting a taboo over these issues we have to see the way these things are linked if you want to do that like stop using you and i started our conversation with statistics and stop using statistics as a tool of obfuscation as a tool of lying about things that are going on let's use statistics and data actually to to open you know to solve these problems and we can't if we if we keep on declaring uh if we demonize one another and we moralize towards one another and and then we don't know where to go from there so then we start compromising free speech and so then you can't have these conversations so maybe the first step is i wish this book would only contribute to the opening of that conversation it's not just about women it's really it's about this how to coexist with one another in places in europe in america on the globe all right i've had the distinct pleasure complicated pleasure speaking with ayan hershey ali today and she's the author of multiple books including this one their newest published in 2021 called pray immigration islam and the erosion of women's rights ayan is launching a podcast monday which is february 8th monday february 8th and as well as launching her new website which is i unhersely.com i'd encourage anybody who wants to know more about ian's thinking to visit her website and to attend to her podcast which i'm sure will be very interesting and no doubt perhaps more interesting than than people will be able to tolerate we'll see um thank you very much for talking with me today uh ayan it was a pleasure to see you again thank you jordan thank you so very much and we could have continued this for a good long time but had to go into the kids so thank you so much for having me bye bye bye [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 656,544

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, ayan hirsi ali, ayan, religion, podcast, jbp, jordan, peterson, petterson, rogan, discourse, europe

Id: yKhAh_qfO64

Length: 74min 30sec (4470 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

She is such a badass and inspiration.

[u/letsgocrazy]

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and I discuss, among other topics, immigration, the changing safety of women in public (particularly in areas of Europe), clashing values of western cultures and Islam, win-win propositions, and many more career-ending topics.

This episode was recorded on Feb 2nd, 2021

Yikes - I think this is going to be a controversial one re: politics.

Please keep it respectful.

[u/itsamemmario]

The end is amazing! The argument that the west holds itself responsible for all of humanities sins is a form of white supremacy. Mind blown. I love it

[u/letsgocrazy]

Amazing podcast - she's a very smart woman, and brave.

I would disagree though when she says no one is criticising China for what they are doing to the Uighers - I feel that that is happening very much.