Johann Hari

The portly, shrieking pantomime dame Christopher Biggins won ‘I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!’ last night, and to no doubt become the nation’s favourite eunuch for a few months. He’s part of a long tradition of gay men welcomed into the British mainstream who I’ve written about before: the safe, sexless, self-hating homosexual who doesn’t make you think about anything frightfully distasteful like men actually having sex with each other other. No – Biggins reassures you that homosexuality is about nice things, like wearing dresses and being friends with Joan Collins, dah-ling!

As it happens, on a personal level, I think he seems like a nice man. There are some gay men (a small proportion, as it happens) who simply are naturally camp, and they shouldn’t be condemned or lectured for simply expressing their true nature. But I thought we were moving beyond a time when this was The Face of the Gays on national television. I thought we were beginning to see that gay men are just as likely to be soldiers or war correspondents or brickies as they are to be pantomime dames or howling drag queens.

By rolling this progress back, by allowing the likes of Biggins and Graham Norton to be the main face of British gaydom, we actually make it harder for gay kids to understand their sexuality. The vast majority of gay boys grows up without any more ‘effeminacy’ than their straight brothers, and yet the only gay people they see represented are mincing queens, and they think: well, I’m not like that, and I don’t want to be like that, so I can’t be gay.

But the problem with Biggins goes deeper and becomes more fetid. For the sake of a few thousand quid, he has actually sold out his fellow gay people to the most repellent gay-bashers in the British media. The Daily Mail has a clever tactic when it wants to attack a minority and beat back social progress: it pays a small fortune to a member of that group to do it for them. Want to savage feminism? Find a self-hating woman. Want to rubbish race relations laws? Find a token black person. Biggins is their token self-hating gay, the one they wheel out to make it seem as if gay people are seriously divided on unequivocal pieces of progress.

For example, Biggins was almost alone in attacking the tender, touching introduction of civil partnerships for gay couples, with Melanie Phillips presenting it as a portent of the end of civilisation. Biggins announced in the Mail that he would not be entering into a civil partnership, saying: “Marriage, in my view, should always be reserved for the union between a man and a woman - primarily for the purpose of bringing up a family.” So is he in favour of banning infertile couples from getting married? What about couples in their sixties, seventies and beyond? They can’t have kids either; but he makes no comment on them.

He then says: “To go one step further and elevate partnerships into the status of marriage would make a mockery of an institution which, for all its faults, has served society well for many centuries.” A mockery? I’d say it was a tribute, a beautiful tribute. If you’re looking for a mockery of marriage, how about Jodie Marsh setting up a reality show to find her a husband? She is – somebody tell Biggins – heterosexual. But Biggins doesn’t, I suspect, believe this right-wing drivvel; he can’t feel good when he sees the notorious homophobe Richard Littlejohn – who was actually condemned by the Radio Authority for his bigotry – praising him for being “sensible”. No: he took the money and ran.
Biggins deserves to win a reality show. It should be called ‘I’m an Uncle Tom… Get Me Out of Here!’

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In the long, hot autumn of 2000, the world was shocked by the contempt for democracy shown by the Republican Party. They knew their man had lost the popular vote to Al Gore by half a million votes. They knew a majority of voters in Florida itself had pulled a lever for Gore. But they fought – amidst the confetti of hanging chads – to stop the state’s votes being counted, and to ensure that the Supreme Court imposed George W. Bush.

Today, that contempt for democracy is on display again. In California right now, there is a naked, out-in-the-open ploy to rig the 2008 Presidential election – and it may succeed.

To understand how this works, we have to roam back to the eighteenth century, and learn about the odd anachronistic left-over they are trying to use now to thwart democracy. Back then, America’s founding fathers decided not to introduce a system where US Presidents would be directly elected, with the votes totted up in Washington D.C. and the winner being the man with the most. Instead they chose a complex system called the Electoral College. This stipulates that American citizens do not vote directly for a President. Instead, they technically vote for 539 state-wide ‘electors’, who gather six weeks after the election to pick the President.

The founders designed it this way for a number of reasons. They wanted the smaller states to have a say, so they gave them a disproportionate number of Electoral College votes. They also believed that, in a country that was largely isolated and illiterate, voters wouldn’t know much about out-of-state figures, and would be better off picking intermediaries who could exercise discretion on their behalf.

It is the worst part of the Constitution, producing perverse results again and again. On four occasions, there has been such a big gap between the national popular vote and the state-by-state Electoral College votes that the guy with fewer real supporters in the country got to be President. It happened in 1824, 1876, 1888 and – most tragically for the world – in 2000.

Today, the Republicans are now trying to exploit the discontent with the Electoral College among Americans in a way that would rig the system in their favour. At the moment, every state apart from Maine and Nebraska hands out its electoral college votes according to a winner-takes-all system. This means that if 51 percent of people in California vote Democrat, the Democrats get 100 percent of California’s electoral votes; if 51 percent of people in Texas vote Republican, the Republicans get 100 percent of Texas’ electoral votes.

The Republicans want to change this – but in only one Democrat-leaning state. California has gone Democratic in Presidential elections since 1988, and winning the sunny state is essential if Democrats are going to retake the White House. So the Republicans have now begun a plan to break up California’s electoral college votes – and award a huge chunk of them to their side.

They have launched a campaign called California Counts, and they are trying to secure a state-wide referendum in June to implement their plan. They want California’s electoral votes to be divvied-up not on a big state-wide basis, but according to the much smaller congressional districts. The practical result? Instead of all the state’s 54 Electoral College votes going to the Democratic candidate, around 20 would go to the Republicans.

If this was being done in every state, everywhere, it would be an improvement. California’s forgotten Republicans would be represented in the electoral college, and so would Texas’ forgotten Democrats. But by doing it in California alone, they are simply giving the Republicans a massive electoral gift. Suddenly it would be extremely hard for a Democrat to ever win the White House; they would need a landslide victory everywhere else to counter this vast structural imbalance against them on the West Coast.

You can see this partisan agenda if you look at who is behind this campaign. It was set up by Charles “Chep” Hurth III – a Republican donor to Rudy Giulliani. It was drafted by Tom Hiltachk – a Republican attorney. Its signature drive was co-ordinated by Kevin Eckery – a Republican consultant. Its funds were provided by Paul Singer – a Republican billionaire and one of Rudy Giuliani’s biggest donors. Its chief fundraiser is Anne Dunsmore – who went there straight from her post as national deputy campaign manager for Giulliani. Seeing a pattern yet?

Indeed, this bias is so blatant that the state Republican Party itself has now chipped in $80,000 to the campaign. Of course, the campaign is not marketing itself as a Republican rigging escapade. They insist: “This initiative is NOT about helping any one party or candidate. It simply ensures that every vote cast in our state counts in the electoral college.” But the best they can do to provide ‘balance’ is to point to the fact that one of the men who has given them $20,000, Edward Allred, once also gave $2300 to the campaign of Democratic contender Bill Richardson. Wow.

There is a real risk they could succeed. They are close to getting the number of signatures they need to secure a referendum in June. (The Los Angeles Downtown News claims to have witnessed signature gatherers offering homeless people food in return for signing.) The turnout for the referendum is expected to be extremely low, because the state-wide primaries usually held on that date have been moved forward to February. So the Republicans only have to activate a small part of their base to push it through – and they have the cash to do it. California dreamin’, on such a winter’s day.

The Democrats in response shouldn’t be trapped in the conservative position of defending the indefensible Electoral College. There is an alternative way to reform it – one that would be fair to all parties. It used to be thought it was all-but impossible to ditch the system because it would require a constitutional amendment, which needs the approval of two-thirds of both houses of Congress, plus three quarters of state legislatures.

But then constitutional scholars realised there was another way. The constitution only requires that each state must “appoint” its Presidential electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” That leaves a glimmer of hope. The Campaign for a National Popular Vote is campaigning for every state to simply commit its delegates to the Electoral College to vote 100 percent for the candidate who wins the popular vote. This would render the Electoral College a forgotten technicality. It’s very revealing that when the California state senate voted to introduce this genuinely democratic system last year, the Republican governor Schwarzenegger vetoed it, with the support of his party.

It shows that the Republicans’ rhetoric of wanting “fairness” and “equal representation” in California is a honeyed lie. They want a system that retains their power, even if it subverts the will of the people. It risks becoming Florida Part II: Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the polling booth… Fasten your seatbelts – it’s going to be a bumpy election.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was stabbed into the world’s consciousness three years ago. One wet afternoon in November 2004, her friend Theo Van Gogh – descendant of Vincent – left his house and was about to start cycling down the streets of Amsterdam. But a young Dutch-born Muslim called Mohammed Bouyeri was waiting for him – with a handgun and two sharpened butcher knives. Wordlessly, he shot Van Gogh twice in the chest. Van Gogh howled, “Can’t we talk about this?” Bouyeri ignored his pleas and fired four more times. Then he pulled out a butcher’s knife and slit Van Gogh’s throat with such strength his head was almost severed from his body. He used the other knife to stab a five-page letter into Van Gogh’s haemorrhaging corpse. Ayaan explains, “The letter was addressed to me.”

It said Van Gogh had been “executed” for making a film with her that exposed the widespread abuse of Muslim women. Now she would be “executed” too, for being an apostate. Even now, “Every time I close my eyes, I see the murder, and I hear Theo pleading for his life,” she says. “‘Can’t we talk about this?’ he asked his killer. It was so Dutch, so sweet and innocent.” At the trial, Bouyeri spat at Van Gogh’s mother: “I don’t feel your pain. I don’t have any sympathy for you. I can’t feel for you because I think you’re a non-believer.”

This is the story of how a 25 year-old bogus asylum seeker from Africa came to Europe in search of freedom – only to be nearly murdered here by a Dutchman, on the streets of Amsterdam, for speaking out against religion. It opens in the blood-strewn streets of Somalia, and it closes in the shiny white marble of Washington D.C – yet it also ends where it began: with Ayaan’s life in imminent, immediate danger. This is the story of the refugee who rocked Islam.

Her light, slight figure walks into the room so quietly that I would not have noticed her. But then the bodyguards follow: big and tall, with their eyes darting into every corner in search of the long-awaited assassin, and you realise – yes, she is here. The internet is littered with pledges to torture and slay Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Yet just a few weeks before we meet in London, the Dutch government has stripped away her security detail. She is paying for her own bodyguards now – and she could soon run out of cash. So how did this soft-voiced woman come to be so hated – and to be abandoned by the country that gave her sanctuary?

The life of her mother hangs over Ayaan as a morality-tale, a warning of what she might have been. “I was determined to never let what happened to my mother happen to me,” she says, looking away. “I think that has made me the way I am.”

By the time she gave birth to her in a hospital on the outskirts of Mogadishu in 1967, Ayaan’s mother was a broken woman. Like all Somalia women, she had been pressured all her life to suppress her personality, to sublimate everything to men and God – to become what Ayaan calls “a devoted, well-trained work-animal.” In her youth, her mother had moments when she fought back, briefly and bravely. She insisted on leaving her family. They were desert nomads, living effectively in the Iron Age, with no writing, few metal objects, and a belief that Allah’s angels and demons were constantly tinkering with reality. At fifteen, she walked out of their desert to the city of Aden. But when her father called her back to be married to a man she had never met, she submitted. Yet there was another flickering moment of freedom: exceptionally for that time and place, she insisted on a divorce, and got one.

But this was all gone when Ayaan was born. The woman striving for independence had crashed into the sheer weight of cultural expectation. She had been persuaded that “God is just and all-knowing and will reward you in the hereafter for being subservient.” Her personality became deformed by it. Ayaan says, “She remained completely dependent. She nursed grievances; she was resentful; she was often violent, and she was always depressed.” She would take it out on Ayaan, tying her arms behind her back and lashing her with wire for the slightest misdemeanour. When Ayaan first menstruated, her mother screamed at her: “Filthy prostitute! May you be barren! May you get cancer!” Ayaan tried to commit suicide not long after. But she says now that she knows “all the abuse wasn’t really directed at me, but at the world, which had taken her rightful life away.”

When her second husband left her, Ayaan’s mother was too infantilised to react. “It never occurred to her to go out and create a new life for herself, even though she can’t have been older than thirty-five or forty when my father left,” Ayaan has written. She remembers waking up every night as a small girl to hear her mother wailing. One time she went into her mother’s bedroom and placed a hand on her cheek. She screamed and beat her. After that, Ayaan would simply crouch at her door, listening to the wails, wishing she knew what to do.

Somali culture began to demand that Ayaan too become a submissive woman who scrubbed away her own personality and sexuality. When she was five years old, she was made “pure” by having her genitals hacked out with a knife. It was a simple process. Her grandmother and two of her friends pinned her down, pulled her legs apart, and knifed away her clitoris and labia. She remembers the sound even now – “like a butcher, snipping the fat off a piece of meat.” The bleeding wound was sewn up, leaving a thick tissue of scarred flesh to form as her fleshy chastity belt. She could not walk for two weeks.

Ayaan soon realised that in a culture so patriarchal it could not tolerate the existence of an unmaimed vagina, “I could never become an adult. I would always be a minor, my decisions made for me. But I wanted to become an individual, with a life of my own.” She heard whispers of a world where this was possible by reading novels. For her, even poring through Enid Blyton and Barbara Cartland seemed transgressive, because they depicted a world where boys and girls played together on the basis of equality, and where women chose their own husbands, rather than having them forced on them by their fathers. Imagine a world so patriarchal that Barbra Cartland seems like a gender revolutionary.

Yet on the road to this self-determining life, Ayaan turned first to its polar opposite: the very Islamic fundamentalism that now wants to kill her. Ayaan was taught from infancy to revere the Prophet Mohammed and the Koran, and she believed it all. She desperately wanted to please Mohammed, and his path seemed to her the only one. So once her family had moved to Kenya, a country where few people wore the headscarf, she chose to don one. She has written, “It had a thrill to it, a sensuous feeling. It made me feel powerful: underneath this screen lay a previously unsuspected, but potentially lethal, femininity. It sent out a message of superiority: I was the one true Muslim.”

She began to go to a prayer group where the texts of Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al Banna – the intellectual inspirations for al Qaeda – were pored over. When the Ayatollah Khomeini declared that Salman Rushdie should be murdered for what a maniac says in one of his novels, Ayaan wanted him dead. “I supported it,” she says now, “and the logic of my position is that I would have become a martyr myself, or supported the people [who did become martyrs].”

What would that girl, who took to the streets to call for Rushdie’s death, say if she could see you now? Would she think you should be killed too? For the first time in our interview, Ayaan pauses. A long pause. “What would that girl of 1989 think of this girl?” she repeats. “I think… well… people change.” Another pause. “She would at least approve of it. That’s why I try to explain - there is a reason why so many Muslims are silent when, in the name of Islam, violence is committed. It's because we believe that jihad is the sixth obligation, those then who are brave enough to commit acts of jihad must deserve our commendation.”

Then, one day, as she slid into jihadism, her absent father reappeared, and announced he had found her a good husband. Ayaan thought him stupid and ugly – but she had no choice. He was from the right clan, he had the right fundamentalist beliefs, and he wanted her. She knew what was expected: “A Muslim girl does not make her own decisions or seek control.”

But she could not –would not – do it. She ran. She ran all the way to the Netherlands, on a plane, to claim asylum. She was terrified when she landed in the heartland of The Infidel. She expected to find depravity on every corner. But she was amazed. Here was a peaceful land that seemed like Paradise. “In the Netherlands I saw people we called infidels living an amazing life – men and women mixing, gay people being free, you could say whatever you wanted,” she says. “Then I went back to the asylum seekers’ centre and almost everyone was from a Muslim country begging for the charity of these infidels. And I thought, if we’re so superior, why are we begging from them?”

She experimented in stepping out onto the streets without her hijab, expecting she would be harassed and raped by the sex-crazed infidel. Nobody looked twice. She began to test other democratic freedoms. She drank alcohol, she found a boyfriend – and she headed for the library to discover the principles that had created this place. She began to pore through the works of Enlightenment philosophy. “Sometimes it seemed as if every page I read challenged me as a Muslim. Drinking wine and wearing trousers was nothing compared to reading the history of ideas,” she says. She says, “The Enlightenment cut European culture from its roots in old fixed ideas of magic, kingship, social hierarchy and the domination of priests, and regrafted it onto a great strong trunk that supported the equality of each individual, and his right to free opinions and self-rule.” She found that all this was a profound challenge to the severe Islam she had been pickled in since childhood.

She began to study for a political science degree and was slowly rethinking her faith when, one bright morning in September 2001, the island of Manhattan became swathed with smoke. The chief hijacker, Mohammed Atta, was exactly the same age as Ayaan. She feels like she knows him, and that if her life had taken a different turn – if she has stayed in Kenya, with the jihadis – “perhaps I could have done it.” And she says something incredibly revealing: “I realised I could either go mad, join the Bin Ladenists, or step out of the religion.”

This fanatical form of Islam was, she realised, around her in the Netherlands. A small group of Muslim men took to the streets to celebrate the massacre on the night of 9/11. The country’s domestic violence shelters were disproportionately crammed with Muslim women fleeing male terror. Forced marriages and ‘honour killings’ continued at a startling rate in Dutch cities. But she found that many otherwise good people were reluctant to speak out against this abuse of women and gay people within immigrant communities. The Netherlands had a policy called “emancipation within your own circle”, and Ayaan saw this as a betrayal. Multiculturalism, she believed, was “elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred towards women to the stature if respectable alternative ways of life. I wanted Muslim women to be aware of just how bad, and unacceptable, their suffering was. I wanted to help them develop the vocabulary of resistance.”

She took the great English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft as her lode-star, and began to campaign for the state to log the rate of ‘honour’ killings, because nobody was even bothering to count. This led her to an offer by the centre-right Liberal Party to run to be a Member of Parliament. She took it, and got one of the highest personal votes in the country. This in turn led her into the path of Theo Van Gogh – and to his slaughter. Ayaan was placed under total 24/7 surveillance, and barely permitted to leave her house by troops of security guards.

At this point, two Ayaans were born, with clashing and contradictory views on Islam. Sitting here now, I can feel their presence; I can hear them alternate in her mind. I call the first Revolutionary Ayaan, and she says about 9/11: “This was not just Islam, this was the core of Islam. Mohammed Atta believed he was giving his life for Allah. This is beyond Osama Bin Laden, it is based in the basic roots of Islam.” Without pausing, she continues: “You have to ask – is it a fact that the Prophet Mohammed conquered lands using the sword? Is it a fact that Muslims are commanded to commit jihad? Yes it is.” She has no time for what she sees as the ignorant, woolly Islam-is-peace message of Western liberals, insisting: “I see no difference between Islam and Islamism. Islam is defined as submission to the will of Allah, as it is described in the Koran. Islamism is just Islam in its most pure form. Sayyid Qutb [the thinker who inspired al Qaeda] didn’t invent anything, he just quoted the sayings of Mohammed.”

Revolutionary Ayaan believes the religion cannot be reformed or changed, only defeated. The millions upon millions of Muslims who are not violent – “the wonderful decent law-abiding people” – simply do not really follow Islam. They ignore it, or they live uncomfortably with the explosive “cognitive dissonance” of simultaneously supporting human decency and the demands of Islam. She lists the awkward truths about the Prophet Mohammed. “All Muslims believe in following his example, but many of the things he did are crimes. When he was in his fifties he had sex with a nine-year old girl. By our standards he was a pervert. He ordered the killing of Jews and homosexuals and apostates, and the beating of women.” That is why, she therefore concludes, “The War on Terror is a war on Islam” and “Islam is the new fascism.”

But there then there is Reformist Ayaan. She says the opposite: internal reform within Islam is possible and necessary. She insists, “It’s wrong to treat Muslims as if they will never find their John Stuart Mill. Christianity and Judaism show people can be very dogmatic and then open up. There is a minority [within Islam] like [reformists] Irshad Manji and Tawfiq Hamid who want to remain in the faith and reform it… Can you be a Muslim and respect the separation of church and state? I hope a large enough number of Muslims will agree you can, and they will find a way to keep the spiritual elements that comfort them and live in a secular society.”

Ayaan’s life-story is strewn with Muslims who rejected Bin Ladenist fanaticism. Her father, for example, was revolted by the Wahabbism he witnessed in Saudi Arabia, and told her, “This is not Islam – this is Saudis perverting Islam.” She hesitates when I ask her about this fracture-line in her thinking; I can almost touch the cognitive dissonance. Reformist Ayaan says: “Well, my father was trying to combine the commandments in the Koran with his conscience. He has reached a level of civilization because he's living in the 21st century, but he was also trying to follow a religion founded in the 7th century. So on the one hand he thinks you should accept that the content of the Koran is the true word of God, and on the other hand he is a decent person. He tried to move on by saying we should only convert non-Muslims by example, not by violence, and [by saying] that only the Prophet Mohammed can call for a jihad.” But then Revolutionary Ayaan adds: “That’s not what the Koran says. It says you can never change the faith.”

Is there is a danger that the language of Revolutionary Ayaan is undercutting the very people Reformist Ayaan wants to encourage? Does she worry that by calling all Islam “fascism” she might encourage the hard right, who want to deny women like her the chance to even come to Europe as refugees? “I do,” she says. “But the group of Europeans, white Europeans, who want to stop immigration all together, and who reject Muslims, today in 2007, is not that large. But they could become larger if European governments continue the policy of accommodating and appeasing fascist demands made by radical Muslims. They need to oppose fascist demands by Muslims, and the fascist demands by far right white groups. I think that if there is equal treatment on both sides that the traditional populations of Europe will say that's fair play.”

As we discuss this, I realise there is something odd about this conversation. It is all so disconcertingly normal. She is speaking in a level voice, at a level volume. If you didn’t speak English and you saw us talking, you could assume we were discussing bus timetables, or the weather. It’s not that she seems passionless – not at all – but that her personality seems to be coiled up within her, and I am only seeing the carefully considered tip of it. When she describes the people who want to hack her body to pieces, it is in paragraphs that feel pre-packed. Perhaps it is all she can bear to show.

And so we continue, like this. She looks at me politely and says that Europe needs to be much more confident about standing up to Islamic fundamentalism. “When we come here as immigrants, we know it will be different to where we come from. It is a choice to come, and we can always choose to leave. If we do not want to adopt European values, we should expect to be criticised.”

For example, the veil she used to wear is “a political statement, it's not just a religious statement,” she says. “It says - I'm different from you and I reject what you stand for.” She stresses she doesn’t want to ban it, just to see it challenged: “I'm opposed to banning of political expression, but I'm very much a proponent of competing political expression. The message of liberals is so much better, so much stronger, that you don't have to resort to banning. You can wear whatever it is that you want, you can give out whatever message that you want to give out - but then you have to understand that if that message is rejected, then you can't call people Islamophobic and expect to be taken seriously. If you choose to wear a veil, people might ridicule and oppose you. That’s their right too.”

She speaks with such eloquent intensity because she is arguing against another, younger version of herself. The Ayaan of 2007 is attacking the Ayaan of 1987 – who is damning her right back. If there is a clash of civilisations, it is happening within her. It’s hard to remember, as we sit here, that there are tens of thousands of people who want to prematurely bring this fizzing debate inside Ayaan’s head to an end – with a bullet.

She fell in love with Holland because of its tradition of unabashed free speech, but it seems the country’s politicians have judged that she took free speech too far for them. Earlier this year, the Dutch government began to re-investigate the lies in her original asylum claim. Ever since she entered public life she had been totally candid about this: she exaggerated the degree of state persecution she faced, because being abused by your family isn’t enough to be granted refugee status. Now the government was twitchy about the rows she was stirring up – so they suddenly decided to strip her of her Dutch citizenship. She fled for Washington D.C. and a job with a conservative think tank.

Her alignment with the American right doesn’t seem like an easy fit: she is a militant defender of atheism, feminism and gay rights – all forces they have demonised for decades. She is an illegal immigrant – their ultimate hate figure. But as our interview goes on, I realise she has depressingly begun to adopt some of their ideas. She wants to abolish the minimum wage. She no longer calls for the closing of all faith schools, but simply Muslim ones, because “they are the only ones that do not respect the division between secular and divine law.” She has even begun to touch on the American hard right’s preposterous predictions that Muslims are “outbreeding” the continent’s traditional populations and will impose shariah law “within decades.” When I challenge her on this, she simply says “experts” say it is true.

Then, this month, the Dutch government went further and stripped away her security protection too, saying she should pay for it herself. The US government will not pick up the tab – the only mechanism they have for protecting private citizens full-time is the Witness Protection Programme, which obviously isn’t appropriate. “Only eleven members out of the one hundred and fifty MPs voted to keep my security detail,” she says. “So it's an overwhelming decision, and when I saw that I did feel betrayed. It's not only a betrayal of me. It's a betrayal of the idea of free expression. I think they believe that supposedly provoking Muslims will only make them more angry and hostile. The four large cities in Holland have now got very large Muslim populations, and that number is increasing - the estimate is that they're about 40%. With that kind of electoral power [they think] it's best not to provoke them.” Even if it means sacrificing basic Dutch values? “Yes.”

She is revolted by the people who claim it is she, Ayaan, who has “sold out” Muslims. “Tell me, is freedom only for white people?” she has written. “Is it self-love to adhere to my ancestors’ traditions and mutilate my daughters? To agree to be humiliated and powerless? When I came to a new culture, where I saw for the first time that human relations could be different, would it have been self-love to see that as a foreign cult, which Muslims are forbidden to practice?”

So here she is, with the last sliver of protection she can afford standing between her and the people determined to murder her, still speaking, still fighting. Her family have said they will never speak to her again. She knows she can never return to the country where she was born. Is she frightened? She answers quickly, as if reciting a reassuring script. “I know that is what these terrorists want me to be,” she says. “So I try not to be scared.” Then she pauses, and looks down. “But sometimes. Yes.”

She looks up again. “But I am lucky. There are so many crossroads where my life could have become so much worse. If I had stayed in Kenya with the [jihadist] prayer group… If I had entered into the marriage my father wanted… I could have lived like my mother…” She nods with confidence. “How many girls born in Digfeer Hospital in Mogadishu in November 1969 are even alive today? And how many have a real voice?”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was in London to address the Centre for Social Cohesion.

You can donate to the fund to provide bodyguards and security for Ayaan Hirsi Ali here.

I have written other articles that touch on these themes. You can read my interview with Salman Rushdie here, with Irshad Manji here, and Shazia Mirza here.

There are other pieces I've written about women and Islam here, here, here, here, and here.

You can read my arguments about why the 'demographic' argument used by Ayaan is wrong here, and here.

You can read my response to charges of 'Islamophobia' here.

Feedback is welcome at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk

The crises that are consuming the Brown government today should indeed be seen a Winter of Discontent, a moment when the governing ideology is coldly exposed as unworkable. But this time, the ideology being exposed as unworkable is small government conservatism. It has been Gordon Brown’s decision to retain and push forward the Thatcherite policy of perpetual deregulation and spending cuts in a slew of policy areas that has left him skidding into this icy dead-end.

Let’s look at the three interlocking calamities that have brought Brown and the global economy to this point – and show how they can all be directly traced to an excess of right-wing economics.

Crisis Number One: The sub-prime mortgage crash in the United States. Once you peel back the economic jargon, this is the simple story of a scam, made possible because over the past three decades, the regulations designed to protect American consumers have been slowly tossed onto the bonfire. The flames were accompanied by a low chant: government regulation bad, unhindered markets good.

This made it possible for a string of shady mortgage banking companies to create a whole new business model. With the old rules stripped away, it was easy. They would go to the poorest people with the shakiest credit records and make them a magical offer. We won’t ask to see your credit history. We won’t even ask to see proof of your income. We’ll give you a mortgage, no down payment, no questions asked.

These people were so desperate to house their families decently that they felt they couldn’t say no – and the banks often didn’t tell them the catch. After an initial introductory period, the mortgage payments soared to vast levels, with rip-off rates of interest. The banks knew the default and foreclosure rates would be through the roof, but the compensatory profits meant it didn’t seem to matter. They financed all this by setting up “structured investment vehicles” which they kept off the balance sheet and hidden from public view. The old rules to prevent all this were gone. As the economist Professor Paul Krugman puts it, “It was Enron redux, except much bigger than Enron.”

It was a business model that was simultaneously unethical and unsustainable – the kind of scam that regulation was introduced in the early twentieth century to prevent. So this spring, the chickens bought at sub-prime rates came home to roost. More than 25 sub-prime lenders have gone bust, big Wall Street names like Merrill Lynch are seeing their holdings in sub-prime loans tank, and more than two million Americans are at serious risk of losing their homes.

This caused a panic among international investors. If Merrill Lynch can have $3bn knocked off its value in a breath, what can you trust? And so the financial influenza spread to Britain - where another risky and unsustainable financial experiment had been made possible by Thatcherite deregulation.

Crisis Number Two: Northern Rock. The former building society is headed by Matt Ridley – an extreme market fundamentalist who scorns government regulation to such an extent that he believes even the food safety laws that protect us from being poisoned should be abolished. Totally unregulated markets would protect us better. The deregulation of the 1980s enabled him to pursue a business model that defied financial sense. He and his board believed the financial dictum that you should have substantial savers’ deposits to finance your lending schemes was an old-fashioned myth to be cast aside.

The result was collapse. The state has had to risk forking out £24bn, equivalent to £1000 for every tax-payer, to prevent it from going bust.

We shouldn’t be angry at the government bailout; we should be angry at the deregulation – maintained by both main parties – that made the government bailout necessary. John Caine, former director of corporate affairs at Alliance and Leicester, explains: “If government is to blame, then it is that led by Margaret Thatcher [and her] determination to deregulate the UK financial markets.”

To understand just how extreme London’s post-Thatcher financial deregulation is, you have to look across the Atlantic. The most hard-right Republican congressmen issued a report last week calling for the US to adopt “a regulatory structure like the one used in the United Kingdom.” Our model is the market fundamentalist dream, one where companies can almost be as unethical and risk-rivven with our cash as they like.

We were warned. Seven years ago, the Cruickshank report, commissioned by the Treasury, argued that banks should have proper utility-style rates of regulation to prevent all this. The banks shrieked and howled, and Brown – disastrously – backed down.

Crisis Three: Datagate. Since he came to power, Gordon Brown has been steadily scything through the civil service, based on the right-wing belief that they are “bureaucrats”, and “bureaucracy” is always bad. He has demanded government departments make “efficiency savings” of three percent, year on year, irrespective of their circumstances. The result is predictable: there are far fewer people doing the same job, and they are starting to screw up. They ignore the protocols they should follow; they post out disks they shouldn’t. The civil service trade unions have been warning all along that a major mistake like this would result.

But it would be foolish to punish Gordon Brown’s right-wing errors by turning to David Cameron’s Tories. They are committed to pushing all these mistakes further and harder. For example, their recent policy inquiry into financial deregulation, led by the foaming John Redwood, actually demanded the total deregulation of mortgage finance – which would mean sub-prime mortgages on the British high street. Cameron complained earlier this year that the civil service cuts pushed by Brown didn’t go far enough.

It has been bleakly hilarious to watch the right-wingers who cheered on every one of these acts of deregulation and “efficiency savings” respond to the crises their ideas have wrought. Several appear to be hallucinating. Charles Moore, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph, blamed the “Marxism-Leninism” of Tony Blair. Peter Oborne of the Daily Mail called it “the week that proved Thatcher was right all along”.

For Brown this could – just – be an opportunity to put things right. He could stand on the doorstep of Downing Street and say: “Yes, I got it wrong. When it comes to financial regulation and civil service cuts, I followed the old Tory ideas for a decade, and it has blown up in my face. These crises have been a failure of Thatcherism, and I have learned my lesson. But remember: both main parties got it wrong, yet only Labour has the philosophy that can put it right. We were wrong to demonise ‘bureaucrats’. We were wrong to believe markets work best when they are unregulated. You know, at the 2003 Labour Party conference, I said my party was ‘at our best when we are Labour.’ I was right then. I will act on it now. This week, the conservative era of endless deregulation and civil service cuts has finally come to an end.”

You can send me comments on this article to j.hari -at- independent.co.uk

You can read my other articles about Gordon Brown - including a discussion of his intellectual influences, and his best policies as well as his worst -
here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

It is impossible to imagine George W. Bush eating cucumber sandwiches on a rainy English lawn, discussing the latest cricket scores. Yet the President with the fewest affectations from the Old Country has nonetheless triggered a rampant return to Anglophilia among American foreign policy experts. With his unashamedly ‘civilising’ mission in the Middle East, and his deployment of gunboats as a tool of diplomacy, he has sent intellectuals dashing back to their accounts of the British Empire to find meaningful historical parallels.

Walter Russell Mead is the latest to approvingly trace the connecting fibres between George III and George W. The distinguished fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations argues that America – a country founded in a rebellion against the British Empire – has, in fact, simply picked up the British imperial baton, with Bush merely the latest (and least competent) runner. So cram yourself on that double-decker bus to Empire: America is more British than you ever knew.

Russell Mead believes that every age needs a ‘liberal empire’ that will control the world’s seas and make free trade possible. Only if you rule the waves do you get to rule the global trading system, determining its shape and character. This was discovered by the Dutch Protestants in the United Provinces of the Netherlands four centuries ago, then by the United Kingdom – and now by the United States. This is the watery lens through which world history must be viewed. Indeed, “The last four hundred years of world history can be summed up in six letters… the story of world power goes U.P. to U.K. to U.S.”

Each of these ‘liberal’ maritime empires saw off towering, glowering rivals. From the Spanish Armada to the Soviet tanks, they prevailed for one reason: they adhered to a code Russell Mead dubs “the Protocols of the Elders of Greenwich.” These unwritten rules are simple to explain. Build an open society at home, where dissent and discussion are possible. Channel its dynamism outwards, towards the global economy. Use the powers of the state to control the oceans, protect commerce, and defeat illiberal wannabes abroad. Open the global system to others, even your enemies, if they agree to abide by the rules. Then the world’s waters – and markets – will be yours.

Russell Mead believes that England and her runaway son, America, are uniquely suited to following these Protocols. The Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the supremacy of Parliament was established over the Crown, gave birth to pluralism and created spaces for dissent and disagreement. Then the rise of Protestantism shucked off the old fear of cultural change that characterised Catholicism, and created “a new kind of religious equilibrium” where “embracing and even furthering and accelerating change… [is seen as a fulfilment of your] religious destiny.” This Protestant ethic is now stamped on Anglo-Americans of all religious hues. As he puts it, we are all Wasps now.

It’s an elegant thesis, drawing on a lush, literate kaleidoscope of sources, from John Milton to Karl Popper to Lewis Carol. To find a foreign policy expert so soaked in eighteenth century poetry is undoubtedly charming. But is his argument true?

Russell Mead presents these empires as essentially benevolent confections, offering a model of rule so seductive that “people choose freely to belong”. To this end, he says that by 1851, it looked like “the Peaceable Kingdom had arrived; British power, progress, prosperity, and liberty were ushering in the universal rule of peace.” Really? Is that how it looked in, say, India? When Clive of India arrived in Calcutta, he described it – as all visitors did – as “extensive, populous and as rich as the city of London.” It was a place of such “richness and abundance [that] neither war, pestilence nor oppression could destroy [it].” But within a century of British occupation, the population fell from 150,000 to 30,000 as its industries were wrecked in the interests of the Mother Country. By the time the British left, it was one of the poorest places in the world. Is this really the baton Russell Mead wants the US to pick up?

‘God and Gold’ offers a sunny, shimmering vision of the British Empire that almost no British historians would now support. True, he does offer up one paragraph listing various imperial atrocities – but even here, his descriptions are strangely anodyne. For example, he concedes that “the American Indians were not treated well” by the British settlers, which is a rather sterile way to describe a genocide. He insists that anybody who says these – or other, more recent atrocities – were “coldly calculated, deliberate crimes,” rather than “excesses, blunders, or regrettable misjudgements by young soldiers in the heat of action” is a “Waspophobe” rivven with irrational prejudice. He glosses over what his call for an empire that defends business interests with force really means: the people of Guatemala and Chile, who have had their elected governments toppled by the CIA in living memory, know only too well.

And then comes the most surprising omission. A book written today, calling for the United States to become a self-conscious and unabashed Empire, surely has to reckon with the on-going haemorrhaging of US imperial power in Iraq. Yet the reader of this book waits – and waits. Iraq is first mentioned on page 272, in a half-sentence aside. It does not appear again until page 362, when Russell Mead dedicates his only full sentence to it, noting that the war has brought “untold grief to innocent victims.” Iraq does not, it seems, have any strategic implications worth discussing; the US should continue to attempt to rule the world regardless of its current inability to rule one collapsing dirt-poor county.

Perhaps sensing these tensions, Russell Mead ends with a call for a rehabilitation of the thought of the late theologian Reinhold Neibhur. The uber-Protestant sought to place the idea of original sin at the centre of politics. All men are fallen, all are capable of sowing disaster – so politics needs to be constantly self-interrogating and doubtful. But how does this fit with Russell Mead’s demand for an American empire? Imperialism is by its nature bombastic; it has to internally suppress the memory of the violence it must commit to perpetuate its power. A humble imperialism is a contradiction in terms.

Russell Mead offers the most eloquent possible defence of the swarm of Wasps that has shaped the world for so long – but ultimately his God and his Gold do not glitter.

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