A cautionary tale from the Dutch immigrant and Dutch immigration policy critic, controversial screenwriter and lawmaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali appeared in an AP article today on Dutch national identity.
Argentine-born Princess Maxima (wife of the Dutch Crown Prince Willem Alexander)
triggered a round of national soul-searching with a speech last month about what exactly it means to be Dutch in an age of mass migration. [NB: "Migration" is a favorite euphemism of American immigration enthusiasts; migration is something natural, something that it would be ludicrous and pointless to attempt to stop. Geese migrate twice a year. What idiot would try to stop geese from migrating?]
The Netherlands is too complex to sum up in one cliche,” she said. “A typical Dutch person doesn’t exist.” [Is she trying to say that the Netherlands is a "Proposition Nation"?]
This sounds a lot like the hoots and hollers of the “treason lobby” in the US, doesn’t it? All that “nation of immigrants” malarkey, I mean. While we’re trying to convince ourselves (against our will) there’s no one answer to the question “What does it mean to be an American?”, there are many Dutch – natural and naturalized – who have figured out exactly where that kind of schizoid behavior leads.
Conservatives in [Holland] say the long Dutch tradition of welcoming immigrants and putting little or no pressure on them to integrate undermines Western values.
“Unfortunately, the debate about Dutch identity is too often held at a very trite and trivial level – as if the discussion is between Brussels sprouts and wooden shoes on the one hand, and couscous and caftans on the other,” said Bart Jan Spruyt, founder of The Edmund Burke Foundation, a conservative think tank.
“What is really at stake, due to a [sic] frivolous immigration policies and decades of multicultural indifference, is the identity of the Dutch nation, Dutch history and culture as a part of the history of Western civilization.
Hirsi Ali, the former Somali refugee, is one of the success stories of Dutch immigration policy, but also one of its fiercest critics. She condemns the Dutch tradition of multiculturalism, saying tolerance for the intolerant has provided a dangerous breeding ground for Islamic radicalism. [Hmm... Sound familiar?]
“Our migration policy is a failure,” she told the Associated Press in an interview last year. “We used to pretend that we were a homogeneous little country and that Holland is not a migration country. We have become a migration country like the United States.”
The Netherlands was, you’ll recall, the home of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who in 2004 was shot and had his throat slit by a Muslim assailant, who left a note pinned to his lifeless chest threatening Hirsi Ali’s life. Their crime? Making a movie.
No, seriously. Submission: Part I, the TV movie written by Hirsi Ali and directed by van Gogh, was, according to IMDB, a
[s]hort documentary made by Moslima Ayaan Hirsi Ali and director Theo van Gogh on the mistreatment of women in the islam. It shows abused women, with koran texts on their body that validate their mistreatment. [sic]
Of course, after we Christians killed so many heretics over The Last Temptation of Christ, we can’t really complain. Oh, wait…
This is the kind of thing we have to look forward to. Unchecked mass immigration – legal and illegal – with no regard to assimilation or assimilability, especially from Third World countries with no love of freedom or history of rule of law, will eventually dissolve both here.
