Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, Season four, Episode seven, I'm McKayla Peterson. Ayaan Hirsi Ali joined Jordan on February 2nd for this episode. They discussed immigration, the changing safety of women in public, particularly in areas of Europe, clashing values of Western cultures and Islam and winwin proposition's. Iron outlined her arguments and concerns with current immigration practices and the ways that Islamic leaders and Islamic values clash with many freedoms of modern culture.

They also discuss her latest book, Prae Immigration, Islam and the Erosion of Women's Rights. This episode is brought to you by Headspace Headspaces, a meditation app advancing the field of mindfulness through clinically validated research. If there was a good time to start meditating, it would be now. I don't know about you, but with the stress of the last year, I really need every option out there to keep myself calm and meditation can really help with that. I brush it off for years, but that's because I didn't have the patience to start.

Headspace really helped with that and make it super easy to use. And you can start with 10 to 15 minutes of meditation a day. It can make a big difference first thing in the morning or before bed or midday. Check the numbers out. Apparently, four weeks of headspace can increase focus by 14 percent, and only three weeks of use has shown to cut aggression to negative feedback by a whopping 57 percent. That seems important nowadays. You deserve to feel happier.

And Headspaces meditation made simple go to Headspace dotcom slash GP. That's Headspace Dotcom slash GP for free one month trial with access to Headspace full library of meditations for every situation. This is the best deal offered right now. Head to Headspace Dotcom slash GBP today. This episode has also brought to you by thinker dog. I think dog. That's t h i n Karg. They summarize the key ideas from new and noteworthy non-fiction, giving you access to entire libraries of great books in bite sized form, seriously bite sized.

You can read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes from old classics like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to recent bestsellers like Atomic Habits. If you're trying to get into reading more, it's a good place to start. They also have audio versions of the books. If you're more of a listener, which you probably are given the fact you're listening to this, if you want to challenge your preconceptions, expand your horizons and become a better thinker, go to thinker dog.

That's t h i n Karg to start a free trial today again. T h i n Karg. If you're interested in my dad's merch, which he has, he has Mirch available on his website, his new posters coming out for his book that's coming out on March 2nd that have incredible illustrations on them. Jordan v. Peterson, Dotcom, enjoy your week. Enjoy this episode.

I have the great privilege today of talking with Ayaan Hirsi 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, but which in principle still need to be discussed.

You've had an amazing life.

I mean, I don't know if it's a 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 his choice of husband. For me, 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 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 talked to a Dutch society like a fish to water. I learned the language. I made friends. I went on to do a master's in political science. And by 2000, 2001, where in my early 30s I had just turned 30, I was leading the life of the average Dutch woman of my age and loving it. I had just accepted a job with a think tank 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 the White House. They had brought down a wing of the Pentagon. And you were old enough to remember that that was a significant moment in history for those of us who were old enough to understand what was going on.

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 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 the point that what motivated them was the conviction, acting on the conviction of their religious beliefs, they were waging jihad and to pretend otherwise was wrong.

And I didn't understand how sensational that would be. And I was given platforms by some of the Dutch newspapers, radio and television. And from being a 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 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, the main instruction I've had over these years is don't talk about that. 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 to what the Fried's Islamophobic. Yeah. I also had to live with death threats. And it's very interesting when you look at that, you know, if you go back in that time when we were discussing the threats to free speech.

And I know a lot of people were in denial, probably are still in denial about it, but where they would say there is no. There's really no distinction here to see between Muslim civilization and Christian civilization, Western civilization, other civilizations, all cultures are equal and so on. There's just, you know, a handful of bad people who are giving everyone else a bad name. But then over and over again, we saw the threat 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 a threat from the inside, from our own universities, where a conversation like the one we're having now or the subject of this book is going to be misinterpreted, which is a charitable way of saying it's going to be dismissed. Yes.

Well, I must say, I'm quite terrified to have this conversation. And 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 hornets 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 demonetization, 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 that. I once did so. But anyways, onward and upward, hypothetically. So back to this, I guess we'll start to talk about this book, Prae 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. 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 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, fear 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.

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 sexual assault, like rape and crime, especially if you do it over a lifetime and crank up the prevalence rates 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.

But if if the definition of that become so lax that it's one 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 comparisons, 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 am laying out, first of all, is and 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 the 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 first with statistics.

So 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.

Also feeling unsafe in the public, in the public space. I was with my Dutch friends and 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, 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 catcalled after.

And so then I go from the descriptions of verbal.

Sexual violence or sexual propositions that are inappropriate and lewd and obscene and 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 have 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 to the statistics. And I thought, well, I'll try. And so I started calling up this 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 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 are 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 don't let me give you an example. In January of last year to January of this year, I think today is what the last day was, the first of February, 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 viruses, 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 have overcome huge taboos.

The problem I'm talking about is 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, 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 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 do you go about ensuring that your sense that the safety of women, which is a much vaguer construct, a 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, 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 the main thrust of your argument and 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 being 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 evince some doubt about that, I believe, because at one point in your book, you talk about the problem, the cultural problem that might be behind this being perhaps not so much Islam, but polygamy itself and its influence, its its influence on Islam.

So I'm not disputing your claims. I'm trying to adopt, as I always do when I read anything, while anything I would say the the most critical stance to find out. Where, where, what 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 these questions 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. Yeah.

Or any other social issue that is of this magnitude. I think the most important thing that I can do or 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 the 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, 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 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 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, the and 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 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 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 and other countries like even the Netherlands, I don't think they would record the religious aspect of it. Some of them will. The 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 X, Y, Z 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 ordeal. 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 latest. 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 do those recordings first, some of these countries would put down that information, these data points, and see them as important. But then in come the political correctness, the identity politics, immigration is sensitive, Islamise sensitive would not 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, OK, 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. Many cases of sexual assault are never there, 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.

It's even more true for the more minor forms of sexual harassment, which I would say would certainly be certainly be of sufficient unpleasantness to potentially restrict women's, at least their sense of freedom in the public domain.

But so I'm a critic and you cover 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. And so maybe it has nothing to do with country of origin or ethnicity or or religious background, 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. 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.

Layout four for everyone has exactly what you think the problem is and and why it is because the other thing I thought, too, was, well, why did Ion's critics are going to say, well, 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, 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 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 in the way I see it is that the rights of women and their freedoms and their safety is being compromised.

When I say, you know, is immigration beneficial is like the way you say it, even on humanitarian grounds, just being compassionate to fellow human beings 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 as much in every way we can without selling out women. Now, in terms of the contention that that particular demographic, when you have young men of a certain age in large groups, they tend to engage in violence, including sexual violence. 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, look at places like Guatemala, El Salvador, all of those places where you have a cohort of young men with no jobs, with no purpose in life and in a machismo type of society.

And there is violence, this disorder and including sexual violence. So that's not something I'm disputing or something that I wanted to exaggerate in terms of the alcohol component. I think we have had and probably will continue to have that conversation about.

So in 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 men 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 are 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 dorms and don't go to the room at 10:00 p.m. and don't drink as much as, you know, 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. The critics. But before please, before we go to the next one, the case, as I describe, let's just say, OK, 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 no neighborhoods where European women have decided no one is going to protect me. 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 that one example where they ought to, I think, coffee in the US 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 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 researcher 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 this is not like some place in Algeria. And he says, this part is you better go. We have another example in Sweden, 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. It looked like it was women. So there are ways of looking at the complexity of this issue.

And not only relying on the statistics that I 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 finished the book and then I threw 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, 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 don't think we're capable of doing it. I mean, which is partly why it's so stressful to undertake 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.

Yes.

And on the one hand, there's compassion for the dispossessed, including dispossessed young men in war torn countries, war torn and catastrophically, catastrophically riven countries and the benefits of immigration. Economically and on humanitarian basis, and then 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, in the context is where we have been having conversations not just about having compassion for the 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 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, which 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 win. 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 are terrified of being the platformed. 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 outlined the unreliability of the statistics and the difficulty of obtaining them, but 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.

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 Masaya or Malmo, you could you could say or certain, you know, Tower Hamlets area in in the U.K., right around London, some of those places you could go as far back as 20 years. Even longer. And that that that, again, that that deterioration is linked to do it to to poor immigration policy or to 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 mentioned youth and masculinity as contributing factors to to violent behavior, but unemployment as well is going to be a contributing factor. I know that that's all true.

So all the socio economic factors, these are all contributing factors. And people actually, I would say more willing to talk and they feel like they're more license to talk about the socioeconomic 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 sphere, 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, assimilation policies. And it is not it's very difficult to culturally assimilate minorities if they're receiving societies are not confident in their own values.

And so the the the process of assimilation and developing successful assimilation that is socializing these young men into the value of women, into the values of the host society, this is all compromised by that moral relativist attitude where we were saying you can you can integrate and we will only talk about the social economic aspects when it comes to the values you can keep. But we're not going to question those. And so there was not 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. There still isn't opposition to that from within saying to do that is to recolonize them. It's ethnocentric Eurocentric. It is. It's arrogant. 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 populists 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 under Islamic. And so if you say if you ask me, the greatest failure is it's the failure of the assimilation process of the integration process.

OK, and 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 wondering. So people read your book and let's say they accept your conclusions that and I'm going to get you to state again.

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 arrival of people from cultures where women's rights are not valued.

I'm not doing a disservice to your book to make that summary, I'm hoping no, you're not. So it's I think it is totally possible to make the case that you can get people to come from societies that are very different in their cultural outlook and in the social socio economic 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 the 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 are livid 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 to close the doors to immigrants. But these are people who are livid, livid, very angry and saying this was a spontaneous it wasn't thought through.

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 had these are people who in the second generation and we were having assimilation issues with those. And now you open the gates and you say, OK, everybody come in, because I feel sorry for this little girl 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 most Europeans may be right now, most people on the left side of this issue don't want to face, which is it's not the socioeconomics that changes the culture.

It is the culture that changes the socio 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 describe, some of these anecdotes, I think I could see a lot of them happening 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 decrement in women's feeling of safety. I haven't that that's not something I've been personally aware of. I don't know if that means that Canada might be doing something right. I 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 development of communities that are.

Distinctively separate from the other communities in the city, I mean, there are 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, in Canada does have an official policy of multiculturalism.

And I don't think that we're walking down the more intense assimilation route that you were describing.

I mean, I'm obviously very pleased to see that it's certainly not being part of 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 covid, but it's possible I don't know why things have perhaps turned out better here, but they seem to have. Well, there is this one 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's become incredibly difficult for European authorities to keep out spontaneous immigration. So everybody wants to select their immigrants. And some for some countries, it's easier than others. And I think in Canada and Australia are some of the countries that have that geographical component.

That's a very good point. Yes, absolutely. We we weren't we're not as close to Syria. And so that protected or that that that distance just from the.

The downstream consequences of the Syrian conflict. And not just the Syrian conflict, the economic travails of the continent of Africa coming, you can come through Libya, you can come through people just arrive in boats and the European authorities that, you know, that deploy the coast guards are confronted with. Do you let 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. You know, we've seen something like this in the US from some of these failed or failing Latin American countries with the caravans and building the wall. And so 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 kind of deports. Canada requires, as far as I know, that if you want to want if you want to go and work and live there, that you have someone to sponsor, you 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 and attacks in Canada. So it's not like you're protected from from some of these stations.

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 I thought that was a very, extremely powerful part of the book, because it is a kind of miracle that that sort of thing can occur. 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 portion of their country would actually be underwater if it failed.

And you you're making you make a case in infidelity. 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 to the idea of equal rights for women to accept 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 when 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 is is that such a danger that it mitigates against any attempt 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, that a society that is hyper organized and you want to call that Western, I'm happy to call it Western.

Great. 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 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's being used against women. The second 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 peoples for the dispossessed, we can pay for the 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. 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.

So now you take those four factors and you say we're going to bring people in from or people from societies who don't have that. Should we bring them into this call it forced assimilation or just socialization or whatever you want to call it. But if we fail to do that and the number gets ever bigger than we are going to have unstable societies, we're going to have and the Dutch can say and I've heard the Swedes to do the same thing. I've had Germans say the same thing to me.

French, there's 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 is 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 at 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 it's OK. I try to do it 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. And so when I came to Holland, I was stunned, of course, in a good way.

Mm hmm. 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. And so when the man that my husband was my father married me off to when he came to claim me, the woman of the asylum seeker centre told me, you don't have to go with him. You can call the police. And we called the police. And I did go with him.

Right.

I can remember how stunned you were. You recounted incidental 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 return? And she said, you don't have to do anything in return. 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 that other places where they do this sort of thing and it is oh, my goodness. So that 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'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 or whatever you name it.

But this is ideology that's taking on. You can see it in newsrooms, in, you know, publication houses, the tech world.

And there is an alarming rejection of the fruits of modernity, of free speech, of all the things 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 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 that disappointment with modernity and the rejection of that. And again, that is why.

What are they doing? Do you think? That and that we've accepted, what are the differences that that 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? I maybe I mean, I'm not expecting you necessarily to know the answer to that, but but it is the issue the. Well, the issues 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 straight away from the pure doctrine and the behavior of the prophets, 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 Bertrand Russell and others have tried to give the answer that 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 they looked down on, then we have to become like them.

That was the attempt that Kemal Ataturk made in Turkey. But then another force, a retrograde force. These are our modern Islamists. So not that is actually the wrong answer. We have to make them submit to us.

And when I say they reject modernity, they like the gadgets and the nuclear weapons, and that's 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 recoil from that because they think that's what's going to take them apart. That's looking like them or running your societies. According to this. That's a 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 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 that to give those people a chance to actually become a part of modernity and modern societies, to assimilate them.

And the way to do it is just by admitting that some of these the voting with the feet 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 opportunities of of two thirds of the globe. Well, 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 out seems to be impossibly difficult. 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 a value. Well, simultaneously atoning for our past sins, maybe even the ways 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 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 beings in general came about, you know, to me it seems to have a deep rooted in the in the idea of the universal soul and the intrinsic value of each person, then 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 an Islamic equivalent.

I think, first of all, just by telling only one side of the story, the story of 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 Westerner's is for them to destroy everything and start all over again. I think even with those aside from the obvious nihilism, let's just destroy stuff and the selective telling of the story.

There's also an element of superiority in there and an element of story, an element of of superiority or supremacy, because only whites and Western allies are held responsible for bad things they did in the past or do today.

Do you mean about bad things that were that happened altogether 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 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 engaged in a genocide against the WIGGO people, we have reports of them forcibly sterilizing women. Why can't we hold them to the same moral standard that we are holding ourselves?

So you think what do you think is inappropriately colonialist for. White Europeans to attribute universal human guilt to themselves, it's an expression of of primacy. 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 their 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 Nigella's and there's the selective telling of the story. But like deep down, when you when you read this stuff over and over again, it is 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 darkly comical.

Well, 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, is it you you think do you think that there is a clash of civilizations and that we should be aware of that its manifestations here and there?

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 were dispossessed and were 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 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 and to solve these problems. And we can't if we if we keep on declaring if we demonize one another and we moralize towards one another 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 this conversation. 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 these. How to coexist with one another in places in Europe, in America, on the globe. Hurt.

I've had the distinct pleasure, complicated pleasure speaking with Ayaan Hirsi Ali today, and she's the author of multiple books, including this one, their newest published in Twenty Twenty One called Pray Immigration, Islam and the Erosion of Women's Rights, and is launching a podcast Monday, which is February.

Monday, February 8th, and as well as launching her new website, which is Ayaan Hirsi Ali dot com. I'd encourage anybody who wants to know more about I am 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 and then people will be able to tolerate. We'll see.

Thank you very much for talking with me today and 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 to the kids. So thank you so much for having me.

Bye bye. Bye bye. Thank you.