Polarising

Last night I turned on BBC News 24 and it was showing that programme HardTalk, which has been amusingly stupid in the past, see here:



and continued to be so last night. It was a different interviewer - not Steven Sackur - and he was interviewing Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who's book Infidel I'm reading at the moment as background reading for my work on Lance Olsen's Head in Flames. Hirsi Ali is interesting because she, more than anyone I can think of, reveals the confusion of left- and right-wing politics that is the current state of politics worldwide. That she came to prominence in the Netherlands is not coincidental, it is the perfect place to show this confusion. I remember reading a Momus blog about a Socialist party in the Netherlands that was anti-immigration because they claimed that the movement of workers and so-on was a capitalist ploy. That's as maybe, but I don't think you can call yourself a Socialist if your outlook is nationalist, not internationalist. You can call yourself someone who stands up for the poor and ignored, but not a Socialist. The Socialist anthem is The Internationale, socialist politics are specifically formed in an internationalist context. Reading Ian Buruma's (excellent) book Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (interestingly re-named in the US Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance), you discover yourself agreeing with anti-immigrant politicians because they are for women's rights, and against pro-immigration politicians because they turn a blind eye to domestic abuse. Hirsi Ali, in her fight against the degrading treatment of women, suggests that Muslims "learn" from Christians and become more Western. Buruma calls her an Enlightenment fundamentalist and Christopher Hitchens writes the intro to Infidel.

I had intended to put up the interview (having found it on youtube) and leave it at that, but a search of youtube reveals an earlier HardTalk interview and a few others, all with descriptions along the lines of "Hirsi Ali's fascism revealed" etc etc, which just goes to show how polarising she is. Nevertheless, the book Infidel is really very good, whether you agree with her or not. I would imagine it would make anyone, of any political stripe, question what they take forgranted. It poses difficult questions.