The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 155. The Erosion of Women's Rights? | Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Episode Date: February 21, 2021

This podcast was recorded on Feb 2nd, 2021Ayaan Hirsi Ali and I discuss, among other topics, Immigration, Islam, the changing safety of women in public(particularly in areas of Europe), clashing values of western cultures and Islam, win-win propositions, and many more career-ending topics. Ayaan outlines her arguments and concerns with current immigration practices and how Islamic leaders and values clash with many freedoms of modern culture. We also look more at her latest book, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights.Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born Dutch-American activist, feminist, author, scholar, and former politician best known for her activism against women’s treatment in Islam. She just released a new book, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights. She recently launched a brand new podcast which you can find on her website: https://AyaanHirsiAli.com/Headspace - for a free one-month trial, visit: headspace.com/jbpTHINKR - to start your free trial, visit: thinkr.orgNew episodes of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast will release in audio-form every Sunday and its corresponding video every Monday on YouTube and thinkspot. Please email [e-mail] for any business inquiries.Please email sales@advertisecast for any podcast advertising inquires.

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, season 4 episode 7. I'm Mikaela Peterson. Ion, her CLE joined Jordan on February 2 for this episode. They discussed immigration, the changing safety of women in public, particularly in areas of Europe, clashing values of Western cultures in Islam, and win-win propositions. Ion 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 discussed her latest book, Pray, Immigration, Islam, and the erosion of women's rights. This episode is brought to you by Headspace. Headspace is 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

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available on his website. His new poster is coming out for his book. It's coming out on March 2nd that have incredible illustrations on them. JordanVPeterson.com. Enjoy your week. Enjoy this episode. I have the great privilege today of talking with Iann Hershey-Ely. 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 No Mad in 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 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 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 708 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. 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 took to a Dutch society, like a fished water. I landed the language. I made friends. I went on to do a master's in political science. And by 2000, 2001, in my early 30s, I had just done 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 in 911 2001 happened, Muslim terrorists, 19 of them took passenger airplanes and started to bring down the twin towers. They wanted to bring down a white house, they had brought down a wing of the Pentagon. And 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 confissions 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 economic challenges. And I said that it had nothing to do with any of that,

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 a point that what motivated them was the conviction, acting on the conviction of the religious beliefs. They were waging jihad, and to pretend otherwise was wrong, and I didn't understand how sensational that would be. And I was given platforms by some of the Dutch newspapers, creators 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 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 towards the riots, 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 why 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. It's just, you know just a handful of bad people who are giving everyone else a bad name. But then over and over again, we saw the threats to the freedom of conscience, the freedom of speech, women's rights, the freedom of association, the freedom of the press.

And never ever did I think that we would have what we now have, which is not a threat from outside forces, whether they're religious or not, but a threat from the inside from our own universities where a composition 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 hornet's nests and decided to take a swing at the largest one. I mean, I think there's every reason to believe that at least in the possibility that when I air this episode, my channel will be demonetized and that it could conceivably be taken off the air altogether. And I've had my fair share, not to the same degree you have certainly, but I've had my fair share of public attack. And, you know, I'm rather embarrassed to admit that I don't have the same stomach for it that I once did. So, but anyways, onward and upward, hypothetically. onward and upward hypothetically. So back to this, I guess we'll start to talk about this book.

Pre-immigration Islam and the erosion of women's rights. I had an uneasy feeling reading it continually. I mean, you do say right off the bat, this is a trigger warning for the entire book. Reading it, you should be triggered. Well I would say I was triggered by reading it. I was triggered partly as a social scientist I would say to begin with because I, as I went through the initial part of the book in particular, which deals with statistics pertaining to the sexual assault of women, I 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, you're, and stop me if I get any of this wrong, 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 immediate problems for, and it's perhaps worthwhile to walk people through what some of these problems are. How do you define sexual assault, for example? Now, you could define it as the, if you define it by the most severe crimes, let's say rape, then you miss all the data that might be obtained when you consider all the other forms of sexual misbehavior that might be regarded as assault, unwanted touching on a street, for example. But if you include those, then you risk minimizing the magnitude of the extremely serious forms of a sexual assault like rape. And especially if you do it over a lifetime and crank up the prevalence rate so high

that they start to become meaningless. Now, I know it's an appalling thing that a very large percentage of women and perhaps an unknowable percentage face unwanted physical, unwanted sexual attention, psychological and physical. But if the definition of that becomes so lax that it's a hundred percent of women that suffer from it, then you divert attention away from, for example, from the more serious forms of sexual assault. So it So, and then you outline as well, the difficulties of doing cross-cultural, cross-country comparisons

because the definitions vary so much from state to state and the difficulty of tracking change in sexual assault prevalence in any given country because of the changing definitions of sexual assault that occur within states. And so I was tempted to throw up my hands at one point and think, well, it's impossible to get to the bottom of this. So in the face of all that complexity, what argument have you laid out? And why do you think it's justifiable? So the argument I'm laying out, first of all, is the story of women and their safety in

the public space. So in this book, I'm not laying out an argument about sexual violence committed by intimate partners. If you wanted that, it would probably be easier to get those statistics. It would be harder to find them categorized along ethnic lines, but still possible. And I'm not talking about sexual violence against women, in say, in the office at work. The themes that were brought to light by the MeToo movement. So those two things are not the subject of this book.

What I'm talking about is the public space. And so I don't start fast with statistics. So I 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 so feeling unsafe 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 cat-called after. And so then I go from the descriptions of verbal sexual violence or sexual propositions that are inappropriate, in the mood and obscene, and are harmful and hurtful all the way to rape. And these women were just stunned. A decade later, I'm hearing from white women in some of these countries describing situations

that I thought were, but that's weird. That's very interesting. That's a real change. And Jordan, I know you know a little bit of my background, but I've also been engaged in this debate about Islam, integration, immigration, the unintended consequences of immigration and all the taboos around that. So when I first proposed writing this book, it was, for instance, my husband saying, the argument will not, it won't go anywhere because you will not be able to get to the statistics. And I thought,

what I'll try. And so I started calling up this justice department, so 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, Jordan, let me give you an example. From January of last year to January of this year, I think today is what the last day was, it's 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 virus is, who's affected, who's likely to die, who's likely to survive, what are the things that we need to do, and we have in response to that data, in response to that knowledge that we gather, put policy or policies in place that constrain our liberties to a great deal with 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, 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 vager construct, say term concept, that the safety of women in the public domain has been compromised. That's the first thing because if that isn't the case, see, because I kept wondering, well, what exactly is the problem here?

And I did believe, as a consequence of reading your book, that your primary concern was that as the public domain, if the public domain becomes less safe, then women are going to have to retreat from engagement 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 that, and so then we'd have to ensure 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 event some doubt about that, I believe, because at one point in your book, you talk about the problem, the cultural problem that might be behind this being perhaps not so much Islam but polygamy itself and its influence, 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 most critical stance to find out where what's solid. And so you're obviously concerned about the safety of women.

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 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,

any other observer can do is to say, I want this to be questioned. And one of the things about the hard sciences, for instance, is that you could replicate data and then you could experiment, you can then falsify or verify. As you know, with these types of very complex social issues, that is very, very difficult. Having said that, if you were to go out and take the exact same steps that I have done, I challenge you. I will say, I bet you, you will reach the same conclusions. Now, it is very important to make the distinction between something as gruesome and as horrific as rape.

And there is rape by one individual against another individual, but sometimes it's done in groups. That's even more horrific. And it's not nearly as horrific as somebody calling you bad names as you, you know, walk by calling you bad names as you, you know, walk by or touching you or so in terms of what is most gruesome, it is rape, especially by groups and then very often that leads to homicide. So some of the victims actually die. And I didn't want this book to be just about that. When something like that happens in a European country that is recorded, and in fact, the authorities make an attempt at finding the perpetrators and 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 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 and the Holocaust and what they had done, also, 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 though record, I've seen this in Norway, I've seen this in Denmark, I've seen it in Austria, even in Germany. At a given moment, there was a recording of the testimony of the victim or witnesses. Or some of the reporters would say today in court case XYZ was tried and the perpetrator was from Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria or Somalia or whatever. And as things evolved, journalists who are told not to do that. And victims

would sometimes testify those who survive the 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 lightest. Let's just say the verbal abuse that 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 their assailants are. And they sometimes, they'll, those recordings, at first, some of these countries would put down that information,

these data points, and see them as important. But then income, the political correctness, the identity politics, immigration is sensitive, Islam is sensitive, we don't want to stigmatize. And then you will see these data points being dropped. You will see statistics that make it very clear that there is a correlation at least between a rise in sexual violence against women and immigration.

And then someone else will be commissioned and will be told, okay, can you please give that a second look? And they would come and they would say, you know what sexual violence against women is universal. Yes, well, that's part of the complexity of the problem because I was thinking as well. Well, you also point out, for example, that many cases of sexual assault are never, they're never brought to the police and no one knows how many cases are like that. And that's even more likely to be the case for the more minor forms if we're allowed to make a hierarchy of sexual crimes, which I think is absolutely

necessary. It's even more true for the more minor forms 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 of sufficient unpleasantness to potentially restrict women's, at least their sense of freedom in the public domain. But so a critic can you cover this in the book as well? A critic might object, well, this is going to happen

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 religious background. But it's purely a demographic matter.

And then there's another issue, which is even if it is true that immigration policy Tilt 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 Lay out for for everyone, as exactly what you think the problem is, and why it was, see,

because the other thing I thought too was, well, why did I and critics are going to say, there's lots of contributors to violence against women that could conceivably be talked about. And you might say, well, you should attend to those that are the most dramatic, 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 about alcohol because if you alcohol contributes victims and perpetrators of violent crimes, about 50% of them are alcohol intoxicated. It's a massive contributor 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 trade-offs. And I think in terms of these trade-offs, what we're seeing is that the way I see it is that the rights of women are being and their freedoms and their safety is being compromised, are being, and their freedoms and their safety is being compromised. When, say, you know, these immigration

beneficial is, and then like the way you say it, even on humanitarian grounds, just being compassionate to fellow human beings, right? From Syria, parts, different parts of Africa, different parts of South Asia. These men are suffering. We should feel compassion for them. I think it should be possible to feel compassion for them and accommodate them in as much in every way we can without selling out women. Now in terms of the contention that

Now, in terms of the contention that that particular demographic, when you have a young man 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. There is violence, there's disorder, and then 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, say, the context I'm thinking of is in college. Most colleges where young men will drink and young women will drink and then they will go off into their dorms, both of them drunk. And up to a point, the young man involved will argue, I thought

all this time that it was voluntary. And the next morning, the young woman will wake up and say, it wasn't. And that is, I think, a conversation we will continue to have and you're absolutely right. If you consume that amount of alcohol and you put yourself in a vulnerable place, I think you should hold yourself as an individual, and I'm talking about as the female as well, that you have agency, you have responsibilities, and we should raise our girls

if they don't want to have sex and don't go to the dorm, then don't go to the room at 10 p.m. and don't drink as much as 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. So critics are going to,

but before we, please, before we go to the next one, the cases I describe, let's just say, okay, the statistics, my critics, let's say my critics might look into these statistics and say there's nothing to see here. All right, then you go to the description that I get from the women. And I'm not talking about a context of women who are behaving in ways that might be confusing. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a woman, a mother in a park

who's pushing her toddler, pushing her baby with her toddler walking next to her, or a woman jogging, or a woman going to do her grocery shopping, or a woman coming home from work and taking the train and who is terrified by a group of young men who think it's a game. I'm talking about different things where you would say, I'd say I'll give you another data point

that are now neighborhoods where European women have decided that no one is going to protect me, I just won't go there. There are two documentary makers that I've spoken to who have, you know, because the phenomenon has been going on for some time have decided they were going to make a documentary about this. Visit these women-free zones and actually confront the men, the proprietors of these places and say,

there's that one example where they order, I think, coffee and they ask to leave. And they have a conversation about why should I leave? These are female filmmakers who are doing this. These are female filmmakers who have seen in France. Certain neighborhoods have become inaccessible for women. They want to address that. They go and talk to the proprietors of these cafes and things. And who is it that brings up the cultural element? It's not the women. It's not the research or the statistician. It's the men themselves who say, no, you're not safe here. It's inappropriate and she says, but this is, 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. And he looked around, it was women. So there are ways of looking at the complexity of this issue. women. So there are ways of looking at the complexity of this issue. And not only relying on the statistics that are gathered by the institutions that are actually supposed to be enforcing the values, the full of law, the protection of women, because they gather the data. And like you, when you

said, I finished the book and then I throw my hands up in the air, what are we going to do about this? 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 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. And on the one hand, there's compassion for

the dispossessed, including dispossessed young men in war-torn countries, war-torn and catastrophically-driven countries and the benefits of immigration economically and on humanitarian basis. And then on the other hand, there's the safety of women. And it's very difficult not to be for both of those, but unfortunately there are circumstances where the interests are not going to align. In a context like this one, and the context is where we have been having conversations, not just about having compassion for 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 is people concluding, well, let's not have that win-win where we protect free speech, but we also protect against incitement and violence. That would be a rational discussion to have. It would be a rational outcome. It would be a good outcome for our society. We have this other confrontation, say, between transgender rights and then compromising the rights of women. We could have a win-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 were terrified of being deeply 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're attempting to demonstrate in the book that using statistics and you outline the unreliability of the statistics and the difficulty of obtaining them, but using statistics and also on the ground anthropology and case reports essentially, to make the case that there has been a deterioration in 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 pronounced, but I think it's been going on for at least 20 years, depending on where you are. So certain neighborhoods in Paris or Messiah or Malmo,

you could say, or in certain, you know, Tower Hamlets area in the UK, right around London. Some of those places you could go as far back as 20 years. Even longer. And that, again, that deterioration is linked to poor immigration policy or to, what exactly is the problem? Is the problem the immigration policy?

Because I might also say, I mentioned youth and masculinity as contributing factors to violent behavior. But unemployment as well is going to be a contributing factor. I know. That's all true. So all the social economic factors, these are all contributing factors. People actually, I would say, more willing to talk, they feel like they're more licensed to talk about the social economic factors, then they are licensed to talk about the cultural factors. So if you have men and families, men and women,

come from countries where men and women relate to one another differently in the public space and in the private space. And then they come to liberal societies and the values are different. Then yes, all the very complex, socio-economic aspects are there. But the question is, are those the defining ones or is it the cultural aspects? And then my conclusion is, it is poor integration policies, in other words, poor assimilation policies. And it is not, it's very difficult to culturally assimilate minorities.

If the receiving societies are not confident in their own values. And so the process of assimilation and developing successful assimilation that is socializing these young men into the valiant women, into the values of the host society, this is all compromised by that moral relativist attitude where we were saying you can integrate and we will only talk about the social economic aspects. When it comes to the values, you can keep it. 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 is an opposition to that from within saying to do that is to recolonize them. It's ethnocentric, it's Eurocentric. It is arrogant. It's racist. It is xenophobic. It's an excuse to keep people out. its racist, it is xenophobic, it's an excuse to keep people out. And so the integration process has been frustrated on the one hand from the establishment that is relativist. On the other hand, by the populist and extreme right-wing parties that are saying, we don't

want anybody assimilating, we don't want them to support them. And then you have this other third force, which is the Islamist, the radical Muslims, who are preaching in the mosques to Muslim minorities and telling them, do not adopt the values of the infidels, of the host societies, because they're uneaslamic. 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.

Okay, and so let's decompose that. If we had a more effective assimilation policy, what do you think that should look like? I mean, the obvious issue is employment and perhaps perhaps the problem would disappear to a large degree if 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. I'm not doing a disservice to your book to make that summary. I'm hoping. No, you're not.

So 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 their socio-economic outlook. But if then the receiving society acknowledges that there is a problem and develops an appropriate integration or a simulation 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 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 back up her transformative actions. And I spoke to German citizens who are living with her, living. They voted for her or they voted for the SDP, the Social Democratic Party in Germany. So these are not right-wing extremists who want to close the doors to immigrants. But

these are people who are living, living very angrily and saying this was 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. These are people who were in the second generation, and we were having assimilation issues with those. And now you open the gates and you say, okay, everybody come in because I feel for, sorry, for this 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 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 socio-economics that changes the culture. It is the culture that changes

the socio-economics. This is a conversation ongoing right now in the United States as we speak about inequality and also to facial confrontations. If you come from a culture where young women are pulled out of school, where there is polygamy, where violence against women is taken for granted, just because you cross the border and you get a job is not going to change your attitude to women. So at some point, we have to have that conversation about the... It seems to me that the left is facing a sequence

of contradictions in some sense that haven't been or won't be thought through. So, and I don't wanna produce a straw man here at all. And I don't want to produce a straw man here at all. So it's a common claim that societies are patriarchal, Western society, perhaps in particular. But let's put that aside for a moment. That human society tends to be unfortunately patriarchal. So we could accept that as a claim to begin with.

And then we might say, well, that necessitates the proposition that some societies are likely to be more patriarchal than others, whichever system we can have a debate about, which those societies are. And then the third thing we might conclude is that the more patriarchal society is, the more the men that belong to it are likely to oppress women. And so then the question would be, how do you rank order societies with regards to their oppressive patriarchal nature? And it seems to me that that's been done even by agencies like the UN because if you, you can, it's easy enough to do research on which countries support women's rights most explicitly and implicitly and which don't. And my sense is that, well, there's a handful of countries that always rank

at the bottom. I think the phrase patriarchy is not helpful in the least. You have patriarchal societies that have developed laws and norms and values that protect women, and are still patriarchal. So this whole notion that it's the patriarchy that causes them what, then you get into this crazy language of toxic masculinity, and so then all men are bad and evil, and so you have to turn men into what? Women, something else. I mean, what, these conversations are just sort of, I mean, the more you dive into them, the more

nihilistic they are, in the sense that then you're going to have men and women on a war footing because for feminists to achieve perfect equality with men you have to diminish men, you have to punish them, you have to brutalize boys and men into accepting values that are actually respectful and protective and on it. Okay, so why do you think that? Let me take attack this from a different perspective. I know, for example, the research literature on antisocial behavior, criminal behavior. It appears that, first of all, antisocial behavior is unbelievably difficult to treat. It looks like it's stable, about as stable as IQ, across the lifespan.

If you're antisocial by the age of four, there's a strong probability that you'll be antisocial when you're a teenager and young adult, especially if you're male. And there isn't any evidence that I know of in the research literature that anything at all can be done to ameliorate that. The more hard-headed scientists that I've worked with who've concentrated on antisocial behavior basically end up making the claim that either addressing it has to be done at a very early stage of life, perhaps between the ages of two and four years old, for that minority of men who

are males, who are aggressive even at that early stage, or you wait till the anti-social males mature out of it, which seems to occur around the age of 27. So what makes you optimistic about the fact? Let's assume that the assumptions that you're making are correct and that this is a cultural issue and that it's a serious cultural issue and that it can be associated with particular cultures. What makes you think that it can be ameliorated? What sort of education or training would be necessary to have an effect on that? The cultures I'm describing do not think in general that it is anti-social or negative in the least to be aggressive as a young male between the ages of two to four or beyond. That is the main difference between say evolved cultures like we are now

you know the cultures that have produced the laws we live under in Western society and say the Islamic Republic of Iran or the now civil war tone Syria or Saudi Arabia or Somalia where I come from. It's not described as aggression in males is not seen as a bad thing. And the ways of channeling that aggression are very different from the ways that male aggression is channeled in Western societies and the way young boys are socialized into, you know, becoming less aggressive or important. Well, they incorporate the successful ones, incorporate their aggression, I would say.

Like, they make it pro-social. They don't stop being assertive. They learn how to play games with others. Yes. And to watch a soccer game or football or whatever. You know, are they become competitive economically or competitive in sports? Or they're still striving to win.

But not at the expense of someone, maybe. The cultures I'm describing think that it is totally social and natural appropriate for males to be aggressive. We come from tribal cultures and as a tribe, the only way you can overcome and dominate other tribes is to have the largest number of aggressive males. So that component is not socialized out of them. It's socialized into them. And that is something that we have to acknowledge some of these values, some of these cultures are different.

I'm not blaming the young men for how they turn out. But I believe that they can be socialized into a different value system, even before they get to the age of 27, or be only the age of 27, if they see that there's a value in it for them, if there's something in it for them. So in a tribal society, there's something that there's an element, you know, I wanted my brothers, my brother and my cousins, and we all talk of our male relatives as brothers and uncles. To be the most aggressive and domineering,

because that protects us, I describe also these perspectives in the book that is a different context. But then what happens when these encounters, such as large numbers of men immigrating from aggressive, tribal, religious societies, and coming into a society where that most men have somehow found ways of channeling the aggression

into something else? These encounters are happening, and it's affecting women, it's affecting children, it's affecting social cohesion, it's affecting how we think of ourselves as a liberal society, but it's also affecting how the young men who are arriving think of themselves as not belonging anywhere. And so right now the situation is lose, lose, because we don't want to have these conversations. There is a possibility, if you ask me about my optimism, there is a possibility that I win, win. If we have the conversations, if we put everything on the table. Do you know much about the immigration situation in Canada? A little bit, yes.

And I know that Canada in some ways looks more like Europe than North America. Well, because they took in large numbers of immigrant men and some of these situations that I described, some of these anecdotes, I think I could see a lot of them happening in Canada. Yeah, well, it's not been obvious to me that in cities like Montreal and Toronto, that we've seen a palpable increase in the kind of street activity that has produced a decrement in women's feeling of safety. I haven't, that's not something I've been personally aware of. I don't know if that means that Canada might be doing something right. It isn't obvious to me that our cities, Montreal, 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 manifested itself in France. In Canada, it does have an official policy of multiculturalism. 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. That there's 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 of 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 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 for some countries, it's easier than others. And I think in Canada and Australia are some of the countries that have that geographical composure. That's a very good point. Yes, absolutely. We weren't, we're not as close to Syria.

And so that protected or that that that distance dust from the the downstream consequences of the Syrian conflict. And not just the Syrian conflict, 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 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 in Canada. No.

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 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 beforehand. And also, I think Canada has, Canada Deports,

Canada requires, as far as I know, that if you want to go and work and live there, that you have someone to sponsor you, they have all of these requirements that they can actually enforce. Having said that, you've had a number of honor killings in Canada. You've had a number of terrorist attacks in Canada. You have a number of extreme right-wing incidents in attacks in Canada. So it's not like you know you're protected from some of these stations. So 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 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 an extremely powerful part of the book, because it is a kind of miracle that that sort of thing could 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 proportion of their country would actually be underwater if it failed. You're making a case in Infidel, you're making a case now that in order for the West to develop an effective integration policy that would enable an effective immigration policy, that we have to have faith in our own values. The values that gave rise, say, to the idea of equal rights for women, to accept that those, the rise of that idea

was something perhaps distinctively Western, and that we need to teach those, we need to have enough faith in those presumptions to teach them to newcomers. That strikes me, 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 seem 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 do 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 attempts to assimilate immigrants, for example?

I think the way you started with 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, right? You, some people just call it modernity. I don't know, some people think it was just lucky. I think there's a bit of everything.

But if you then look at societies where the bus doesn't come on time, that is one factor. And I just really like the time factor. In fact, we can, we 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 its violence. That is suppressing male violence and channeling it, so that it has other outlets instead of disrupting society and it being used against women. The third one I would say is money. And it is for societies to have these large surpluses where they can actually take care of the weak. They can afford compassion. Compassion is not just something you say,

I feel sorry for you. We pay taxes so that we can pay for people's, for the dispossessed. We can pay for their medical care. We can pay for the housing we can. So, and that, again, greatly enhances stability and social stability. And then, finally, it's sex sex which is not something that you can

spontaneously have whenever whatever you know, again it's not perfect but compared to some other societies unwanted diseases, unwanted babies, rapes and sexual violence, all of that in western societies seem to be really different. Now you take those four factors and you say we're going to bring people in from or people from societies 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. or just socialization, or whatever you want to call it. But if we fail to do that and the number gets ever bigger, then we are going to have unstable societies. We're going to have, and the Dutch can say,

and I've had the sweets to do the same thing. I've had Germans say the same thing to me, French. There is nothing uniquely different from my culture, maybe because they take it for granted, because it's never been challenged. They all look alike, they think alike. And then one day... Well, you do take whatever's around you all the time for granted,

and it's clearly the case that we don't understand our own cultures, let alone other people's cultures. You don't understand what you... You don't understand what you have until you don't have it anymore. And what, what did you, what have you experienced the West as having the values that should be transmitted to the immigrant population that we're inviting in? What's crucial in your estimation and how do you communicate it?

I mean, all you tried to do that when you wrote in Cedel. Right, and I'm trying to do it again in this book and I've tried to do it in Herod's, 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 knew of the concepts of freedom, but to me it was a dream. It wasn't something you had. So when I came to Holland, I was stunned, of course, in a good way.

I felt safe as a woman in any kind of space. That's not something I was used to. I was told that I had equal rights before men. So when the man that my husband, my father married me off to, when he came to claim me, the woman at the asylum seeker center told him, you don't have to go with him. You can call the police and we call the police.

And I didn't go with him. Right, I can remember how stunned you were, you're accounting in Cedal 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

And again, that is something, she was just as shocked as I was. So there are places where they do this sort of thing. And it is, oh my goodness. So 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 be friend whoever you want. You can sleep with whomever you want.

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 made 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 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, generations have decided that they are disappointed in modernity. They call themselves postmodernists or critical race theorists. So whatever you name it, but this is ideology that's taking on. You can see it in newsrooms in publication houses, 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? Or what do you think about that? I mean, is this... It is a religious issue. It's a religious issue, it's a cultural issue. It's also an issue of not only generating and being the motto behind modernity and constantly modernizing,

which is what Western societies are constantly doing. And then obviously the religious component for me, when I analyze the leadership of Islam, is the disappointment with modernity and the rejection of that. And again, that is why I think about the most important. Do you think that we've accepted, what are the differences 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, that that equality should be fostered and treasured and developed. What's the difference? I mean, I'm not expecting you necessarily to know the answer to that, but Muslims preach 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 this straight away from the pure doctrine and the behavior of the prophet, especially when he was in Medina, and he had become so powerful, he had conquered not only Arabia, but then went beyond, and then his disciples went to almost every continent.

And they were dominant. Then what went wrong? And I think people like 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 wanna 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 had to make in Turkey.

But then another force, a retrograde force, this is our modern Islamists, said, no, that is actually the wrong answer. We have to make them submit to us. And when I say they reject modernity, they like the gadgets and the nuclear weapons and that sort of modern stuff that makes them feel dominant or strong. But when it comes to adopting attitudes such as liberating women, they recoil from that. Absolutely, they recoil from that because they think that's what's going to take them apart. That's looking like them. Or running your societies according to this, that time machine that the West does.

They think that that's all empty, looking at the clock all the time. So there are aspects about the West that they admire and want to incorporate, but the end goal is that it is not, it is not 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 to give those people a chance to actually become a part of modernity and modern society is to assimilate them.

And the way to do it is just by admitting that some of these, the voting with the feet says it all. Well, you know, 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 two thirds of the globe while elevating themselves to positions of unearned superiority. And of course, there's no shortage of evidence for that if that's the evidence that you choose to look at. And sorting that 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 I would say we could at least admit that our past sins were the failure of our The failure to live up to our values rather than the values themselves

But it that's certainly not it's certainly not the case that everyone's going to agree to that. It's a real mystery why the idea of equality between the genders or equality between men in general came about, you know, to me, it seems to have a deep rooting in the idea of the universal soul and the intrinsic value of each person and the intrinsic value of each person's capacity for speech and creative production. I think that's a deeply Judeo-Christian idea. Its roots go deeper than that.

I don't understand, I don't know if there is 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 attend for, the colonization, the slavery, the segregation, all of these well-documented terrible things that Western societies have engaged in. That is one side of the story, but there's also another side of the story. And the other side of the story is that it is Westerners who took the initiative among humanity to change all of that,

to end slavery, to end segregation, to aspire for equality. So if you're going to tell the story, then it's better to tell both sides of the story. Now, for the people who tell only the negative side of the story, who are toppling statues and saying, the only way to redeem Westerners is for them to destroy everything and start all over again. I think even with those aside from the obvious nihilism, let's just destroy stuff and the selective telling of the story, there's also an element of superiority in there.

An element of sorry, an element of? Of superiority or supremacy because only whites and Westerners are held responsible for bad things they did in the past or do today. Do you mean about bad things that were that happened all together or specifically that bad things, the bad things that were perpetrated by Europeans. I mean, it's certainly the case that slavery was a human universal. It's not something unique to European society by any stretch of the imagination. And so was colonialism.

And so was and is segregation still to this day? Take a continent like India where the caste system is still vibrant and healthy, or any of the Arab countries where people with mice can still reg at it as slaves. So I think if you want to litigate history and all the things that were done bad by human beings, and all the things that were done bad by human beings. Selecting only whites, and especially white men, and saying only they have to forever atone for their sins, is in itself an expression of supremacy because holding the Arabs and holding the Chinese,

and the Chinese right now are engaged in a genocide against the Wiga 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 it's inappropriately colonialist for white Europeans to attribute universal human guilt to themselves. It's an expression of supremacy. It's an expression of only we can meet those high, very high standards, not the rest of humanity.

They are all victims in one way or the other. We just take it for granted, they just can't do it. You know the Chinese and their violations of human rights, why haven't addressed it? They don't know how to do it. So we only, do you see where there's the nihilism, there's the selective telling of the story,

but like deep down when you read the 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, like, darkly comical. What conclusion would you like your readers and anybody concerned with public policy to come to as a consequence

of reading? Well, let's say your books, pray in particular since it's your last book. You think that there is a clash of civilizations and that we should be aware of that? It's 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 have 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 European scholars. These young men who are dispossessed and who are vulnerable without sacrificing the rights of women. But we can't do that unless we forthrightly confront the problems that are associated with 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 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, UNI started our conversation with statistics and stop using statistics as a tool of obfuscation statistics as a tool of fascination, as a tool of lying about things that are going on. Let's use statistics and data actually to open, you know, to solve these problems and we can't, if we keep on declaring, we demonize one another and we modelize 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 these conversations. So maybe the first step is I wish this book would only contribute to the opening of that conversation. It's not just about women. It's really, it's about this this how to co-exist with one another in places in Europe, in America, on the globe.

Please. I've had the distinct pleasure, complicated pleasure, speaking with Ion Hershey Ali today, and she's the author of multiple books, including this one. Their newest published in 2021 called Prey. Immigration Islam and the erosion of women's rights. I N is launching a podcast Monday, which is February. Monday, February 8th and as well as launching her new website, which is IonHerziali.com. I'd encourage anybody who wants to know more about Ion's thinking to visit her website and to attend to her podcast, which I'm sure will be very interesting.

And no doubt perhaps more interesting than people will be able to tolerate. We'll see. Thank you very much for talking with me today. I am. 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 how to go to the kids, so thank you so much for having me. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye. you