The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Ayaan Hirsi Ali: why the UK is facing a clash of civilizations

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

Western societies have never been more divided. As the election race heats up in the US, both parties are accusing the other of being a threat to democracy. Meanwhile, years of mass migration into Europe is giving far right parties more power than they have had in decades, and mass riots in the UK have exposed a deep-seated anger that is dividing the nation. Our guest on this Munk Dialogue has a unique insight into these unfolding conflicts. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia where, as a young girl, she grew up in a strict Islamist society that relegated women to second class citizens. At 23, she fled to the Netherlands and claimed asylum to escape a forced marriage. Once there, she worked her way up from being a janitor to earning a Master’s degree in Political Science and serving as an elected member of the Dutch Parliament, where she campaigned to raise awareness of violence against women. She has since become a fierce champion of Western values, especially on issues relating to liberty for women and free speech. Ayaan worries that the authoritarian principles which governed the Somalia of her childhood are showing up in popular leftist movements across the US. She also blames those same leftwing movements in Europe for mass migration and what she calls “the clash of civilizations”.   The host of the Munk Debates podcast is Rudyard Griffiths Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 15+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Executive Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Kieran LynchBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We tried socialism all through the 20th century, and it failed every time. We should restore dignity to the working class and stop saying you need a credential in order to achieve the most basic, modest version of the American dream. Netanyahu is the worst leader the Jewish people ever had. He should be impeached. Genocide is the latest modern blood liable that anti-Semites use to justify their anti-Zionism. We should prioritize making sure that no more Ukrainians die, that this war is brought to an end. All parents want to help children with their feelings, but I argue that not every feeling is worth paying attention to. Why are these students covering their faces?

I think it says something about their movement, about their ideology, and also simply the fact that they're also cowards. Hello, Monk listeners, Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this. Our continuing conversations called The Monk Dialogues. These are in-depth questions and answers with some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers. On each monk dialogue, we go deep into the big issues and ideas that are driving the public conversation. Western societies are increasingly divided politically, culturally, socially.

All this we can see right now in the United States as the race heats up to the White House, both parties Kamala Harris and Donald Trump accusing each other of being threats to democracy. Meanwhile, years of mass migration into Europe is giving the far right a new lease on their political lives. And large-scale riots in the UK have exposed deep-seated anger that is dividing the United Kingdom. Our guest on today's dialogue has a unique set of insights into all of these issues and events. Ion Herssey Ali was born in Somalia, where as a young girl, she grew up in an Islamic society that subjected women. to unfair and unjust practices and treatments. At the young age of 23, she fled to the Netherlands and claimed asylum to escape a forced marriage.

Once there, she worked her way up from being a janitor to earning a master's degree in political science and then serving as an elected member of the Dutch parliament where she campaigned to raise awareness about violence against women. She has since become a fierce champion of Western values, especially on issues related to women's rights, liberty, and free speech. On this monk dialogue, I and Herssey Ali worries that the authoritarian principles and culture, which so dominated her childhood in Somalia, are now showing up in populist movements across the U.S. and Europe. She also blamed some of these very same movements in Europe for the mass migration that she thinks is precipitating a clash of civilizations.

I and Hershey Ali, welcome back to the Mug Dialogues. Pradir, thank you very much for having me. Well, it's always a pleasure to talk so much on all of our listeners' minds these days. Politics in the United States, Europe, the UK, seemingly a consequential moment for the big democracies of the West. If you'll play along with me, I'd love to do a kind of a bit of a roundtable. a tour around the proverbial horn with you talking about these different countries, elections, and the growing political kind of turmoil and strife that we're seeing not so much below the surface anymore. Let me begin with the United States because it's where you spend majority of your time these days.

What's your take on where we find the U.S. election today as we enter what everyone considers the real start? of the campaign, the final sprint between now and early November? I think what you have is a very divided country. You have the two major parties, and a lot of people on the left will say Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. They will say that Republicans have allowed him to hijack their party, and they will say he is not really what Republicans or conservatives, who are. want. He's a dictator on the making. He's dangerous to democracy. I mean, we're familiar with

this. We've been hearing this since 2016, at least. And I think there's been very little scrutiny in what's going on with the left in general and the Democratic Party in particular. And if you, well, I think of myself as a Clintonian, you know, back in the day in the 1990s, I remember being upset of the Lewinsky affair, and I thought, you know, here we have a president who's compassionate and fantastic and clever, and he's being bogged down with these stupid affairs and you name it. But that party of Bill Clinton of a sensible migration policy, of a balanced budget, of abortion as rare, and legal, that's not what the Democratic Party of 2024 is. It's been in some ways hijacked by the far left, by the woke. And Kamala Harris is a representative of that wing of the Democratic Party. And so I think in many ways she, Kamala Harris and those who support her from the far left

end of it, I think they are a bigger threat to democracy than Trump and Trump supporters. But that's just my opinion. Yeah. We appreciate it. Yeah, I base my opinion on the following things. It's the assault on the structures, the constitutional structures of the United States. They lose a vote. They say we want to change the electoral college.

They want to change it into something else. They lose a court case and they say we want to pack the courts. They have stopped arguing, you know, the Democratic Party is not standing there, persuading you of their policies to see if you like that or not. The candidate is now hiding. There was no proper primary. The sitting president, if he's still sitting, one day he was sharp as attack. The next day he was disappeared out of the scene.

And here we've brought this woman in, and we're being told she's the best thing that ever happened, when in fact she was the worst vice president. We know she was inept. She was told to get on with the border now. That was a fantastic crisis. She, Kamala Harris and the people who support her, they've taken to calling the other side weird. But she's the weirdest political creature alive today. Everything that comes out of her mouth, and that's why they're hiding her.

is bonkers, you know, these, these words salads that she produces. Either she's on a teleprompter or, I don't know, there's a debate that we've been promised, but in that debate, I'm sure she's going to be prepared and all the rest of it. But here, I find all of that weird. I find the abuse of the justice system very, very dangerous. I come from the third world. I grew up in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, you know, this was. dictatorships, they were autocratic. That's where the police came and lifted you out of your bed

and sent you to prison. There was censorship. There was no freedom of speech. There was tribalism to the point of this constant genocidal violence that was going this tribe to that tribe. And so it's weird to see Americans talk like this and flirt with these types of authoritarianism or tribalism or the positions that the woke people are taking in this departure of flight from reality, the gender politics, the racial politics. I mean, all of this is just mad. So that's where the United States is. And we say when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches cold.

So the woke virus is now in the UK. It's, as you know, in Canada, it's all over the English-speaking world. spreading to the rest of Europe. And, Ian, do you have any hope that, you know, elections sometimes can be cathartic, clarifying events? They can sometimes provide populations and political establishments with a reality check, with a one would hope, a renewed sense of somebody having a mandate, some legitimacy to act on and implement their agenda?

what do you think about this election in November? Could we hope for that? Because I'm starting to hear a different picture, a more dystopian one, of an election that could well be disputed once again, an election that could end up back in the court system with all the problems that that's entailed as the judicial system itself has become more politicized. What's your sense of the potential for this election

to provide either some beginnings of a new start of reconciliation versus a further dissent into chaos. I think there's a best case scenario and a worst case scenario. And the best case scenario would be if the divisions that are now going on within the Democratic Party, they result in the adults, in the room within the Democratic Party saying, we need to lose this election and go into the opposition and figure out what is going on within the Democratic Party. Who are we? Are we revolutionaries? Are we represented by the squad? Are we woke? Do we want to destroy America?

do we think that the story of America is one of, you know, slavery and segregation and exploitation and oppressive? Or do we move back to the middle? And in that sense, in that scenario, the election would provide the kind of reality and sort of the kind of meta-decision that the Democratic Party is probably waiting for. You know, Bernie Sanders can go back to the fringe. That would be the best case scenario. Or, as you say, the dystopian outcome, which is, I really think, a terrible scenario where the election is too close yet again, and both sides refuse to concede. And this time, they don't even go to the courts. I worry this time that actually the Democrats will say they've been saying it's now, at least for two years, at least since

the congressional elections of 2022, that why Donald Trump to win an election, we won't even let him be president. We won't acknowledge that because he's so dangerous and they were just having, they were talking in this incredibly third-worldish way where sitting people in power say they just won't seed control to the winner of the election because if they do, they worry, it's going to be the last election. And it's also this projection where the Democratic Party consistently uses the language that they are protecting democracy when in fact they're the ones who are impeding democracy. And so if the election is too close to call, I think, yeah, we're facing a crisis. I hope we don't get there.

I hope that American voters give us a very clear outcome either way. One of the issues that you've long been focused on is women's rights and the extent to which men and one religion in particular has sought to control women, including their reproductive rights and their sexuality. What is your sense of the American debate right now on women's rights, on these very issues that you, experienced in a very raw way in the early years of your life as a young woman and later the threats that were posed against you by Islamic radicals largely on the basis of your gender. Why are these same types of controversies and fixations now gripping American society, a society that doesn't share culturally, religiously, otherwise, any broad traditions with the oppressive order that you were exposed to and that you experienced in the early years of your life?

So here we talk about, obviously, the big mammoth whose name you can't say, Islam, and the growth of organized political Islam, which we've come to call Islam, is a which is very well entrenched now in the United States and the rest of the Western world, maybe more so in Europe. And the Islamist's attitude to women has never changed. I mean, they've really been consistent. Women have to be hijab, you know, covered, shrouded, kicked out of public life. The Taliban are back in power.

And they're doing what the Taliban does. And wherever Sharia law is implemented, you see oppression of women and oppression of gays, oppression of religious minorities and other people that they call unbelievers. But what's fascinating now in America, again, this is occurring within the Democratic Party and within the left.

This unholy alliance between the woke who won't even define what a woman is and the Islamists waving Hamas paraphernalia and, you know, repeating terrible genocidal slogans against Israel and the Jews in general, and the Islamists. And for the woke, they've divided society into the oppressor and the oppressed, and the oppressor is white and male and heterosexual, everybody else is oppressed. But even that, they have a kind of ranking. where in every way, shape or form, women's rights are sidetracked,

except for the one thing they're obsessed about, which is abortion. Again, in most of the wealthy Western world, abortion is not an issue. It's just in the United States. Well, it's a very crazy thing that's, you know, with the availability of readily available contraceptives, you know, we've never had so much education. we are at the wealthiest country and yet we just haven't figured out

how to prevent an unintended pregnancy and that's what we're obsessing about that's what the woke left is they've reduced women's rights to that and the Islamists are making hay of that and in this I think right now there is no one that's holding Muslims

Muslim minorities accountable for the way they treat women We're not talking about it. October 7, we witnessed the most gruesome, horrifying acts against women, sexual violence, rape as a tool of war, women who are not just raped, but then again, mutilated and shot at and traumatized. And you would think that would have us all marching the streets and demanding justice for those women, not a word from the left, nothing, except denial.

So that is where we are in America. But then we cover the streets, are covered in rainbows. And I don't know, I didn't go to the Democratic Convention, but outside. It was people offering free abortions. So you started by saying this dystopian reality. And I think we're living through a dystopia right now. I'm curious, I'm on both the right in America. which has successfully, at least state level, implemented quite draconian laws in terms of

women's access to reproductive rights in cases that seem shocking, banning, except in the most limited circumstances, access to abortions for women who are the victims of incest or rape. I guess what I'm trying to get at with you is, is it always thus? Is society always obsessed with women's bodies one way or another? Or is this some kind of intensification that we're seeing where politics and sexuality and identity, whether in the Islamic world, the Western political world, all of this is kind of merging into these very frothy, fraught politics that we find ourselves in? I think we should look at the Muslim world separately from the Western world, and especially the English-speaking Western world, where I see that we indulged for some decades now in these philosophies of moral relativism.

Different cultures have different moral systems, and we're all equal, we are not allowed to judge. And maybe an unintended consequence of that, and also, with the erosion of the moral frameworks that grounded Western societies, this Judeo-Christian religious morality that has taken a back seat, that what at least I see in America is there is no longer a common shared minimum morality. And here's the polarization we are talking about. On the right, at least you get an explanation. You say, you know, why are you doing what you're doing?

Why are you revising Roe versus Wade? And you get a legal explanation that, you know, this problem never goes away. It should have been with the states. You should go back to the states. And that's a conversation about policy. And then the different states make their different cases for why they are denying women abortion over a certain period of time. They make a moral argument. They make a legal argument.

They make a social argument. On the left, I see reproductive rights merely as a tool to advance a political agenda or in general even to just use women, women's bodies, women's rights, women's interests as a tool for advancing a political agenda and not, you know, we as individual human beings having rights in and of ourselves. that's what I observe. To the left, we are just tools. And this shows up, for instance, when the whole issue of transgender, where you have the demand that men take part or people who are born as men take part in women's sports, whether they're put in women's prisons, whether they use women only facilities like bathrooms and hospital wards. You know, these are really hard. We fought very, we fought very, very, very, very hard to get to this place. And so for a minuscule minority to come along and say, we're just going to have all of that undone. And this is indulged freely by the left. That is when I think so women and women's rights for the left are just a tool for advancing their political agenda. They really don't care about us.

Well said. Let's shift from the United States to another geography that you know well, Europe. we're seeing a surprise surge, maybe not a surprise. I have to think about that for a sec, in the what are the so-called far right, primarily in Germany in reaction to most recently a brutal stabbing and killing orchestrated by ISIS against a festival in Germany.

You, I, and I think we've known, each other for 20 odd years, you had been talking, writing, and kind of warning about this very circumstance for over two decades now. And here we find ourselves once again, dealing with this combustible mix of mass migration, struggling, cultural assimilation, clash of values and cultures and religion, now breaking out into wanton violence and terrorism and understandably a large-scale political reaction to that that we'll see, but probably not in our collective interests. Is this deeply frustrating to you or deeply, and I know you wouldn't think of this personally, but in some ways, like,

deeply satisfying to kind of be right, if I could say. It is not a certain. is fine in the least and not a day goes by that I don't pray that I was wrong. I wish I'm wrong. I wish I was wrong. And I don't want to take the credit for it because every sensible person who was looking at these developments, as you say 20 years ago, 30 years ago could see all of this coming. And what you, I mean, we saw it with as far back as 1989 when Salman Rosti and got the fatwa over himself, that there is a radical clash of value. between the world of Islam and the West or the Christian West, and now it's the post-Christian West.

And so we knew that there's this clash of civilization. In the 1990s, in the 2000s, when I was in the Netherlands, the discussion was Muslims are a minority in the West, and the big question was, how do we make them welcome and how do we assimilate them? And without, you know, committing the same sins, we committed doing the Second World War, the way we treated the Jews. That was the big question on the table.

And as more and more Muslims came, so demographically speaking, fast through immigration, through family reunion, and then just a higher birth rate. The number of Muslims in Europe is just growing at a pace. it's outpacing the birth rate of the native Europeans. It's no longer, I think the question is no longer, how do we assimilate Muslims? It's become very clear that there is, yes, a large group of Muslims who are willing to assimilate and have done so

and do contribute generously to the societies that they live in, they're law abiding, and they're just wonderful. And that's not who I'm talking about. not with the conversations. That's not who we're talking about. We're talking about the organized Islamist groups that reject the West and that have started these campaigns to actually Islamize the West through conversions and through various means by saying that they want to introduce

Sharia law. And alongside that is also a cohort of young men who commits crimes, bugleries, all sorts of organized crime. but lately organized crime against women. It's unsafe in the streets of Europe to be a woman, any woman, not just Muslim women, any woman. There are neighborhoods, there are places women avoid at night. Look at a country like Sweden. Sweden is now called the rape capital of the world.

So you get these sorts of problems, and in reaction to that, the citizens of these countries organized first they would vote a certain way and find that it, It didn't make a difference. The immigration numbers did not stop. There was no investment in integrations. Things are not changing. And so then along come the populist parties that at the moment are growing. And yes, the AFD in Germany is probably going to win the elections.

And they're being mainstreamed. In France, Marie-LePence, Front National is always a heartbeat away from the presidency. And similarly in other countries, there are some countries that are doing better than others. Denmark has found a balance. And I like the way Denmark approached the subject because it is their way of life or our way of life. Because these value systems are irreconcilable, you can't have Sharia law in Denmark. And they will not accept Danish law and Danish values. You know, one of these forces has to give.

and the Danes decided that they were going to have Danish values prevail and the way they did it and they were called racists and xenophobes and they were rejected for that. But the way they did it is simply by managing the numbers and by investing heavily in the process of assimilation through education and all the rest of it by limiting the growth of Islamism. But that's not what the other countries have done. That's not what Britain has done or France or Germany.

So now these countries are really stuck with very volatile climate, a breakdown of social cohesion. The riots you saw in the UK in early August, these were in the making for decades. And you see similar riots in France and everywhere else in the Netherlands, Zheat-Wilders, who had just as one issue, Islam and immigration, he is now, he has the largest party, he's not the prime minister, but he has won the largest number of votes. So how is Europe going to cope?

Either they answer the question the way Denmark answered the question, or they find themselves in the nightmare scenario that was written in the novel by Wolbeck called submission. And they surrender to, Islamism and this Islamization of society in European countries is been accelerated by the woke the far left because the far left are really not the far left say that they want to deconstruct society. They have described the structures of Western society as exploitative and they have to be dismantled and so that gives a boost to the Islamists. So right.

down the scenario in Europe, unless they turn away, unless, you know, Kiyostama wakes up tomorrow morning and says, no, I'm not going to adopt that Islamophobia law. I'm not going to censor people. And he apologizes to the people who threw in jail, who all they did was disposed images. And he sits down and seriously starts talking about the increasing numbers, the migration numbers, along with this aggressive entrenched Islamist infrastructure. Only then I think we have a chance of turning things around, but it doesn't look like that. Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, the executive director of the Munk Debates. Well, if you're enjoying the kind of civil and substantive conversations that we have at the debates,

where we're really trying to get at the big issues and ideas that are driving the public conversation, I want to urge you to check out the Hub. The Hub is Canada's fastest growing digital and news outlet. And like the Munk Debates, It's focused on those important conversations and bringing them to you in ways that are enlightening, enriching, and again, focused on civility above all. You can check out The Hub right now at triplew thehub.ca or open your favorite podcast app and type in The Hub Canada. You'll go to the Hub's channel and see all kinds of great interviews, roundtables, discussions with thought leaders from around the world. So, Monk Debate community, check out The Hub.

We think you'll like what you see, listen, read, and hear. Do that right now at triple-W thehub.ca. Now let's get back to our Monk Debates program. I want to talk to you more about what we saw in the streets of the United Kingdom, which was these large-scale riots and a particular government reaction to them, both a large-scale police response and judicial response, but also a response that extended into social media and saw a number of people arrested under new UK laws

related to so-called hate speech on the internet. Do you think this was a kind of watershed event? And if so, why? What are the dimensions of the moment that we've seen here in the United Kingdom over the last month. So before I answer the question, I just want to make two comments. And one is that I find the riots abhorrent. And I think it was wrong to riot.

I think it was wrong to incite violence by calling for mosques to be burned down with people in them or hotels with asylum seekers inside them. It was wrong to do these things. That was one comment. I wanted to make. The other comment I wanted to make is we really do not know yet what motivated the 17-year-old young man whose parents are originally from Rwanda, but who was born in Cardiff and who stabbed the three children and wounded many others. We don't know his motives yet. So I don't think any of us can conclude. We don't know why. We don't know what motivated him. I think

we have to await for that process to unfold. And then I think the bigger question is in the UK, and it's not just in the UK, it's also in other countries, but right now in the UK, for at least a decade and a half, British citizens, and particularly the white working class, were bearing the negative unintended consequences of immigration. And they were appealing to the political leaders to do something about it. But the numbers just keep going up and up and up. And I think not only that, but again, the negative unintended consequences of that, the clash of civilizations, the grooming gangs, the knife crime.

there was a lot of vandalism and a lot of problems with immigration that just were not addressed properly by the Tory governments. This other government was just, it was in for a couple of weeks before this thing occurred. And so I think in a way there was, you always need an incident to spark of kindling this tension between. different groups that was growing and growing and growing. I think the most sensible thing for the new government, the new Labour government, would have been to punish those who had actually, you know, broken windows, set things on fire, or committed acts of crime. But I think at the same time, Kiyos Dami should have brought,

who represents the white working class in Britain, and who represents the working class in Germany or in France? I don't know, but whoever represents those groups should have been brought around the table and say, we hear you, we take you seriously, we're going to do something about this problem, we beg for your patient and understanding, et cetera, et cetera. And that's what happened is the exact opposite that they were told, shove off, and I'm being polite. And then they were shoved into prison for words, for posting words,

words and images. And British prisons apparently are full because they hadn't been building many. And this administration, this new administration, has decided that they were going to empty the prison of violent offenders of all kinds. And they're going to put members of the people who protested to this incident in there. This is a fast-track justice and, you know, use censorship, use real authoritarianism

to show who is in charge and who's boss and to tell these white working class segments that they don't matter. And this, I don't know, I'm sure you've heard of this phrase, two-tier care, because at least since October 7, October 8, the streets of London and other large cities in the UK

witnessed so-called protest after protest after protest. They were called pro-Palestinian, but essentially they are pro-Hamas protests given the sorts of slogans that they shout about the elimination of Israel and the annihilation of Jews. And so these people were never stopped. They weren't justized, they weren't sanctioned,

they weren't told to be quiet. They were given full permission and license to protest, to stop traffic, to riot, to beat people up. And they got away with all of these things. I mean, just before the incident happened in Southport, there was an incident in Leeds. And perpetrators were Muslim immigrants in Manchester, the same thing. And all of those perpetrators are walking free. The laws weren't changed for them.

They aren't censored. In fact, on top of it, Kiyosama wants to introduce a law banning. Islamophobia. In other words, if you criticize anything that has to do with Muslim immigration, with violence against women, with the advance of Islamist ideas, anti-Semitism, religious, Islamist-driven anti-Semitism, if any of these things, you're going to be punished for Islamophobia. So I think it's insane. It's just going to drive the country into the ground. And is there a in a political prescription, a policy prescription for this situation that the UK finds itself in? And it's a situation that may well in a different version and permutation, let's hope not, but it might unravel after a close U.S. election come November.

What is the collective response that we should be taking towards these types of crises? Is it more free speech, more trust in effect in people's abilities to combine the faculties of reason with the exercise of liberty to create something better? Or is there an argument? Is there a case that we've kind of lost? some of our faculties to reason. We've lost some of our ability, collectively at least, to command our passions, to find our way through to something that's better

than these kinds of senseless riots and violence that we saw in the streets of the United Kingdom, and that people have long feared could come specifically to America and to American politics after a closely contested election. I think we need trust, we need freedom of speech and we need leadership. And I think maybe the biggest crisis we are facing is this avoid in leadership.

You have leaders of ideologies, leftist ideology and Islamist ideology and right-wing ideology. So we have these ideologues with the loudest voices, but we really need some, yeah, very, rational and grown-up leaders to stand up and mobilize the silent majority. And the silent majority, I think, wants to be taken seriously in the unintended, when it comes to the unintended consequences of globalization, the unintended consequences of immigration. You know, how do we cope? We can't take a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand depending on the country or a million or two million immigrants every single year from places where, you know, we just, we don't share any culture when you bring in large numbers of people who can't immediately be put to take part in the

economy. It's a strain on the welfare state. It's a strain on housing, on health care, on schools, and services and the poor people, the working class people, and increasingly the middle classes, they bear this burden. And instead of stifling them and instead of insulting them by calling them xenophiles and far rights and shutting them up and shutting them down, I think if we want stability back, if we want to get rid of this sense of crisis, then I think we have to sit down and listen to them and address those issues. I think also in some ways there is a moral vacuum to go back to the moral relativism.

We don't have a sense of shared morality anymore. And that has to be addressed as quickly as possible because if you have a moral breakdown and you have a social breakdown, people don't feel responsible for one another anymore. You know, if you hear a cry like bound them down in the mosque or burn them down in their side, that means they don't care about them as human beings anymore, right? And this is why censorship is bad, because you didn't know throughout that that sentiment was alive and growing. Where would that sentiment, how would you hear about it? How would it be channeled if you stifle it?

But now that we know how masses and masses of people feel across Europe and America about immigration, it's really time to act to, and I know we should never mention his word, but to stop things getting to what Anok Powell feared, the rivers of blood. I do come from Africa. It's a very bloody continent. And when tribes and different clans develop these sorts of sentiment to one, another, burn them or kill them, even the word them, then things get really out of hand. And there's nothing the states can do about it. Sometimes the state joins it. Sometimes the state

facilitates these things. And sometimes the state is a bystander. But I think we are dancing with the devil at the moment. Let's wrap up on an optimistic note. Your own story is a story of perseverance, of, you know, remarkable accomplishment, of focus and attention to a variety of important causes from women's rights to free expression to the value of education and scholarship. And you are, in sense, are an example of someone who's flourished in Western society, despite a lot of challenges that were thrown your way, including the very real risk of attacks on your life, on your person, on your family. So if you extrapolate from your story, what makes you fundamentally optimistic about the West and its potential?

Maybe we're not realizing that potential all the time, but it is there. You're, to me, an example of it. What does make you optimistic about our culture, about our society, about our civilization? So many things. If we want to see it and take it, I think the foundation and the moral foundations of the West are sound. I think the problem solving attitude that Westerners have, they can come together and say, we have a problem. Let's work together to solve it.

You saw it during the pandemic. I often see it in America during hurricanes and natural disasters. You know, you drop everything, you get together, you solve the problem. We also know that if we compare ourselves to the rest of the world, we are the least racist, the least discriminatory, prejudiced societies in the world. You know, as Americans, we're making these things up about race. We're not a racist country. It's just not true.

And I think we should stop believing in this nonsense and we should start highlighting it, highlighting what really makes us so, so great. We're generous societies. We're not anti-immigrants. We're just saying we have to be rational about how we do these things. You can't in the name of human rights and compassion say, let's open the borders,

while at the same time you have communities within America, that are saying we are crime-ridden, we are hungry, we don't have access to. So you've got to balance these things. And yes, it is citizens first. You know, these are nation states and these citizens have been, they invested in the system. They've been paying taxes into it. It's okay to have a number that is good with them to come in a number of people that you think will thrive here.

I'm a very grateful immigrant. I've been given the opportunity to find for myself, to fend for myself in the West. And I see it as part of my responsibility to say, we should not be making the sorts of mistakes that we're making now. Ideologies, I think this attraction right now of being drawn to the tribal impulse, I think we can as Westerners. We can come out of it just simply by showing in Western history itself, sectarianism, tribalism, the events of the Second World War, the events of the Cold War, but also events of the 19th, the 18th and all of those centuries, the West has its own richer history where it

knows if you indulge these sorts of forces of absolutism, it always leads to bloodshed and destruction, and it's easier to break things. But I think the most optimistic thing about the West is the West is really good at building things, building bridges, building, and not just building, but also preserving those values and those frameworks that really lead to prosperity. People complain about capitalism, but capitalism is of all the different isms. It's the best philosophy for creating things of value. and sometimes there are excesses to capitalism, but we also know how to deal with those excesses. And so I think it's just a question of, it's a question of leadership.

I keep going back to that again and again. I and this has been such a wonderful conversation. We did exactly what I hoped, which was that incredible journey, that tour of political, social, cultural movements, change, debate, crisis that's unfolding from the United States to Europe, to the United Kingdom, it's always such a privilege to have the opportunity to speak with you on the mug dialogues. I know our audience greatly appreciates your time, your wisdom, and your analysis. So thank you so much for coming on the program today. Thank you very much for having you. Well, that wraps up today's dialogue. I want to thank our guest, Ian Hershey-A-L-A. She

certainly gave us a lot to think about. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard on this or any of our podcast, please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. Thank you for lending your time and attention to our efforts to bring back the art of civil and substantive dialogue, one conversation at a time. I'm your hosted moderator, Redyard Griffiths. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk charitable foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating.

Thank you again for listening.