Freedom and the Netherlands
I don't know how many of you are familiar with the absolutely appalling case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
The always-reliable Christopher Hitchens has the best take on the issue, but let me provide some brief perspective here before launching into the discussion.
Ali was born in Somalia, she left that war-torn country and her family and came to the Netherlands. Part of the reason she left - and her subsequent motivation for getting involved in Dutch politics - was the rise of Islamic religious extremism in Africa.
Here's where the truly sad part comes in: upon arriving in Europe, she came to discover that Islamic religious extremism had begun to take root there as well. She was threatened by vile thugs for daring to support the fundamental dignity of women!
She was placed under protection in the Netherlands, but it gets worse: the people who lived in her building sued because they felt they were being endangered by her very presence. For anyone interested, Volokh has the translated court documents.
Now, we've had some good discussion on sex/gender and some good discussions on religion and its proper role in a polity. To my view, this topic combines them both very nicely. So I ask the group: having read those two articles, do you feel that minority religious communities should have separate laws and ethics within a country? If so, to what extent? Should majority religious communities?
Put more simply: is it fair to say "oh, that's just their culture" when a religious community different from ours does something that we would never tolerate in our own? Is the lesson of the Netherlands a lesson in successful multi-culturalism, or a warning sign to the majority's beliefs?
posted by Joshua @ 12:49 PM
5 Comments:
In my opinion, the law of a society should be about as liberal as it's most liberal faith, if not more so, while legislating the tenets of none. Allow people the restrictions of their religions, if they so choose to partake in them, but also protect their freedom not to. This seems pretty basic to me.
Well we really have no power (or shouldn't have power) to regulate the morals or ethics of any society within a country. I could be wrong, but a lot the actions of the fundamentalists that were described would be illegal in The Netherlands, if not elsewhere - female circumcism, stalking and intimidation, beatings, etc. Therefore, it doesn't matter what your religion is, you have to follow the laws of your adopted country. What the Dutch (and other countries) need to do is stop letting these societies wall themselves off and start having police patrolling that area. There was some line in the article about how the police won't even go into those neighborhoods because they've basically written them off and left them to the fundamentalists to police themselves. Stopping that practice alone would help cut down on atrocities happening within their borders.
For anyone interested, Volokh is talking about the people who tried to evict Ali from her apartment.
Seriously, these people don't even want this woman to live next to them. And we expect them to go the next step and go into hostile fundamentalist communities with the police?
Well.... no. I wasn't saying average citizens should start patrolling those neighborhoods, I was saying the Police should get up off their asses and do it. Muslim fundamentalists anywhere will feel like they have to right to live as if they were still in the home country as long as the citizens of their new country abandon them and let them do that - were there a police and social services presence in these neighborhoods, this kind of behavior wouldn't happen as often. I wasn't saying that the scared, selfish neighbors of Ali should go into fundamentalist neighborhoods and have a bake sale. Than again....
Never mind the bake sale: they're trying to kick Ali out of the country.
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