Will Someone Please Close the Door?

Suppose you buy a nice condo, and a terrorist magnet moves in next door? Even worse, the government places her next to you because you live in a secure, gated community. Do you have any recourse to this? Does the safety of your family or value of your property make you think about this, or do you accept the risk based on a strong, principled stand?

I found the immigration story of Ayaan Hirsi Ali compelling because even as a recepient of the generous immigration policy of the Netherlands, she supports limiting free immigration.

After becoming controversial in Holland, she had her citizenship revoked (maybe temporarily) and was offered a job with the American Enterprise Institute in DC. So I expect that we’ll be hearing more from her from the conservative forums of the US.

There were favorable stories in the WSJ and Salon demonstrating her wide appeal among both the liberals and conservatives, but fundamentally for the sake of discussion:

• She lied about her asylum application in matters related to age, name, and cause and cherry picked the country of asylum.
• She benefited from the Dutch immigration policies to the tune of citizeship, social entitlements and a graduate degree in political science.
• She served on a liberal think tank while focusing on human rights and women’s issues, and switched to conservatives when they offered her a position in the legislature while in her 30s. Now her positions are anti-immigration focused on opposition to Islamic culture.
• She wrote and narrated “Submission“, a short film on Islam and Women that got Theo van Gogh dead. Most dutch consider her too confrontational, strident and incompatible with their cultural values. Her atheist views presented as anti-Islamic decumentaries and essays have inflamed the Islamic contingent across Europe.
• Earlier this month, she joined Vice President Dick Cheney and others in Philadelphia to honor Bernard Lewis, the British-born scholar who coined the phrase “clash of civilizations” and helped shape White House thinking about the Middle East after 9/11. She also spoke at Harvard University and the New York Public Library. Apparently we need more people to clearly define the conservatives from the liberals.

I expect her to become a staple in the conservative movement to protect America from other cultures and other brown people unless she implodes in the near future.

You wouldn’t mind if she moved in next door, would you?