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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column about the Dutch-Somali politician and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, best known for her outspoken defense of the rights of Muslim women. Among other things, I noted that the Dutch parliament was about to vote on whether to extend a promise some of its members made in 2002: to pay the bills for Hirsi Ali's personal security, which are hefty. (To repeat: In 2004, Theo Van Gogh, co-director of a film she and he made about women in Islam—titled Submission—was murdered by a fanatic. The murderer pinned a death threat to Van Gogh's chest, claiming Hirsi Ali would be the next victim. After being in hiding for some time, Hirsi Ali eventually moved to the United States, since Holland had become a far too dangerous place for her to live. Nevertheless, she remains a Dutch citizen, endangered by the peculiarites of the Dutch political situation, largely threatened by fanatics resident in Holland.)
In response to this piece of writing, I received an astonishing quantity of email, mostly from Holland. Some claimed that Hirsi Ali is rich, now that she's written a best-selling memoir, and can pay for her own security (not true); some said they felt embarrassed that their government was reneging on its promise; some complained about my use of the word "Holland" to describe a country called "the Netherlands" (to which the only answer is that we don't complain when the French call our country "Les Etats-Unis"); some wanted to know what they could do to help. None of it mattered much, because the Dutch parliament voted "No," and now Hirsi Ali, possibly the greatest women's rights activist of our generation, is fund raising. She is being helped by a variety of sources at the moment, including some bits of the U.S. government, some American sympathizers, and others. But we all hope she will live to an extremely old age; and security is expensive. So for those who wrote and asked how to contribute, here is the information, directly from her office:
The preferred and most immediate way to assist Ms. Hirsi Ali in the financing of her private security protection is through the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Security Trust. This private trust fund can accept non-tax deductible donations from within the United States and internationally, and is entirely dedicated to financing Ms. Hirsi Ali's security.
Checks should be made payable to the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Security Trust and sent to:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali Security Trust, Bank of Georgetown, 1054 31st Street, N.W. Suite 18, Washington, DC 20007. Ayaan Hirsi Ali Trust Tax Identification Number: 75-6826872
For more information please contact: John Matteo (jmatteo@jackscamp.com) or
Mackenzie McNaughton (mmcnaughton@jackscamp.com), representatives for Ms. Hirsi Ali.
I hope that answers that question.
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If we need any reminder that it's not easy to be the first popular female candidate for the American presidency, it arrived Monday in the form of an announcement by the AP that Hillary Clinton was leading in yet another poll. This one? The candidate likely to make the "scariest" Halloween costume. Some 37% of the respondents to the survey chose Hillary as their front-runner. (Giuliani was second, with 14%. More key details here.)
The fright-mask news arrives roughly a month after it was announced that Clinton had led in a Pew poll asking respondents about the relative "toughness" of the various candidates: In it, some 67% of Democratic-leaning voters said that Hillary was the first candidate who came to mind when they heard the word "tough." By comparison, only 39% of Republican-leaning voters thought of Giuliani when they heard the word "tough." (Yet he was considered the "toughest" Republican candidate.) All this might seem to be good news for Clinton: after all, over the past year, she has labored hard to burnish her "tough" persona, so as to stave off the perception that a woman--and a Democrat, to boot!--would prove soft on matters of foreign policy. It'd be easy to think that it had finally paid off.
But I've been wondering all this time whether a "tough" backlash was on its way (maybe just because I've been reading Susan Faludi's flawed but sometimes piercingly insightful The Terror Dream). And just last Friday a crucial American institution paved the way for said backlash. In a segment entitled, "Is it OK for women to cry" -- pegged to Ellen DeGeneres' on-air breakdown--the Today Show broadcast images of Clinton giving a speech and shaking hands and confidently pronounced that many people think "that she is too stoic, that she doesn't reveal enough of herself"--on its way to elaborating on the communicative benefits of crying in public. If media coverage of the last election was filled with accusations about girlie-men, will this one be full of talk about manly-girls? Let's hope not. In the meantime, here's an article that briefly discusses the latter group (scroll down); apparently we see them as "pretenders." Sound like a familiar critique of Clinton?
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Hillary jumps the same way as Obama:
"I am deeply troubled by Judge Mukasey’s continued unwillingness to clearly state his views on torture and unchecked Executive power.
The Attorney General is the chief defender of the rule of law in our country. After Alberto Gonzales's troubled tenure, we cannot send a signal that the next Attorney General in any way condones torture or believes that the President is unconstrained by law. When we leave any doubt about our nation’s policy on torture, we send a terrible message to the rest of the world. Judge Mukasey has been given ample opportunity – both at his confirmation hearings and in his subsequent submission to the Judiciary Committee – to clarify his answers and categorically oppose the unacceptable interrogation techniques employed by this Administration. His failure to do so leaves me no choice but to oppose his nomination."
Meanwhile, the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee await Mukasey's answers to the questions they've asked him.
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OK, XX Team, most of you are solid supporters of choice, so please help me out here. After my piece on Michelle and Barack Obama’s marriage ran yesterday, a lot of the reaction I saw on the Web boiled down to: I’m not interested in anything that woman might write, because I disagree with her on abortion. Even though the Obama piece contained not a word on that subject; why would it? And even though my actual views in that regard are somewhat less thrilling than advertised. My question: Has it really come to the point that we only listen to people pre-certified as in agreement with us on all crucial matters? And if so, what does that cost us?
For months, I’ve been in John Kerry mode, thinking that nothing could possibly be gained by answering people who are too mad to listen. (Who, me, thin-skinned? Let it go.) But is this What Hillary Would Do? Think again, caballeras.
So, belatedly: Contrary to the provocative headline on my mild but reviled June op-ed in the New York Times, I never posited that “Pro-Choice is a Bad Choice for Democrats.’’ In fact, on the sheer politics of the abortion issue, I’ve said just the opposite.
What the piece argued instead is that pro-choice should not be the only choice for Democrats in good standing. And that Democrats are losing voters they don’t have to lose by out-and-out insulting any who dare differ on this one matter.
These are not classic single-issue voters, in other words, but otherwise liberal pro-lifers who just want to be able to attend a party function without hearing themselves described as extremists. But even the modest proposal that we make more room at the table was shouted down, perhaps in part because so few readers were in possession of their temper by the time they’d finished scanning the headline.
The fact that the paper’s normally judicious headline writers – not exactly grab-the-reader-by-the-lapel types, in my experience – saw an argument for self-interested tolerance as indistinguishable from a call to overturn Roe was only one indication that when it comes to this subject, subtlety is out of the question, and middle ground very hard to stand on.
When some of the women I interviewed for my book about what women want in a president first spoke about feeling unwanted in the Democratic Party as dissenters on abortion rights, I thought that was interesting, but not something I had ever experienced personally.
The over-the-top reaction to the op-ed changed that, though; Google me now and you’ll come away convinced that I spend off-hours throwing rocks at pregnant teenagers. Though none of my critics on either side – the National Right to Life took exception, too – seemed to have gone to the extreme of cracking open the book the op-ed was based on, its pages are actually filled with women expressing all points of view. (Because, perhaps poignantly, the object was never to come up with six easy ways to win the women’s vote; it was to help us understand one another a little better, and maybe even see that, as Barack Obama says, there really is more that unites us than divides us. Or so I’d like to think.)
Among those I met along the way were opponents of choice who said they’d never be happy Republicans, but found it hard to stick around and subject themselves to abuse from fellow Democrats. And in my new life as an abortion concern troll, I now know what they were talking about.
Yes, I am Catholic, and try to hang in there with my church – except when I don’t. Or won’t. So I happen to oppose abortion, same as I do the death penalty and the war in Iraq and the truly immoral disregard for the already born. (And while we’re obsessing over Roe, isn’t the Supreme Court busy overturning everything else we thought was nailed down?) After 35 years at the barricades, it’s clear that this is an issue that will never be solved by either the Congress or the courts. Or that most politicians even want to be shed of, since it has been so darned good for business in both parties.
I sympathize with those on both sides of this debate, and rue that we are so busy doubting each other’s motives and calling each other names that the mothers and children we all say we care about end up quite beside the point.
As far as I can see, the only actual result of the whole baby-killers-versus-women-haters craziness is that it keeps those who genuinely fear for the health and safety of women and those who genuinely see “termination’’ as an Orwellian name for a thrown-away child -- considered less than human just as slaves once were -- from ever working together to help anybody, other than those who raise cash whenever we clash.
Which is why I have long since had it with the leaders on both sides of this electric fence; they carry right on fighting and raising vast sums on the backs of women in trouble, while the abortion rate remains ridiculously high – whether you see it this way or this.
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In a press release today, Obama said of Mukasey: “While his legal credentials are strong, his views on two critical and related matters are, in my view, disqualifying. We don't need another attorney general who believes that the President enjoys an unwritten right to secretly ignore any law or abridge our constitutional freedoms simply by invoking national security. And we don't need another attorney general who looks the other way on issues as profound as torture. Judge Mukasey's professed ignorance of the debate over the propriety of practices like “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning, as a means of interrogation, was appalling."
Now what? Do other Democrats--among them Hillary Clinton--jump the same way? Or do they (ie some of the senators on the Judiciary Committee) keep trying to look like they're pressing Mukasey while planning to wave him through?