Geoge Will casts some verbal gems in his column today centering on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch politician who has immigrated to the United States.
- Holland evidently tolerates everything except skepticism about the sacramental nature of multiculturalism
- But the recoil of many Dutch people from Hirsi Ali suggests that the tolerance about which Holland preens is a compound of intellectual sloth and moral timidity. She was more trouble than the Dutch evidently think free speech is worth.
- Neither is she pessimistic about the West. It has, she says, "the drive to innovate." But Europe, she thinks, is invertebrate. After two generations without war, Europeans "have no idea what an enemy is." And they think, she says, that leadership is an antiquated notion because they believe that caring governments can socialize everyone to behave well, thereby erasing personal accountability and responsibility. "I can't even tell it without laughing," she says, laughing softly. Clearly she is where she belongs, at last.