... How I wish that CORE's Martin Luther King Jr. dinner at the Hilton last week could have been televised nationally. I stood up and cheered (and believe me, that wasn't easy) after listening to honoree Ayaan Hirsi Ali's speech. This beautiful Somali woman suffered genital mutilation at age 5, fled from to the Netherlands to avoid an arranged marriage, educated herself, and became a member of the Dutch Parliament. She is now living in America, and she gave a perfect wakeup call on our endangered culture.A few highlights of her speech follow: "Sixty years ago it was the Nazis in Europe who were bent on exterminating in the name of racial purity. Today it is a global network of radical Muslims who call for a holocaust in the name of their faith"; "Human beings are equal; cultures are not"; "A culture that spends millions on saving a baby girl's life is not equal to one that uses its first encounter with natal technology to undertake mass abortion simply because girls are not welcome."
Ms. Ali made several comparisons between America's culture, which respects the rights of women, and the one from which she escaped. She was raised in parts of Africa — Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya — which were independent. The white man had exited, but she claims he did not take oppression with him, saying: "Almost all the bigotry and persecution in Africa nowadays is committed by blacks against other blacks." Speaking from experience, she listed acts such as mutilation, beatings, rape, and murder that were "committed against girls and women in the most intimate setting of all, the home, by dad or mom, by a brother or a sister, by a husband or his mother."
Ms. Ali has dubbed our benign culture as "ladies first," because she had never heard those words until she came to a Western nation. She warns, however, that it is "this culture that is under threat today. Many of those born into it take it for granted or, worse, apologize for it."
Immigrants are not storming to get into Mexico or any Muslim country. They are seeking what was built by our "freedom for all" culture. Yet we are bending over backward to accommodate different cultures and making sure that others are not offended by all things Americana. This is not only irrational, it's suicidal.