Brandeis’s Bogey(wo)man

A quick thought on a story that is likely to get some attention over the next few days: Brandeis University’s decision not to give Ayaan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree showcases a fascinating tension present in modern liberalism.

Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born apostate from Islam. She fled an arranged marriage in 1992 by escaping to the Netherlands, where she then served as a member of the Dutch parliament. Following the September 11 attacks, she became an outspoken critic of Islam, and it was student complaints about those remarks (“outright Islamophobic,” one student charged) that prompted Brandeis’s policy change.

Here is where it gets interesting: Hirsi Ali is also one of the foremost advocates for women’s rights in the Middle East. In 2004 she released, together with director Theo van Gogh, the short film Submission, a documentary about the oppression of women in certain Islamic societies. The film resulted in van Gogh being assassinated by an Islamic extremist, who pinned a note to his chest threatening Hirsi Ali. So Hirsi Ali came to America, where she founded the AHA Foundation, which

works to protect and reinforce the basic rights and freedoms of women and girls, including security and control of their own bodies, access to an education, the ability to work outside the home and control their own income, freedom of expression and association, and the myriad other basic civil rights defined under the laws of Western democracies and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Opposing forced marriages and genital mutilation seems like a generally agreeable position. But liberalism’s obsessive prostration to various interests creates amusing situations when these interests collide. One wonders what Brandeis would have done had the university’s women’s rights advocates come out to protest the Muslim students group. When two “politically correct” interests collide, who wins?

Liberalism has no guiding principle for these conflicts—none, that is, except convenience, toward the larger interest of power. That ruthlessness can offer an advantage against conservatives, who believe themselves tasked with obeying certain overarching dictates. Then again, when that same ruthlessness is turned against itself, the intellectual vapidity of modern liberalism is put on full display.