On 2 November 2004 a film director was shot dead in the open street in Amsterdam while he was cycling to work.
The man who shot him, a young Dutch-Moroccan Islamist, then cut his throat and drove a knife through his chest. Yes. Also in the open street. Pinned to the knife was a letter. The letter was not to the director. It was to the woman he had made his latest film with - an eleven-minute film about violence against women in the name of Islam.
It was called Submission.
As in Submission.
The same thing the word Islam means.
Her name is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Born in Somalia, raised in Islam, fled a forced marriage to Holland, elected to parliament. Since that day in 2004 she has lived with bodyguards. That is her you can see and hear in the video, twenty-two years later, on a stage in Geneva, where she has just received a prize for "moral courage".
A prize rightly given to her - one of the Western world's few remaining real heroines.
When you watch the video, I want you to notice the following - because she does not say it, and you cannot work it out from the video.
What she says in Geneva in 2026 and gets a prize for is the same thing she said in The Hague in 2004. Back then the word was that she exaggerated. That she was traumatised and generalising from her own childhood. That she was an Islamophobe, that she was dangerous, that she was playing into the hands of the right. Holland's biggest newspaper and half of her own party found explanations for why there was no need to listen. And in the twenty-two years since, during which nobody listened, the thing she pointed at grew exactly as she said it would. Not with violence. But with patience. Through the institutions, as she says in the clip, slowly and beneath the surface, with the battle plan she lays out, which everyone has been able to read up on for years, if they could be bothered.
But reading is not all that fashionable, apparently. Least of all among journalists. But then what does Truth matter anyway. Well, that is a side track.
What I want to show you is that it is not her who has moved. It is the distance between what one was allowed to say and what was true that has grown so large that even Geneva can see it now.
And then she points to the thing that hurts.
Israel, she says, understood in the nineties that the "right of return" was not a question of justice but of the arithmetic afterwards. Had they said yes and held a vote, the country would have voted itself out of existence. So they said no, and took the abuse, and therefore exist today.
Hold that up against us.
We have not said no to anything. Nor have we said yes. We have done what is worse than both - we have stuck our heads in the sand like an ostrich and left the question unasked, for forty years, while the answer moved in. And we have not needed to guess what the answer would vote for, because it is written in a letter from Mohamed Kahn to the Danes, which you probably read last week - when the Muslims are numerous enough, sharia will be introduced by democratic means.
That is not an accusation on my part. I can even understand it, for that matter. And acknowledge it. That is how the world works. So it is what it is. It is a roadmap, written by someone who is looking forward to it.
Israel was asked to vote itself away and said no. Denmark is not being asked anything. That is the difference, and it is the whole difference.
But she does not end there, and that is why I chose this particular clip. She ends by saying that the West is not lacking anything. We have the people, we have the means, and we have, as she says in English, "the greatest story ever told".
We see the same thing, she and I.
Everyone in the hall knows what that is the title of. It is the story of Jesus. She who grew up in Islam, was an atheist for twenty years and became a Christian three years ago, says from a stage in Geneva that what the West must take itself back with is not the institutions, not legislation, not a new strategy, but the story we put away in the drawer because we thought we had outgrown it.
That is what I write about. Every week. That is what someone like me is not really supposed to say. White. Male. Middle-aged. Well-groomed. And with surplus on every axis.
So if you cannot hear me. Then hear her.
And then notice how long it took before anyone did.
Good evening, friends ❤️🔥🪽
