Ayaan Hirsi AliMike Rappaport

Tom recommends this column on  Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  I knew I liked her before, but this is really good:

Slender, elegant, stylish and articulate (in English, Dutch andSwahili), she has found an intellectual home here at the AmericanEnterprise Institute, where she is writing a book that imaginesMuhammad meeting, in the New York Public Library, three thinkers –John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper, each a hero of theunending struggle between (to take the title of Popper’s 1945masterpiece) “The Open Society and Its Enemies.” Islamic extremists –the sort who were unhinged by some Danish cartoons — will be enraged.She is unperturbed.

Neither is she pessimistic about the West. It has, she says, “thedrive to innovate.” But Europe, she thinks, is invertebrate. After twogenerations without war, Europeans “have no idea what an enemy is.”And they think, she says, that leadership is an antiquated notionbecause they believe that caring governments can socialize everyone tobehave well, thereby erasing personal accountability andresponsibility. “I can’t even tell it without laughing,” she says,laughing softly. Clearly she is where she belongs, at last.