Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Appearances
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Yeah, I don't know if I would call it disagreement. I would say a different perspective, because obviously my background, I grew up a Muslim. I lived in Muslim countries and I come at the problem differently. So in just right about that time, say my name to fame in 2003, 2004, or infamy, depending on who you speak to.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
is the publicizing of abuse against Muslim women by Muslim men, women who are subjected to honor killings, honor violence, they're locked up in their homes, they're forced into marriage, they're taken from the country and they're taken to the country of origin and they're forced to marry people they don't want to. They're beaten up, they're murdered.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
I remember from a well-known Dutch publicist who was, at one point, he sat me down and he said, you are trying to draw attention to abuse against Muslim women. Let me tell you about the middle classes in Europe. They're indifferent. And I remember asking him and saying, they're indifferent to the abuse of Muslim women, but will they be indifferent if European women are abused?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And he said, no, if it is a blonde girl, on national television, and she's been sexually abused by one of these, there'll be huge outrage. The feminists will not stand for it. Unfortunately, fast forward to 2013, 14. At that time, I don't live in Europe anymore. I live in America. I'm an American citizen.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And all the anecdotes I'm hearing from Europe are about these grooming gangs in Britain, a similar phenomenon in Holland. young men chasing women, raping them, men from Afghanistan especially, lots and lots of these brazen rapes that are occurring in Germany, in Austria.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And so that for me is the reason to challenge the publicist statement about if it's about white European women, there will be universal outrage against this. And I started diving into the subject and that's how Prey came about. And what I discover unfortunately is that
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Exactly here I agree with Julie, that what the British have come to call grooming gangs, that is the systematic sexual abuse of white working class girls and women by men, mostly Muslim, was dismissed as their slags. I've heard the phrase white trash over and over again, and so there's a class element to this.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
But what I found in a chapter in Prey, I called it the playbook of denial, was the same reasoning that was applied to look away from the abuse of Muslim women was also applied to the abuse against now these white girls, not just by men in power, but by feminists, mostly by feminists. And what I found was what I would call layers of fear. It was almost like the mafia in the 1980s.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Anybody who knows the story of the mafia, they know that different groups of people in society were afraid for different reasons. And during this period, I remember there's nothing I could say because sometimes I would talk to government officials in different countries and they would say, don't quote me. I would ask, can you give me the statistic in your country?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Now, in Britain or in Sweden, I talked to Germans, France, and they would say, no, we don't collect statistics. on the basis of religion, then I would just ask a simple straightforward question and say, what about sexual violence committed by foreign born or the children of foreign born men against women? I didn't even say against white women or black women, just women.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Now, that stat was presented to me in different countries in different ways. One of them was, we have the stat, but we can't publish it. Another one said, I can give it to you, but you can't cite me, which makes my book useless. So at some point, I resorted to just giving anecdotal accounts of these women and what was happening to them in every single country.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Now, I really want to emphasize this. It's not a disagreement. I think it's very important to get all of these perspectives on the table to get a full picture. I'm coming at this by saying it's very important to understand not just why social workers were silent, why the police were silent, why politicians are silent.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
We're going to uncover all of that, and it's very, very important that we uncover that. But let's also do the other side. Why is it that these men are committing these crimes in this way? What is wrong with the families and the wider community of these men? Why do they tolerate it against their own women and then against women that they don't think of as their women?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And we have to answer that question. And once you go down that path, then you open the door to the issues of immigration, the failure of integration, the role of Islam in this. And the one key question that Europeans simply don't want to talk about, which is that what do we do about it?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Because this is going to involve the mass deportation of large numbers of people who are here, some of them who are also born here. If you go through the inventory of fears, I think the biggest fear is what do we do then?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
I really want to interrupt. Go ahead, Ayaan. I think that it's true that a large number of the British public didn't want to know and turned away. But here's where I want to bring in the story of Tommy Robinson.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Yeah, and he did before anyone else because it was happening in his neighborhoods. He's born in Luton. He's working class. And his cousin was raped by a grooming gang. And he brought this to the attention of the British people over and over again. That man is in prison.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And forgive me if I say, if you look at this particular topic, he has done more than any feminist in history to bring this to light. He is in prison. There are British people who want to know it and other Europeans, but once they know it and once they have the courage to publicize it, what happens to them is this punishment by the media that vilify them.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
by the police that arrest them, by the courts that charge them with contempt of court. This is, I think, it is this suicidal. I don't know what to describe it as. If Tommy Robinson were an American citizen, we would have a statue of him. He would be a hero. He would be getting the Medal of Freedom. The guy is in prison. And I think that that is one of the things is, why is that, Julie?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Why is it that the British members of the public who want to know it, who publicize it, who risk their lives doing it, they are the ones who are thrown in prison? There are examples, Barry, in the piece by Dominic Green that you published of the girl who they put a nail through her tongue, the grueling story that you just described of death.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Some of these victims are the ones who get arrested by the police. They're the ones who get punished. And that is something I think that we cannot easily bypass by saying these men are not monsters. Not all Muslim men are monsters, but the men who are doing this are monsters. And they invoke a culture and a religion that is monstrous. And it is high time that we say things as they are.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
That's exactly who I mean. And they're also the ones who shut us up. They're the ones who shut you up. They're the ones who shut me up.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Barry, it is true. It is fear. And there are different layers of fear. And I'm glad that you brought in the MP. There is the naked threat of if you do anything about this issue, we will come and rape you, burn you, kill you. And these people, they do act on these threats. I've been living with protection for a very long time. I know exactly what I'm talking about.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And so the threat from, whether it is Islamist driven or tribal driven or whatever it is, but from the immigrant Muslim men and their families, that is absolutely key. There's another layer of fear, which is more sinister, which is that some of the politicians have come to depend on the vote of those immigrants.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And so the working classes, the white working classes, numerically are no longer important to them. They don't serve them. They don't serve the Jewish minorities. I've been told over and over again, Jewish minorities in Europe are numerically insignificant.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
So if you want to keep their vote, and this is the Labour Party in Britain, and not just the Labour Party, even for the Tory party, if they wanted voters from those constituencies, then they had to look away from these problems. And this applies to different countries. There is that fear as well.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And then there are different layers of fears, not just the threat of physical abuse and murder and all of this, but some people, and this is why an inquiry is absolutely necessary. Some people have taken money or they've taken sexual favors or they're in some other way compromised. And so you have different people who are afraid for different reasons.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And then, of course, there is this giant, and you're very familiar with this more than I am, Barry, the progressive media on the other side of the Atlantic in Europe is committed to this model of diversity, of bringing in more immigration. That's just an ideological thing. And so the media itself, the BBC in the UK, Sky News, Channel 4,
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
the national newspapers, many of them are also, there's this conspiracy, ideological conspiracy, to look away from these problems. And they have their own reasons and their own fears. And I think all of that, that whole box has to be opened.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
So if you go back a little bit in time, in the early 2000s, late 1990s, there were very hot debates and discussions on what sort of societies we are now in Europe. I lived in the Netherlands at the time, but the discussion was going on all over Europe. And what we had was this classical model where the system of law looks at individuals and all individuals were equal before the law.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
So if you are a perpetrator of any crime, you would be treated absolutely like everyone else. But then we had this Muslim minority that we were trying to assimilate or coexist with or accommodate, whatever it was. And there was a whole school of thought, I think a lot of them came from America, who were pushing this multiculturalist model.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
So when you say community relations, that is one of the centerpieces of multiculturalism, which is instead of being this, you know, Western society, which was racist, Eurocentric, oppressed, there's a whole criticism of that. The multicultural model says minorities are going to be given exceptions and exemptions.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And that is one way of not, we don't like using the word assimilate, but it was integrating them into society. And so this model is now bankrupt. This model has given us these grooming gangs. This model has given us all sorts of crimes. This model has failed.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Now, at certain times, for instance, Angela Merkel in 2015, 2016, after that, there was this mass rape where immigrant men had started groping and harassing German women. She came out and said multiculturalism had failed. A little before or after that, David Cameron, who was then prime minister in Britain, also came out and said multiculturalism had failed.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And even though these leaders took this position, multiculturalism isn't going to work, they did zero, nothing about the policies in place. So the community relations, the community policing, giving responsibilities, two members within those ethnic communities who were not qualified to do it. In America, you would call this diversity, equity, and inclusion. All of these things happened.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And so the police who are covering were not even allowed to tell you who their ethnicity is. We're not allowed to tell you who the lawyers are who are covering up for this. I would ask the question within the old system, let's open the whole can of worms open, and then you're going to discover who exactly was where, when, and did what.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And a lot of this covering up is part of it is ideological because we are committed to the model of multiculturalism. That is what we invested in. That's where we poured a lot of taxpayer money into. And when you pull away from that, what are you going to get? And then part of it is the corruption.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
It's a model, community relations is a model that has corrupted the system of social work, of police work, of the relationship between politicians and these communities. You can just now go to a so-called community leader and get a heap of votes instead of going there and making your case. So the system is corrupted in so many different ways and that has to be opened up.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And that is going to lead to the abandoning, not just of multiculturalism in name, but the multiculturalist policies. And again, that is going to take us to, if we have, hypothetically speaking, about one million people in Britain who are incriminated in this grooming gangs scandal alone, what are we going to do with those men?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And then I've started to talk about deportations and things like that. And that is the one thing I have discovered in every single European country. That is the one thing you can't talk about. Up until this year, and Keir Starmer, who is the current prime minister, he's only been prime minister for six months, spoke about it first.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
He became honest about the sheer number of people from those countries that came in in 2020, 21, 22, in the last five years. And he put the blame on the Tories. So the borders are still wide open. The numbers are still coming in and the problems are building up.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
No, I'm infinitely grateful to Elon Musk. All of us right now, I mean, every single person, as Julie just described, every single person who tried to bring these issues to the attention of the people who can actually do something about it, they've been silenced. They've been locked up. They've been ignored. They've been vilified. They've been bankrupted. They can't do any of that to Elon Musk.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And so for me, I'm so grateful to Elon Musk. He's using his superpowers to say, I am going to give a voice to the voiceless. And he's just one in multi-generation human being. I mean, he's my hero. He's amazing. And I hope that he continues. I hope he follows through to the bottom. I hope he gets to the bottom of this. And that he stays through for the whole thing.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Okay, now I'm full of disagreements on all of this. I do not think that Elon Musk is a repellent man. I think he is a genius and I think he's one of the best human beings alive. I think, Julie, I disagree with, yes, in Britain and in the rest of the world, in the Western world, There were sexual crimes against children and against women. But what you are looking at now is very different.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And immigration is front and center of this problem. And I think we can't resolve this without looking at it. And frankly, I think we do have to retire the word racist or racism because it's used in the most dishonest way to shut up discussions like this and to silence people.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
So if we really care about these girls and we want these problems to be resolved, bye bye to words like racism and phrases like far right. And Elon Musk deserves every woman's gratitude for what he's doing now.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
They adopted the multicultural model, so they have a two-tier cultural system. That's a matter of policy. That's a logical outcome of the multiculturalist model. You have minorities are treated differently from majorities. It's the logic of the system. So yes, he's absolutely right. And it's not just in Britain. It's everywhere where the multicultural model applies.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
It's in Germany, it's in France, it's in Sweden. The only countries that resisted are countries like Denmark and Switzerland.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
I don't know about Keir Starmer when he was a prosecutor and his relationship with these cases. If I were Keir Starmer, I would want an inquiry if I knew that I was on the right side of things. And one reason that I suspect he's resisting the inquiry, I think for me is political. There might be other reasons, but that is for the British people to look into. He's only been in politics.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
He's only been in office. So he's been in politics for a long time. He's only been in office for six months. Normally, I've been a politician myself. When a major story like this bursts into the light, if you've been in office only for six months, you would embrace an inquiry because you would say, these people have been in office for the last 15 years.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
You put all the shame and blame, you put it on the Tories. That's a great opportunity that you have. And so it's baffling to me, you know, based on my knowledge of how politics works, why or not is he resisting an inquiry? This should be too. And the person who's calling for the inquiry is from the party who was in office for the last decade and a half. So that doesn't make sense.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And so why is he resisting an inquiry? And so I have to speculate and analyze and think he is resisting an inquiry because he his party depends on the Muslim vote. It's a large number of the people in Birmingham, in Leeds, all of these constituents who put him in office, these are the Muslims that put him in office, and these are the people, it's the communities that harbor the grooming gangs.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And so in that sense, he's compromised. It's the same with, I would say, the mayor of London. I don't think the mayor of London is an Islamist, but I think he depends on the votes of the Islamists. And so when these issues come up, why are you suppressing an inquiry into the grooming gangs, or why are you tolerating the blatant anti-Semitism on the streets?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
I think with these politicians, the first thing that comes to their minds is the votes. Let's protect the votes.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
So again, from purely political calculation parts, in 2019, Boris Johnson won what was called the Red Wall. People who live in these ,, the white working classes, it is their communities that have been basically displaced and challenged by the negative consequences of immigration.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Boris Johnson went out of office not because of policies, but because of it's, I'm trying to talk to an American audience and say, they were talking about cake. I mean, I don't know, but it was this most juvenile of all cabinets I've ever seen. They were backstabbing one another. There was a lot of incompetence and ineptitude that was going on there.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
But I think in these last five years, from 2019 to now, The Tories did not stand up to the things that they promised the working classes. They said that they were going to reduce the number of immigrants. Immigration went up. They didn't do anything about assimilation. They didn't do anything about crime. It's on their watch that crime went up.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
So all I can say is that they've been punished at the ballot box. Now they have a new leader, and the new leader, Kemi Badenoch, has come out and said... I admit that we've made all of these mistakes and we're going to do things differently. So she's talking about a future. And if I were her now, I mean, this is why I'm baffled by, again, from a political calculation perspective, I am baffled.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
by Keir Starmer's behavior, because he's basically giving the Tories a free pass. And this guy is inept, you know, the Labour Party, they don't know how to govern, and people will want something else soon. And again, for me, it depends on how the new Tory leader, Camille Badenoch, how she handles these things, and to what extent does Badenoch have what it takes. Because clearly, Kiyosama doesn't.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Do you think that she does? And Julie, do you?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
I have heard of a man called Ben Habib. I've heard of, I've heard other names, and I totally agree with you that for this mafia to be defeated, this Islamist grooming gangs mafia to be defeated, a lot of it has to come from the inside.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And that is why if it doesn't come from the inside, then the relationship, the future relationship between these communities and British communities is just one-off. It's one of war then, because if you're doing this to our girls and women, how are we supposed to react, right? So it has to come from... So there are names.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
I also want to point out that we've been talking about this issue as a matter of sex crimes, as if these men are doing it just for sexual gratification. There's a component we haven't discussed, which is almost... It's a war. I've been asked, does Islam say... that women should be raped. Can these men find any justification within Islam for what they do?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And what I find, if you look at scripture, Islamic scripture is the only time it's allowed to take women during war time, infidel women. Those are, they become, when you are victorious over the enemy, the women you take and they become slaves and they become the women that your right hand owns and you can rape them as you please in any number you want.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And one of the things that's going on in the mosques, these are mosques that are run by the Muslim Brotherhood, is this constant preaching that we are at war with the enemy, these enemy are the infidels, et cetera. So when these men hear that, they apply that enemy and that is how they justify their actions.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
So you do need then leaders from within who want to challenge the preachings of the Muslim Brotherhood, who want to challenge the preachings of the infrastructure that they have set up. And there I see a light at the end of the tunnel because the core Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, like the UAE, they have driven the Muslim Brotherhood out of their countries.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
And those that are driven out, they come to Europe and America, and we harbor them. So right now, for this dynamic to change, I think in 2025, there's a huge opportunity for Muslims who hate this and Westerners, Brits and others, to join forces and say, let's get rid of this monstrosity.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Ayaan? So I agree with Julie on all of that. And what I have found is when I try to shut out these problems and think, let other people do it, I can't sleep at night. I keep thinking, if I think it is other people's problems, then when I am in trouble, other people will think, well, someone else will help her. And so if you know of a problem, you should do something about it.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The UK Grooming Gangs and the Cowardice of the West
Like this discussion now, I'm really grateful that it's out in the open and it's really, I'm not doing much. I'm just filling in the gaps, little gaps of where things are open. And quite recently I've come to believe in God. And sometimes it's great to know that when we talk about service and duty and charity, it's a gift from God that I'm able to do this.