Somali Immigrant Has a Chilling Warning for the West | Ayaan Hirsi Ali

0:00You cannot have 70 ,000 to 80 ,000 people from Somalia living in Minnesota and not have a clan dynamic. Jake Pride doesn't understand that this is another form of dancing with the devil where he's going to be fried. The Muslim Brotherhood in Minnesota and elsewhere in America is decentralized and it's all delegated to the Somalis. And so Ilhan Omar has to navigate that. And then she also has to navigate the Democratic Party and she has to navigate the opposition. The question is, how long is she going to survive? Are you hopeful at the moment? Are you bullish on the West at the moment? Or do you think we have just now 10 years of just crazy fighting to get through this?

0:42The Iranian Islamist regime has articulated it in the most clear way. Israel is seen as the little Satan. Their goal is if they destroy Israel, that will give them a chance to go after America. They think they have Europe in their pockets because of the demographic shift and Islamization. and through the weakness that they sense of the European political elites, which is really weak. Imagine if they actually do conquer the West and conquer the world. Where will they take humanity? They'll take humanity to death and destruction.

1:21I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is the founder of the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation and the host of the Ayaan Hirsi Ali podcast. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, I've said your name three times in the first sentence. How are you, my friend? Oh, Dave, I'm doing very well. It's lovely to see you and speak to you. And yeah, great. Well, it is always a pleasure to see and speak to you. And, you know, we connected for 30 seconds before we started recording here. And you said something like, you know, we're old friends in this at this point, which seems kind of crazy. I mean, I think I interviewed you for the first time probably – it was probably fall of 2015.

2:00So we're rolling into our 11th year together. You have been fighting for Western freedom since well beyond that. But I thought maybe for some of my audience that is not totally familiar with you, and they should be, and we'll link to all your books below and everything else, there's so much talk about Somalia these days. And I think people are so confused about the history of Somalia, the American Somali population. You know, we talk about Ilhan Omar all the time. Can you just clean up some of that, perhaps, and maybe connect it to a little bit of your personal journey, and then we can dive into some of the issues of the day?

2:36And don't forget Somaliland, and they want independence. And I think it's a good thing, and so on. Yes. Well, I was born in Somalia in November of 1969 And Somalia became independent in 1960 And independent from British Somaliland That is the region that now wants to become independent And then there was an Italian Somaliland And that's where my father comes from And also that's where I was born But I was born after independence and you know as I don't know how familiar your audience is with African history but usually after independence people have these incredibly high hopes of building nation states that will thrive and that you know hold all of these different clans together and different tribes and for Somalia that didn't materialize after the white man left because soon after, you know, my father was one of the people who wanted to make a Somalia that looked a little bit like America.

3:46You know, you come in and, you know, you have founding fathers that designed this beautiful constitution and laid down these pillars and everybody's going to subscribe to that and we'll build this great nation state. That's not what happened in October of 1969. The Soviet Union, I would say, pretty much marches in by using a local Somali sergeant. And ever since, it's been chaos. So I was born into that upheaval. But within this great power politics mix of, you know, the two, during the Cold War, the two hemispheres, Soviet Union versus United States, in Somalia, what predated and still goes through and is the permanent, I would say, feature of Somalia is the bloodline.

4:42It's the clan. And I remember being five, six, seven years old and my grandmother sitting, my siblings and I down under a clan, under a tree and teaching us our clan line. That's like your passport. I am Ayan, the daughter of Hersey, who is the son of, and so on and so on. And every child is taught that. That is your welfare state. That is your benefit state. That's who you fight for and who you die for. That's your identity. And to supplement that identity was Islam. And what happened in Somalia, as in many other different parts in the world, was from about the 1980s, Petro-Islamism came into our shores.

5:24and there was an attempt to reverse things so that where Islam supplements the clan bloodline, it became now that the clan supplements the bloodline. In that sense, I don't know who's prevailing at the moment, but there is this, you know, everything that the clan holds dear, Islam enforces anyway. So when I was a little girl, I didn't have to wear the hijab, but little five-year-olds today in Somalia wear the hijab. Maybe that's the difference. It's an Islamization in a society that was already clan, bloodline-oriented, and Muslim. Right. And then—sorry, go ahead. I wanted to say fast forward because my father was modernized.

6:16He went to Columbia University. He didn't just accept this coup of Mohammed Syed Barrett in 1969. He went into exile and mobilized other men and decided to fight him. And this was occurring in Ethiopia, which then forced my mother and my siblings and my mother's mother to leave the country. So I've been exposed to besides Somalia. I was in Saudi Arabia with my siblings. We lived in Ethiopia and we lived in Kenya. And during that time that we were living in the diaspora, we were looked after by the clans. I just want to illustrate that is how the clan system, how the bloodline works. When people ask me, how did you pay your rent?

7:01Where did you get food from? Who did this for you? Wherever we go, there are Somalis. And if I meet you today, I'm not just going to say, hey, your name is Dave Rubin. I'm going to ask, you are the son of who? And you're going to say, you're the daughter of who? And then we try and track the bloodline and we'll get somewhere where we maybe trust one another and help one another. Or maybe we'll get to a place where we keep our distance. And, you know, we feel that there's a sense of tension and animosity. And that's how it works. So there's so much there that I think connects to what's going on right now.

7:42We don't have to tell the rest of your story at the moment. And again, we'll link to some of those earlier interviews, but you're, you know, ultimately fleeing and eventually becoming a member of parliament in Holland. And then your friend Theo van Gogh being killed with a threat to you. And then subsequently over the last decade plus becoming an unbelievable fighter for Western values and individual rights and freedom and all of those things. But I want to focus on the Klan thing for a moment because, you know, there's a video from probably three or four months ago where Ilhan Omar is on, who obviously is Somalian, where she's on stage and she supported Jacob Fry, not the Somali who was running against him.

8:21Although he, I think, in some sense thinks he's Somali or something like that. And she started talking about the Klan's that had betrayed her. Are you, I suppose you're not that surprised that they've imported this type of thinking into America when you hear something like that? Oh, no, I'm not surprised at all. It's not that they imported. That is just how it functions. You cannot have, you know, 70 ,000 to 80 ,000 people from Somalia living in Minnesota and not have a Klan dynamic. It's all determined and ruled by the Klan dynamic. What surprises and amuses me is that Jacob Fry decided to assimilate into the class.

9:01Is that possible? Is he the first one that ever did it? No, he's not the first one. But anyway, he's decided he was going to assimilate into the class and he probably thinks he's very clever. But he doesn't understand that this is another form of dancing with the devil where he's going to be fried, as in F-R-I-E-D. Right. So, OK, so can you talk a bit about there's a lot of focus now on these roughly 80 ,000 people in Minnesota and obviously what's going on with ICE and everything else. And so there's the fraud element of it. There's some element connected to illegal immigration, although a lot of the Somalis are legal, obviously, through Barack Obama.

9:39But what do you make of the whole situation right now that's happening, that's unfolding in Minnesota? So it's got three components. There's the Somali ethnic bloodline component that we've just been discussing. And they do have an alternative moral system. They don't see what they're doing as stealing. They see it as helping family and helping the bloodline. And so if there's this alien weak system that is dishing out money, if you don't take it, you're stupid. And also the assumption is we're not the only ones who would be doing such a thing. All smart people would be doing that. I wrote a piece in the Free Press where I cite Edward van Hoffman.

10:37He's trying to explain to Americans about what he calls it amoral familism. and this AMO, this orientations towards the clan or the in-group at the cost of everything else, it's not unique to Somalis. I think it's probably once upon a time it was universal. But it cannot coexist within the nation state because the nation state is modern and the clan bloodline system is not just pre-modern, it's anti-modern. So there's that aspect of it, it's that clan. And within that is another circle, which is the Muslim Brotherhood and the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood in America, dedicated to transforming America and Islamizing it from within.

11:34That's what they say. The way they do it and they want to go about it is by bringing Muslim communities and turning them into these ethnic blocs that are Islamist and that will vote the way they tell them to vote and, you know, will be this demographic representation. Then there's a third layer, which is amazingly the Democratic Party, which has created this business model, electoral business model, that they don't want to go and persuade voters about the programs they have in mind. They want to do the exact same thing as what the Muslim Brotherhood is doing, which is pump every state with just enough ethnic voter blocks to vote for them in exchange for providing them with benefits.

12:26And none of these three groups, the ethnic Somalis, the Muslim Brotherhood or the Democratic Party, seem to think that that money comes from somewhere. taxpayers, you and me, do you think we want to finance our demise? That's exactly what's going on. And so there's this conspiracy. That's not a conspiracy, but it is this, yeah, collusion. So since Ilhan is the representative from there and seems to be at the center of this, I mean, do you think she's sort of equal parts all three of those things? She kind of thought, well, do the fraud because we can kind of get away with it and I'm the representative, kind of has sympathies, let's say, to the Muslim Brotherhood and then obviously is a progressive in the Democrat Party.

13:11Is she equal parts or do you think one is running? It's just hard to understand what's going on there. Ilhan is 100 percent clan oriented. And again, the other thing you have to understand is the Muslim Brotherhood in Minnesota and elsewhere in America is decentralized and it's all delegated to the Somalis. So the Council of American Islamic Relations in Minnesota is led by, the head of that is a Somali. So he's still advancing the Muslim Brotherhood agenda. He's a Muslim, et cetera. And then obviously the largest membership are Somalis. So there's this hybrid symbiotic relationship that these two groups have.

13:53And so Ilhan Omar has to navigate that. And then she also has to navigate the Democratic Party, and she has to navigate the opposition, the Republican Party, the Trump administration that is now onto this cabal, onto this threesome, and they have to figure out how they're going to deal with it. And so this is, yeah, she's a real politician. I think she's a capable, talented politician, And she can put on these different hats, whatever she or headscarves, whenever it is convenient. The question is, how long is she going to survive? Because she cannot serve all of these masters at once. So as somebody that grew up in Somalia, your first years in Somalia, underwent female genital mutilation, which you've written extensively about, then became really, I would say, a feminist in the true sense of the word, the original feminist sense of the word for equality in the fighting for the West.

14:53You were also one of the first people that I ever heard talking about the sort of red-green alliance and the sort of useful idiots that the progressives play alongside the Islamists. That seems to be bursting forth in a more obvious way these days. But when did you really first see how sympathetic or confused the progressives and the left were with the radical Islamists? Well, I saw that in the Netherlands. And I think in my early encounters with Dutch progressives, I thought it was all coming from a good place. I thought they were people who felt that they were privileged, that they had held colonies in the past, that they were super wealthy.

15:33And when I was in parliament, it was part of the Dutch national policy to preserve some of the GDP to develop other poor countries, to bring poor people from third world countries into modernity. It was part of the national, you know, the Christians active in that country to say, we're going to volunteer and welcome everyone. So that's how I interpreted it. And also, by the way, my assimilation, which is very quick into Dutch society, I thank most of that for Christian volunteers. People who volunteered because little pieces of paper were hung in the church, like who wants to teach two Somali girls the Dutch language and people volunteered.

16:21And then from there, for me, it was truly accelerated. That's how I interpreted it. But then over time, I came to understand and to review that there's an ideological component. People have come to believe that this concept of multiculturalism, which is rooted in communism, but it's a sort of soft identity-based communism. And that's what they believed. And I had taken part in those debates in the late 1990s, early 2000s. I don't know. You remember that probably also. I do. I do. Yeah. Multiculturalism is the answer to everything. And we were all becoming morally—you can't compare cultures. You can't compare religions.

17:04Everything is the same. We don't want to be ethnocentric, blah, blah. So I really thought that that was coming from a good place. And then I went into politics. And as a member of parliament, walking the corridors of power, I saw how that went from coming from a good place to becoming, you know, cynically, how do we just win elections? And my colleagues were not asking the question, if we win elections with the ethnic vote or if we appease the Islamists, we're going to agree, we're going to accept and implement policies that will have very negative consequences for our society. They didn't seem to care.

17:51I mean, we would detail those negative policy consequences, but the people who did that would be sidelined, marginalized, and they would be smeared and shut up. And everybody would just go with the dream fantasy of we need to win the elections. That's the most important thing. And we'll do it. We'll win these elections, you know, whatever it takes. Are you on board or are you not on board? If you're not on board, you know. And by the way, it wasn't only the Netherlands that this was happening. Obviously, this was across much of Western Europe. So that leads me to, do you think there is a sort of free Western future, largely Christian future for Western Europe specifically?

18:33I think now that the populations, large swaths of the populations who, because these societies were rich, not just the Netherlands, but all these other Western European countries, the United States, Australia, Canada, these are societies that were so wealthy that they could for a long time, at least two decades that I have witnessed, they could ignore the consequences. consequences, you know, the negative consequences of these policies. But we can no longer do that. Now it seems as if it's not just the working classes who are affected. It's not just women who are affected. It's not just Jewish minorities who are affected.

19:18It's not just black Americans, African Americans, descendants of slaves in America who are affected. It's the middle classes. And it's, you know, even Silicon Valley, the richest, most powerful people in the world are saying, my country, my environment is changing in a way I didn't even vote for and I don't like. And who are the people who are making these decisions? So as this comes out into the open and these subversive forces, the Islamists, the communists, and whoever has hijacked the Democratic Party, that's what we are talking about. But now that is exposed. And I think this is I think it's healthy.

19:56I think it's good. And maybe there's a chance that we reverse these policies. So what is reversing it actually look like? Because I've asked a lot of different politicians from a lot of different countries. And, you know, you can get some people or there are certain places like Hungary, but that's not Western Europe. It's Central Europe where, you know, obviously Orban has closed the border. In America, we've closed the border. But there's also a homegrown issue now in Western Europe. And in Holland, you know, Gert Wilders, from what I understand, talks a really good game about this. But are they doing anything?

20:26Are they? I mean, I think they closed the borders a little bit, but are they deporting people? You know, they're still part of the EU. Like there's just so many conflicting pressures there. So what does reversing it look like? I think I would just like to use the American example after Donald Trump is elected in November of 2024. And he ran on this, I am going to close the borders and I'm going to track all the alien illegals and deport them. Now, that is the reversal program. It's very, very messy. And it gives, again, these other forces the opportunity to impede law enforcement, to create this sense of chaos.

21:11so it is that's what traversal looks like I've looked at countries like Sweden, Sweden used to be the most welcoming, the most naive I mean if you I think it's a compliment to call them naive, I think sometimes they were stupid and sometimes they were, the elites of Sweden were insensitive to their populations so So they need to be held accountable. But it's okay. Reality is holding them accountable. So now they're at this place where they're saying, remigration, we're going to pay you, Somalis, Middle Easterners, South Asians, we're going to give you money to go back home. So that's like that soft European approach versus that Trump-hard approach of, I'm going to deploy parts of our military to find these people and get them out.

22:04That's where we are. But you look at all of how we're going to reverse these policies. It's just going to be one hell of a mess. It's going to be messy. Right. So when you see what's going on in in some in I was about to say in Somalia, but when you see what's going on in Minneapolis and largely in Minnesota right now, same. Yeah. Yeah. When you see that, I mean, is there is there something, you know, I see a lot of more left leaning people who aren't complete progressives. They'll say something like, oh, yes, we understand we had to close the border and we should deport people, but not this way.

22:40And I always find that to be a little thin because it's like nothing is perfect. I think we've arrested the last number I saw was less than 270 actual citizens of America were temporarily detained, usually for about an hour out of 700 ,000 plus that have been deported. Nothing's going to be perfect. But when you when you're watching what's on the ground there, what do you make of it? Well, again, you've got to analyze it and segment it and see who is doing what.

23:16The three groups that I talked about, the Somalis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Democratic Socialists that have hijacked the Democratic Party, those three groups, they like the status quo. They don't want that to change. So they are mobilizing. They're using funding from I don't know who and mobilizing to defend the status quo. And then the Trump administration, I voted for Trump specifically because I wanted him to do something about the border. so those of us who voted for that we are saying you know you can't have what do you think it was going to look like did you think that right the moderate democrats that removing illegal aliens did you think that the people who benefited from the status quo which is going to lie back and accept it no they wouldn't so they're going to throw these subversive efforts they're going to you know, the melodrama that's taking place now, Ice Watchers, Antifa coming in, trying to create this sense that federal law enforcement is actually invading Minnesota.

24:28I mean, all of that was to be expected. They were doing that in 2020. They were doing that for a very, very long time. They do that in Europe. It's all of these NGOs. So to me, that's not surprising in the least. and then it is, you know, the Republicans, the moderate Democrats or people who used to be moderate Democrats, the independents. We've got to come together and say, how do we do it? If Trump is doing it wrong, what would be the right way to do it? So one of the concrete complaints I've had is why should ICE be covering their faces? Why are they traveling in unmarked cars? that's not what we should be doing in America.

25:13But then we live in this internet age where these officers' families are threatened. Their faces are put online. They are doxxed. How do we go about that without escalating, without then bringing the actual military in? So I don't think that there's going to be some kind of neat and tidy way, some very clean way that's going to please the lady somewhere with her little pearl chin. It's going to be very appealing. There's no way. It's not going to happen. It's going to be messy. Are you saying you can't deport thousands of people without spilling a little tea as you're sitting there in the afternoon?

25:56Yeah, you can't do that. And also that you have to realize that these three groups that I just told you about, they are weaponizing that Minnesota nice. you know minnesotans saying oh my gosh that's not how we do things how do you do things you know what when i lived in holland it used to be we talked to them the guy who murdered the the of angor when he was chasing the of angor with a gun in his hands theo was saying to him can we talk about it if that's how you want to approach it you know it's also going to end in a different kind of mess so you we just have to um yeah we have to come up i think with those of us who love America, we have to come up with a unified way of saying, we know it's going to be messy, but we have to inform the public about who these three groups are, what their objectives are, and the sorts of things that they're doing, and not fall, you know, amongst ourselves, fighting amongst ourselves.

26:54It's just not productive. Right. And it's worth noting, and again, people should watch some of our earlier interviews, but when Theo Van Gogh was killed, the murderer in the middle of the street then pinned a note on his chest, on his jacket, saying, you know, in essence, I on, you're next. But, you know, what does this tell you, you know, when we joke about the sort of the women drinking the tea that don't want this to be messy and sort of don't understand what reality is, that there's going to be some things that, you know, look a little upsetting or whatever. What does this tell you of the state of classical liberalism?

27:28Because, you know, a decade ago when I started saying I'm not a progressive. I'm an old school liberal. You were saying very much the same thing, you and Bill Maher and Sam Harris and a couple other people. But it does seem like even the phrase classical liberal is sort of lost on people at the moment, at least from an American context. For me to explain to people, yes, I'm a classical liberal, it doesn't even make sense anymore because the word liberal has been so mucked. But do you think there was a flaw in the classical liberal mindset in some sense that we need the conservatives to do a little bit of the dirty work because classical liberals tend to more so be the woman with the T?

28:03Yeah, I think classical liberalism does not have missionaries. And so, number one, classical liberalism does not have missionaries. And number two, they don't realize how incredibly Western and white and privileged classical liberalism is. And so classical liberals are talking to other classical liberals. And we all vehemently agree with one another and we love each other's company. But we don't realize that there are people, and they also don't realize we're a minority, and that a lot of people across the world hate classical liberalism and what it has. Classical liberalism gave birth to modernity.

28:54and even when you analyze classical liberalism itself, Christianity gave birth to classical liberalism. Classical liberalism is a product of Christianity and the Christian arm is the missionary arm. It's the one that used to go out to the wild and tell them about how wonderful Christianity is and eventually get people with a classical liberal sensibility. And so, unfortunately, what classical liberals have done is they have, they neutered the Christian arm, their missionary arm. And we're paying a huge, huge price for that. How do you think your own evolution is connected to that? Because obviously, born Muslim, you were a well-known sort of new atheist for a while, and it's just in the last couple of years that you've converted to Christianity.

29:50So I sense your own bedrock thinking is now connecting back to that arm. Yeah, I am. So I'll just put aside sort of the personal story of that. But in this intellectual, you know, a defender of classical liberalism, I don't think I stopped asking the question, so where does that come from? What is it rooted in? And I think for a long time, I listened to people who would jump from their line-tortment period to the Greeks and Romans because they didn't want to say anything about Christianity. But if you do it diligently, you are going to go back to the Christian roots of classical liberalism. And then you're going to realize that it couldn't have had classical liberalism, the secularized version of it, could not have come about without the tolerance and the freedom of conscience that Christians promoted, without this insistence that what governs the individual conscience is the Sermon on the Mount, without going back to this figure, Jesus Christ, who was, I mean, analytically, all sorts of people would just say, you know, there was Jesus and there was Muhammad and there was Moses and this, that, and the other.