The Spectator's notes

20 October 2007

Charles Moore on what really did for Ming Campbell

Ayaan Hirshi Ali lives in daily danger of murder. Since she wrote the script for Submission, the film about Islamic abuse of women directed by the Dutchman Theo Van Gogh, she has been on Islamist death lists. When Van Gogh was stabbed in the street in Amsterdam, her name was mentioned on the note left pinned to his corpse. If you look on jihadi websites, you can see invitations to anyone knowing her whereabouts to post them on the internet. Ayaan Hirshi Ali was spasmodically protected by the Dutch authorities, until the beginning of this month. Now, because she is in the United States and has a green card there, that protection has been withdrawn, even though she is still a Dutch citizen. The Americans refuse to help, saying that such protection cannot be given to private citizens. Only the Danes have stepped forward, offering her a sort of cultural asylum. If you think about it, the Dutch behaviour is scandalous, the American scarcely less so. The authorities considered the threat to her life in the Netherlands there so great that they effectively confined her to a safe house. So a country that upholds free speech refuses, in practice, to defend it, and so makes it impossible for her to make a living there. She is, in effect, a refugee — from a country which prides itself on looking after refugees. Next month, Ayaan Hirshi Ali will visit Britain as the guest of the think tank the Centre for Social Cohesion. Wouldn’t it be an earnest of our government’s commitment to human rights if it offered this brave woman the protection which would enable her to live here?

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MK

October 18th, 2007 11:07am Report this comment

Your statement about nurses is crude, insensitive and harsh but actually fair. In fact you could also include us doctors! Sadly you have missed the point about hospital infections. Medical staff unwittingly contribute to the problem. Male doctors should probably never wear ties and smart trousers. Jackets and long sleeves have already being outlawed in some hospitals! It will be too expensive to implement full uniforms and changing rooms for NHS staff so the infection rates are unlikely to drop dramatically. MRSA, C.Diff, VRE, MREC etc. are not just excerbated by bed pressures and targets. The hospital environments are not properly cleaned(this really started in the 1980s) and the designs of these new PFI hospitals(early 2000s) are grossly inadequate with too few private, "side" rooms and too few disposable curtains. The spores of C.Diff can remain in the environment even when chlorine-based agents have been used. Once you have dealt with C.Diff, you then need to consider that there will be more and more resistant microbes emerging which have evolved as a result of modern farming practices involving blanket antibiotic use. Ordinary Joanna Public carries some of these resistant superbugs around her even when feeling well. This government is quite cluelesss about hospital infections and should have imported the more expensive but "safer" methods of providing healthcare used widely in continental Western Europe. Both main parties are responsible for the current mess. Michael Howard's 2005 election bullet points are beginning to look more and more sensible each week......

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