bari weiss. miss ali is a research fellow at stanford university's hoover institution and author of the new book "prey: immigration, islam, and the erosion of women's rights". in this her third book she examines police and immigration data to consider the sources of increased sexual violence against women in europe. she makes a number of recommendations about approving asylum and immigration policies and emigrating new migrants into the host country societies. miss ali is the recipient of more than 20 prizes for him her writing, public-service and human rights advocacy including the simone de beauvoir prize and goldwater award and is one of "time magazine"'s 100 most influential people in the world. joining miss ali in conversation is bari weiss, a journalist most recently of the new york times and author of the best-selling book how to fight anti-semitism. after their initial conversation i will be asking miss ali and miss weiss questions. please write your questions in the text chat area on youtube and we will get to them later in the program. now i'm very pleased to welcome ayaan hirsi ali and bari weiss and i'll return later for the questions in the program. >> thank you doctor duffy.y. imagine if you're in the conversation you might have seen some of the noise surrounding tonight's event and i guess i want to speak briefly before we get into the conversation about that controversy and speak directly to all of you. we've been in a world in which we insist that women are to be believed. that their lived experiences should be trusted and yet those same people want to silence ayaan for sharing hers, never mind she's survived the most evil forms of violence against women and actionable. we live in a moment in which we declare that black lives matter yet ayaan is a black woman who's traveled under armed guard for more than a decade and a half due to credible death threats and she's now being told your voice puts people's lives in danger. we live in a world in which we are told speeches by and yet sounding the alarm on actual violence perpetrated against women and girls is met with accusation and denunciation. this isn't just hypocrisy. these are the tools that liberal ideologues that masquerade in morally fashionable language use to bully and silence those they disagree with. those that want to shut down conversation are interested in speech or freedom or safety, they're interested in eepower but thankfully we still live in a country with a bill of rights and the constitution and a culture of liberalism where we get together at forums like this and freely discussed on subjects with respect and decency. those are the priest principles of an open society and they are worth fighting for and i want to sincerely thank the commonwealth club and doctor duffy for their refusal to capitulate to the censorious mess and deeply un-american mob to try to get this event canceled . and with that but get to the reasons you are all here which is ayaan hirsi ali and her book which is called "prey: immigration, islam, and theerosion of women's rights" . ayaan, as always it's a pleasure to be with you and i want to start with something you write early on in your book . you write early on it's one of the rich ironies of early 21st-century history a single decision that has done the most harm to european women in my lifetime was me by a woman. i wonder if you could talk about who that woman is and what her decision is, her decision was how it informs what you write about. >> thank you very much for that fantastic introduction. i like you want to thank the commonwealth club for hosting me and you and for refusing to capitulate to the mob. i also want to thank especially doctor gloria duffy for insisting that this is a case, thank you very much for your courage. the feeling is entirelymutual . i think really it's one of the most courageous voices who defend freedom in your generation. the question that you asked who is that woman that is angela merkel. and what is the rich irony? the rich irony is that she in a moment of falseness in 2015 decided that it was time to open the gate to immigrants from syria at that point. that was the question. the context was a young woman n decried and the cameras were on and she said what am i going to do and that first miss merkel said i have to think about this, we can't accept everyone and the child cried and she said okay, everyone is welcome . and that moment of compassion once large numbers of people came in and when i say people , these are people who are dispossessed. these are people running away from civil war and their people who've been exposed to the worst kinds of violence imaginable but a lot of them are also young men and so germany and other countries who are not prepared for that kind of influx, they too were not prepared for the context that they came into and i think if that event was handled more thoughtfully things would have been i different today. >> not to jump ahead but what wouldn't more thoughtfully have looked like in your estimation ? >> in my estimation i think leaders like angela merkel and others, the prime minister of the uk, other leaders who were struggling in their countries with the process of ssintegrating in the united states of america, we call it assimilation and struggling with the assimilation process of immigrants from muslim majority countries would have anticipated after some events like the arab spring and before that orcountries in africa and south asia in the middle east, that things were turning around and there would be a huge influx of immigrants and they would come to europe sooner or later i think they should have anticipated these events . even to this day i don't think they're having those conversations so true leadership what it looks like tis to say we're seeing events, where having difficulties today on the ground. in this context, it is a failure of assimilation. five years from now, 10 years from now what things look like and then if that moment arrives and you're overwhelmed and you have all the cameras gazing at you, in other words the eyes of the world if you want to look good and compassionate and you make a thoughtless decision, what then happens is it starts to affect other people and now they're having probably the greatest social volatility and political volatility that europe has known since thecold war . so i will out myself as one of those bleeding hearts who cheered in my heart when angela merkel made that decision and famously said we will manage and like a lot of people wanting this event i think about the refugee crisis in europe and i think about a little boy, remember alan kearney in the white t-shirt who washed up on the beaches. you write in your book to give people context for the amount of numbers we are talking about, since 2009 you write in your book 3 million people have arrived illegally in your. more than two thirds of those immigrants are men and the overwhelming majority of them are coming from countries where men and women not just culturally but according to the law are not equal and that's really the subject of your book is how to square the understandable compassion i would say that a lot of us don't the sympathy for people fleeing countries like syria twith the ideas that people bring with themselves when they cross over the border so take us a little bit more deeply into the book. the subject of your book, the subtitle is the erosion of women's rights. tell us how this influx of immigrants in your view has changed from the lives of women and girls both muslim inside these communities and also non-muslim in cities like paris and amsterdam and berlin. >> i will start with the components of compassion. i think we should absolutely yes, without fail we should start. you call it a bleedingheart, i just think of it as pure compassion . human to human. i think what's going on in parts of africa, parts of the middle east and south asia even right now in china is a community women in the community being subjected to the greatest violation of human rights, i would just call that genocideand my heart was out to them . i feel compassion for them. if you are a world leader and it is your job to be elected to express judgment, to take the time, to make the trade-offs, what is attainable, how do you turn that compassion into a win-win, not a zero-sum game. what would you do? that requires a lot of thought. it requires a lot of hard work. it requires the convening of a lot of world leaders. it requires you to compel others to say this is a burden worth adding and let's share that burden when it comes to resources, when it comes to who are we going to allow him but what are we going to do in the countries of origin from towns stabilizing them politically, militarily, economically. that's not the conversation that european leaders and world leaders, western thleaders of rich countries were having. the conversations they were having in the pastdecade , maybe further was i'm going to go after my own self interest. people move around. economic disruptions and so on and somebody gets hurt in the process. and the subject is as these large numbers of people move from poor unstable countries to supposedly rich countries, somebody gets hurt and that first it was immigrant women that were brought in and subjected to such things as genital mutilation, child marriage and so on but today there are neighborhoods with labels such as working-class or low income or social housing, they've got all sorts of euphemisms to say these arethe lower-class incomes . again, lower-class communities. they are bearing the burden of the unintended consequences of migration. and the leaders, the angela merkel's of this world are standing in front of the cameras and virtue signaling that we showed a sense of compassion, we let everyone in but when things get disrupted, when people's lives get disrupted who is bearing the burden and what are we doing about that? >> i think your your your book would argue it's not just immigrant women inside communities it's all women and girls in the surrounding society who are pulling themselves back from the public square so even though the laws have changed a lot of these countries you seem to be making the case that the cultural shift is so tremendous that law is sort of neutered in the face of so maybe you could tell us, give us a little bit of color or some examples. one comes to mind to me is what happened i think it was new year's eve in cologne in 2015. tell us what happened and give us a few examples so people who have read the book a sense of the extent of what you mean when you talk about the erosion of women's rights as are not just talking about calling or groping in public although that happens to . >> with your permission i'll give you some color. i will read a passage from the book that is an infamous incident that i think a lot of people in the audience are familiarwith . but they may have forgotten. this is page 64. a reckoning came in the german city of cologne on new year's eve december 31, 2015. around 1500 men, mostly newly arrived asylum-seekers are more american backgrounds versed in the area between cologne central station and the cities same gothic cathedral to ring in the new year on what germans called after the fourth century pope sylvester. the men were drunk and unruly and soon became clear beyond the control of thecity's police . a mom together and attract women in the square. sexually harassing and assaulting any could get their hands on. often stealing their wallets and mobile phones in the process. in the following months 661 women reported being victims of sexual attacks not. one of germany's leading feminists and a cologne local investigated the events of that evening interviewing many of the women who had been. they described being separated from their husbands and male friends and put inside circles of young migrants met. the men groped women and girls no matter their age appearance or circumstances, grabbing their breasts and between their legs. one woman described several men trying to insert their fingers into her giant. the only thing blocking them was the thick winter heights she was wearing. some women were held by swarms of men for 30 minutes of continual assault. when they were eventually shut out of the ground some reported and here's what kills me, the police had deliberately looked away. many women reported ongoing trauma and fear many months after theevent . yet those who have spoken about what happened to them in public forums have been labeled racist for pointing out the messy or migration status of their perpetrators and now often use syrians when speaking about their experience. that is the old leadership and win as a leader you stand there and say i have shown compassion, in fact you have not. you have shown incompetence. >> ayaan, inside that specific instance which is resonated with me, the scene that this disturbed me the most is that police at the event were largely peaceful and that a scene itself throughout the book. two years later another german city also on new year's eve you write about an incident or kind of a party, a gathering for new year's eve in an area near the brandenburg gate and you write about how the police is typically set up an area, a women's safety area and the police spokesman wasn't ashamed to say publicly this is a good opportunity to offer women a place toretreat to if they feelharassed . what is going on here ? why is our police and law enforcement to say nothing of the leadership you talked about failing at their most basic duties which is to provide public safety for people? >> that is the question really, the subtext of the book is this failed leadership that is the question i ask myself. why were we surprised by the events of 2015 and beyond when in fact we have seen some of these things happen in various countries in the past decade? at a smaller scale so we have seen it happen. we have seen this happen in egypt, we've seen it happen in syria and variousother countries . it's called the rate game so we knew that if we had allowed a large number of men , very young men to come in unguided, not socialized into the new context that they were coming into, that we were going to run into problems like this one and then the response itself where the onus, the burden of putting up with this is put on the women and it puts on women in poorneighborhoods . and i think that is really, it's outrageous. it's absolutely outrageous. so if you want more color as you read the book you see example after example. i've spoken to so many women who literally say i'm not, i want to display the same compassion angela merkel display for the people of syria and for the people of afghanistan . they feelsorry for the people of somalia and elsewhere . i want to welcome them. there are so many volunteers in many of these european countries who want to do good things or people in the physical places. most of them both on the left parties but they also describe how the streets is changed, how their schools have changed and the continuous assault on their bodies that, there are scenes of how they are assailed on a daily basis and how the authorities leave them to themselves because when they go to the city council to say look at what's happening in my neighborhood there just dismissed azucena forbes and racists . that is where the russian trolls coming and that's where the radical islamists come in and all other fringe groups and extremists with an agenda because the mainstream parties don't want to deal with these issues . >> you make a powerful argument in the book the that because the centerleft, even the center is so scared to touch this issue that basically gets exploited by the populace that says, look at these horrible things that are happening and use it to make arguments for mass deportation and things like that. is that one of the reasons you felt the need to write this book and i love for you to speak to critics that claim that even by writing a book like this and shedding light on the stock you are somehow offering father to right-wing nationalists for example. >> i think if you said we were offering father to right-wing nationalists and not cases 20 years ago that was excusable because you know, that made sense. you thought that's what feed these extremists. but over time we've seen that when mainstream parties and when mainstream leaders silence everyone and everything and put this taboo and say your a, you're full of hate speech there's this censorship around this topic, it's extremists who benefit and sometimes they go from, they come out of nowhere and just occupy, take occupation of relatively large structures.re if you look at this book, it zooms in on women and how they're being elbowed out certain neighborhoods and other public spaces. cafcs, passport systems, etc. and now they're trying tocope and adapt to the circumstances but it's not just women . you can go to europe and talk to jewish minorities andthey will say the same thing . they lived here for centuries and we suffer and today we can't anymore. jennifer goldberg of the atlantic did a piece. >> it was 2014 i think. >> i think it was 2014 and he did a similar sort of journey , a similar analysis where he talked to a lot of jewish leaders who were saying we've lived here all our lives. these changes are taking place because of immigration especially from muslim countries and now we're being faced with islamist driven anti-semitism but not only that the old extreme right wing anti-semitism is coming out of the past now because it's become okay to be anti-semitic. and they were responding by leaving their neighborhoods if they could. by leaving to go to israel or to come to america. or most who are jewish, which is what the women are doing. they are covering themselves not to look desirable or attract attention. you could do the exact thing of what is going on when it comes to homosexuals. they are not holding hands, they're not looking day because they're being attacked and what is ehappening? because there are immigrants who are coming from countries where there is intolerance told towards homosexuality. and when they see they don't, they act on that hostility when it happens over and over again in your neighborhood, people want to feel safe. they're scared so they start to believe themselves. they raise themselves out of their neighborhood cafcs. and there's more fear, more silence. it's not just women is what i want to say. >> that lead me to a question i've been thinking about a lot and not just in the context of your book more generally in the west right now which is i wanted to ask if you feel that intersection alley, multiculturalism, cultural and moral relativism, the idea that all cultures are created equal . they trumped the old notion of, when i've been raised to think of as feminism or women's rights ? >> i think if you're a feminist and you knew about the subject of today you would be raising more than holy hell. the question is do they know or do they want to know? now, it's interesting, i thought it was inspiring because there were powerful men who were taking advantage of their positions on women in the working place and for women to come out and then say this happened to me, this happened to me and that conduct have to stop, that was a good thing but it came to a screeching halt . bdid get to the women that i discussed in prey. that is working-class women. so right now, there is no feminism that is defending working-class women. number one. number two, yes. there is another kind of feminism i don't object to it but i wish it would become a bigger tent. it is a feminism that's being about shattering the glass ceiling.we want women presidents, we want women chancellors. i think that's all fine. but right now you know what i want? i want a feminism that goes to d