A Stopover in the Heartland

Is it Okay to Love the America of No Cliterodectomies, No Fatwahs?

DR NAOMI WOLFJUL 6

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I left my California idyll, and soared into milky, hazy US skies. 

I touched down to change planes in Minneapolis, which I recalled as having been the corn-fed, friendly Midwest. 

I saw that now, almost everyone employed by the airlines, as well as everyone working as ground crew, was of Somali descent, or were recent arrivals from Somalia. 

They spoke Arabic or Somali to one another, not even bothering with English; passengers and colleagues alike were greeted with a hand to the heart. The flight attendants for Delta, out of Minneapolis, wore chic little grey attenuated hijabs, pinned to their hair. (They happened also to be in furious moods.)

I have no problem with reasonable legal immigration; I have no problem with other religions. But I did wonder what had happened to all of the US-born former staffers that used to be employed in those fairly well-paying jobs. It was not diversity I was seeing now, but a new kind of hegemony. 

I wondered what kind of security issue it might represent when an entire major US travel hub was now under the management of a single recently-arrived nationality; one that is not our own.

The fact that the entire sensitive Minneapolis-St Paul airport infrastructure — which I was surprised to learn is a joint civil and US military facility — is in the hands of Somalis, is an example, to me, of the chaos and vulnerability we import when we in the West lift humans wholesale out of their sometimes-dangerous, sometimes-abusive contexts, and re-situate them in influential Western contexts, with almost no acculturation, or assimilation metrics. 

“The immigrant” is positioned always in liberal discourse as in need of “our” “help.” The narrative is always about “our” “responsibilities” to such immigrants, and all of the immigrants are always positioned within this narrative as being a/ helpless and b/ innocent. And C — the immigrants’ culture that is being imported along with the immigrant, is always supposed to enhance the United States’ culture, simply because it is “other” from the nasty, racist, homogenous culture of the United States.

In fact, this narrative actually to me itself seems to be quite racist; simply a new, NGO-reframed revamp of the condescending 18th-century European trope of the non-European innocent, admirable “Noble Savage.”

This narrative, indeed, reveals, in my view, a profound ignorance about the actual world — a lack of awareness of the kinds of struggles that peace-loving, justice-loving, freedom-loving people, living in failed states and under oppressive regimes, actually face. 

Some societies are in fact neither helpless nor innocent.

At the level of leadership and of social contracts, and especially of the treatment of women and girls, Somalia, to take just one example, is a horrible, culpable society.

Individual Somalis no doubt are likely to be people of great decency. But look at Somali norms and society as a whole, which we are also importing when we resettle people en masse.

According to Amnesty International, all parties in that nations’ current civilian conflict, a confrontation between the government and a militia group named Al-Shabaab, abuse their own civilians and deprive their own peopleof human rights. In other words, no Somali party is innocent.

The crisis in Somalia is not currently derived from those cliches of racialized identities, “white against black”, or “colonizer versus colonized”. It is, rather, a crisis of Somali against Somali. And very specifically, it is a crisis of Somali men against Somali women and girls.

There are half a million internally displaced Somali people, 80 per cent of them women and children, who are suffering horrific abuses, including sexual assault, forced marriages, and “gender-based violence” — meaning beatings and female genital mutilation — at the hands of Somalis. 

According to the European Union Agency for Asylum, female genital mutilation affects almost the entire female population of Somalia:

[Source: https://www.fgmcri.org/country/somalia/%5D

The chart above, explains FGM/C Research Institute, shows a dip in the ages 15-19 simply because girls that age may not have been “cut” yet. 

In 2018, three young girls, two of them sisters, died within a single week in Somalia, from complications arising from female genital mutilation. 

A 13-year-old girl died of female genital mutilation in Somalia in 2021 — and the Guardian reported a rise in the practice during the pandemic. 

Yet, points out Amnesty International: “The federal [Somali] parliament failed to pass bills on sexual offences and female genital mutilation.”

According to the FGM/C Research Initiative, which centers on studying the issue of female genital mutilation, a staggering 99.2% of girls and women in Somalia aged 15-49 have endured female genital mutilation. The average ages when Somali girls are “cut” is from ten to fourteen years of age. 

Even though, worldwide, many Muslim feminists and even progressive Imams are speaking out against the practice, and pointing out that female genital mutilation is not in fact demanded by Islam, 72% of Somali girls and women believe that this mutilation is a requirement of their religion.

The Somali community has the highest percentage of genitally mutilated women in the world; there are 61,000 Somali people in the state of Minnesota alone, and many sources confirm that Somali girls and women continue to suffer genital mutilation while in the United States. In other words, Somali immigrants in Minnesota have not stopped this abuse of “their” girls and women, just because they are now also Minnesotans. A scholarly article asserts that between 150,000 and 200,000 American African girls are still at risk of undergoing genital mutilation:

“Sanctuary for Families indicates that Somali and other African families import traditional practitioners from overseas into the United States to circumcise their daughters, and in some cases, they send their daughters abroad for circumcision. The practice of sending their daughters abroad has become known as “vacation cutting”’.

So these communities’ arrival physically in America did not magically heal this cultural corruption. This culture of mutilation has not in fact vanished. This nation did not magically wash this cruelty, away.

Somali “female circumcision” is different from other forms — it is by far the most severe. Somali FGM is Type III genital mutilation, which means the excision of the entire outer part of girls’ genitalia, and the stitching together of the raw wound that is left behind. Somali FGM involves: “the complete removal of the clitoris and labia minora, together with the inner surface of the labia majora (Jones, Ehiri, &Anyanwu, 2004; Rasaq, 2012; Weir, 2000).”

In the image above, the green areas represent the tissue that is excised in each form of “female genital mutilation.” The Somali versions are the two images in the last row.

Women and girls subjected to this kind of mutilation suffer chronic bleeding, horrific pain during intercourse, problems in childbirth, infections, and dramatically increased mortality: “This increased mortality rate translates into an estimated 44,320 excess deaths per year across countries where FGM is practised. These estimates imply that FGM is a leading cause of the death of girls and young women in those countries where it is practised accounting for more deaths than any cause other than Enteric Infections, Respiratory Infections, or Malaria.”

Somalis now represent over one per cent of the Minnesota population. This organized, politicized community, of course, can now swing elections. Why should we think that, since this horrific practice endures even now in the US, a ten per cent make-up of Somalis in Minnesota, won’t alter American culture in the direction of this kind of misogyny — a form of misogyny that Somali women themselves are seeking to combat?

For that matter, why should we assume that a mass influx of immigrants from closed societies, will champion open societies? 

There is no freedom of expression in Somalia, for example. Journalists are being killed, arrested and detained there. The head of a media group, Ali Nur Salad, was arrested when he posted on social media that the drug khat was being used by Al-Shabaab members. Salad was denied legal representation. He faces charges “including “offending the honour or prestige of the head of state”, “committing obscene acts”, “distributing obscene publications and performances”, “insult”, and “criminal defamation”, as well as restrictions on travel and [on] speaking to the media.”

The government of Somalia raids live television debates: “On 6 January, Somaliland intelligence officers raided the offices of MM Somali TV in Hargeisa, the Somaliland capital, interrupting a live debate about […] Ethiopia/Somaliland […]. They arrested the MM Somali TV chair, Mohamed Abdi Sheikh (also known as “Ilig”), Ilyas Abdinasir, a technician, and Mohamed Abdi Abdullahi, a reporter.” The International Federation of Journalists condemned the arrests. 

Somali journalist Mohamed Abdi Sheikh and two other reporters who were arrested with him:

That — that failed state, that society without the rule of law or protections for free expression; that society that sees fit to gouge little girls between the legs with razors, to excise their clitorises, and to injure them permanently; those bad norms; as opposed to “bad individuals” or “a bad group of people” — let alone “a bad ethnicity” — are what we should object to importing wholesale; in this case, to run the management of our key airport hub in the sensitive center of our nation. 

Reporters in Somalia, women in Somalia, refugees in Somalia, even Parliamentarians in Somalia — “On 2 September, Somaliland police arrested Mohamed Abiib, an outspoken opposition MP, and detained him in Mandera Prison” —- live in a state of fear. Amnesty International and other human rights organizations call Somalia a “failed state.” 

It is okay for us here in the West not to want to live in the state of fear, that many Somalis, Afghanis, rural Pakistanis, in much of civil society — as well as journalists in Mexico, and anti-trafficking activists in Colombia — suffer.

Voice of America, in an article about Somali “Political Victories in the West”, reports that Somalis in Minnesota have become well organized politically: “Abdirahman Sharif, the imam and the leader of the Dar-Al-Hijrah Mosque in Minneapolis says another reason Somalis have risen in U.S. politics is because they are a tight-knit community.

“When Somalis came to [the] U.S., they moved to a foreign country where they could not communicate with people. So, for them, being close to people from their country meant having someone to communicate with and that helped them to unite their votes, and resources for political aspirants,” Sharif said.” Imam Sharif says nothing about Somalis wanting to learn to communicate with their American neighbors, or about their wishing to help America to succeed, or wishing to contribute to the shared destiny of all Americans. In this article, at least, the Somali political voice is a separatist one. The article describes Somali electeds gaining high office also in Britain and Canada and Finland, Norway and Sweden. Other Somali leaders stress with pride the separateness of the community. A Swedish Somali leader similarly does not mention wishing to contribute to Sweden, which welcomed the community, or wishing to assimilate into Swedish society successfully. Rather he too is proud of the separateness of the community:

“Mohamed Gure, a former member of the council of the city of Borlänge, Sweden, said there are unique things that keep Somalis together and make them successful in the politics in Europe.

“The fabric of Somalis is unique compared to the other diaspora communities. They share the same ethnicity, color, language, and religion. There are many things that keep them together that divide them back home. So, their togetherness is one reason I can attribute to their successes,” Gure said.”

Somalia is just one example of a separatist immigrant society with viciously misogynist practices. But across Europe, and in Britain, other viciously misogynist societies’ norms are being imported wholesale, along with mass separatist immigration. 

British and European and Irish women have started to protest against the harassment, intimidation and sexual violence directed against them by immigrant men from various countries that treat women and girls badly; these attacks are being minimized by the courts in these “advanced” nations. In Britain, a British mother of a 12 year old girl, Lucy Connolly, who had recently lost her young son, is in jail for 31 months for a tweet she posted in the wake of the murder of three little British girls, at their dance practice, by an immigrant. Conolly called for immigrant housing to be burnt down “for all I care” and for immigrants to be deported.

Meanwhile, in March of 2025, a pregnant Scots woman in Glasgow was raped by a Muslim Deliveroo driver, Mohammed Khan, so violently that he caused her to miscarry. That rapist received a twelve month sentence. 

I have avoided engaging in this issue to date because I know sadly that it is not only migrant men who rape European, British and US women; many European, British and American men rape women routinely as well. So I was reluctant to accept that something new was happening. But by now, the way in which British, Irish, European and US women describe new levels of street harassment and of sexual violence, and new levels of impunity for abusers from the courts (in the US, that is, before President Trump was elected), leads me sadly to conclude that this situation is not “rape culture as usual”. 

Rather, I think we need to face the fact that the Globalist push to flood the West with millions of men from brutally misogynist societies, and to let them do their worst, with sexual and with other kinds of violence, to women and girls, with near-impunity, is part of a war on women and girls that is deliberate; and that this form of assault is of a piece with promoting abusive neologisms such “birthing people”, abusive situations such as public spectacles of men beating women in boxing rings, the erasure of women’s safe spaces such as restrooms and changing rooms, and in general the erasure of women and girls as a respected, let alone understood, let alone in some ways even protected, category of human beings. 

We have to stop talking about this issue as if it is one of race or ethnicity or even religion; and we must understand that this issue is profoundly one of social contracts that are utterly different from each other. You are not a “rightwing extremist” or a “white supremacist” to not want in the US, or in England, or France, or the Netherlands, what unfortunate women and children and journalists and MPs suffer and endure — and protest and resist — in Somalia and in other conflicted, beleaguered lands.

The West took millennia of effort and struggle to evolve the rule of law; freedom of expression; the equal rights of women and religious and racial minorities, and homosexuals, as I have pointed out elsewhere. You could do this same deep dive into the norms of many of the nations whose entire societies have been imported wholesale to the West: Afghanistan, Yemen, rural Pakistan, parts of Haiti, parts of Central America. 

It takes at least two generations of steady acculturation to absorb the values of stable civil-law-based, egalitarian, open pluralistic societies. It took at least two generations for my relatives to leave behind the instincts of the shtetl. 

We in the West have to start to be unafraid to say what rights organizations say routinely: some social contracts are just better than others. 

Everything is in fact not the same. 

We need to be unafraid to say: “You know what, some things are in fact better. It is in fact better to have a society with a rule of law; it is better to have a society that does not force women into marriage, or tear apart the genitals of young girls, or arrest TV debaters in mid-sentence, or detain its Parliamentarians. 

“We are going to protect our own precious social contract, first by protecting our borders, and second by protecting our futures, our norms, our languages and cultures and histories, and our rule of law; our women and children and the vulnerable; and there is nothing racist or xenophobic about that commitment.” 

#####

I made it home to Brian and to Loki. I should have been at peace. Loki gazed at me adoringly. (Some dogs never hold grudges.) Brian told me hilarious stories and made me his delicious hot coffee, with cream, and we sat on the porch and looked at the high sun in the trees. 

Still — I was edgy.

Coming up to July 4th, 2025, in spite of leadership from MAGA that often delighted me, the American nation still felt so unstable. No one in legacy institutions, on the left, or in globalist networks, seemed to have learned anything from the recent past. 

That was scary.

On the plane from California to Minneapolis and from Minneapolis to Boston, I had been reading memoirs by luminaries on the Left. They seemed bizarrely uninformed, working still within cultlike, two-dimensional reasoning. 

The otherwise brilliant novelist Salman Rushdie, in his memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder — a book about the Islamist would-be assassin who nearly succeeded in murdering the author on a lecture stage in Chautauqua, New York — describes major voices of his generation, from Paul Auster to Martin Amis, post 2021, developing cancer or other serious illnesses suddenly becoming mortally ill, or dying. 

Not a flicker of awareness rises off of Rushdie’s pages about what could have caused this plague, that swept a generation of major novelistic talents, into annihilation.

Rushdie also describes MAGA voters with contempt. As he travels across states in the US, he sneers at the Trump signs.

Rushdie describes giving a speech on “freedom of expression” in 2022, for the writer’s free speech organization PEN America, at the United Nations. But Rushdie does not notice that the administration he was championing — the Biden/Harris administration — had damagingly silenced people such as Dr Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford; Dr Martin Kulldorff of Harvard; and many others; including me, for that matter. 

He reviles the fanaticism that led to his assailant, a Muslim extremist, taking a knife to a 73-year-old man. But he does not notice that we don’t support Fatwas, or fanatical theocracies, here. We don’t kowtow to Imams. Or to priests, or to rabbis, here. 

He objects to our American “white supremacy” “exerting itself” over Black and women’s bodies. But this is in fact a metaphor. It is not our law.

In fact, actually, white and black women can go from state to state, still, in America, if they wish to secure an abortion, which is what Rushdie is talking about.

It is the Global South, much deified by the Left, that actually “exerts itself” over Black and women’s bodies. 

It is in fact, in law, fanatical, extremist Muslim societies, among others, that “exert themselves” over girls’ and women’s bodies. 

But somehow Rushdie takes aim at us — racist old America, that eternal whipping boy — from the podium of the UN, instead of at those actually culpable nations. 

Why would that be? Hm; could it be because it is easier and safer to attack “racist old America,” where in fact girls and women of every race, actually have rights — because we in America are unlikely to issue a Fatwa against him?

Rushdie, in his UN speech, does not notice that we don’t have female genital mutilation, as an organic part of our culture. Or militias interrupting debates. He gives no credit to the warm shelter of America, which made him a citizen; which created the shelter for him of the First Amendment, and received him at a time when major voices in Britain were attacking him for having spoken out inconveniently.

He barely credits an America that he describes consistently as treating him and his loved ones with kindness and open arms — an America that assigned, indeed, a US Attorney to prosecute his assailant.

His right-on contempt for half of the nation, is so recognizable to me; it is so tiresome, so ill-thought-out:

“We are engaged in a war of stories — a war between incompatible versions of reality — and we need to learn how to fight it.

A tyrant has arisen in Russia and brutality engulfs Ukraine, whose people, led by a satirist turned hero, offer heroic resistance, and are already creating a legend of freedom…. Meanwhile America is sliding back toward the Middle Ages, as white supremacy exerts itself not only over Black bodies, but over women’s bodies too. [Italics mine]. False narratives rooted in antiquated religiosity and bigoted ideas from hundreds of years ago are used to justify this, and find willing audiences and believers”…[That is you, MAGA, in case you did not catch it].

He goes on to complain about his adopted country:

“[T]here was a war to fight on many fronts — against the bigoted revisionism that sought to rewrite history, whether in New Delhi or in Florida [you again, MAGA]; against the cynical powers that sought to erase the two original sins of the United States, slavery and oppression and genocide of the country’s original inhabitants; against fantasies of an idealized past (when exactly was America “great” in the way those red hats wanted to re-create?)”…

At that point, I just wanted to throw the little beige volume across the room.

I am tired, tired, tired of this. This rudeness, this churlishness, this taking for granted of our beautiful ethos, our welcome. 

This slap in the face of Lady Liberty.

I am tired of this ungraciousness; visitors to our nation’s universities terrifying our nation’s actual students; global intellectuals welcomed by us, scolding us from the platforms of the biggest fora in the world; deriding half of our electorate, as if they know better than half of America, about America; when in fact they know nothing about half of America; when they have probably never spoken to “those red hats” in their lives; when in fact — they could no doubt learn something from that sneered-at half of America. 

I am tired of this use of the shelter of our lovely First Amendment to do nothing but cavil at us, instead of setting to with all the rest of us, actually to make America better — out of love; out of reverence and appreciation. 

I am tired of such people, such immigrants, legal or illegal, who have so little appreciation for where they actually are, and for what it took from American generations past to bestow upon them the “Philadelphia freedom” that now they treat so lightly and so ungraciously.

It’s cool on the intellectual Left to mock and deride America. I for one am done with such people. 

If America is so bad, Mr Rushdie, try moving back to Britain now, where people are in prison for tweets. Where intellectuals grudged you even government-funded protection. 

Try India now, where seven journalists are behind bars. 

Try living in any of the nations that supported the Fatwa against you. 

No? 

Hm. I don’t blame you. 

Maybe America is pretty good, in spite of our “original sins”, after all. 

Maybe America is pretty good — to you. 

Indeed, maybe America has, for all its flaws, been great; 

Is great.

You are here, after all — out of the whole world of places you could be — and maybe we are also in the process of making America — 

Great Again.

“[T]hose red hats.” 

We benighted, lowbrow patriots. 

#####

If you are going to come to America, Somali immigrants, Pakistani immigrants, Salvadoranean immigrants, Indian and British and Mexican and German immigrants — 

Come legally, learn the language, stop injuring girls and women, whoever you are; join the culture, the ethos, and be American. 

America is not an economy. It is not a location.

America is a social contract. 

If you are going to benefit from it — and you are — I want to say: you must give back to it in kind. 

Otherwise please peacefully just leave. Seriously. 

Honestly that is how I feel; I feel that our “empathy”, our “inclusiveness”, have inadvertently let millions into our homes, who have zero respect for our family’s values, and no intentions whatsoever of actually joining our family.

#####

Brian and I sat quietly, getting ready internally for the tiring flight to Britain the next day.

The Fourth of July was coming up. We would be in the UK during our nation’s birthday.

The headlines were full of wars and the rumors of wars.

“The war is speeding up,” said Brian comfortably. To him, a soldier, this is a good thing, because you know where your enemy is, and what your enemy’s objectives are. “When things move fast, plans fall apart, and the enemy exposes himself”, he explained. 

I was done with the war. As I have told you, I am not a warrior by nature. 

I had set out to be a poet.

But our nation needs us. On her birthday, she needs a new birth of freedom. She needs our recommitment. 

I suppose that the war – a peaceful war, I trust, but still a fierce one; a battle of values — is speeding up, and becoming clearer.

I suppose that the war is not done with me. 

#####

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