‘It Just Kind of Jumped Out of My Heart’

“Today, I have a question, a pressing question,” a Belgian member of the European Parliament, Assita Kanko, said Wednesday during the central debate of the plenary meeting at Strasbourg, France. “For some Western feminists, how can you remain silent, when women and girls are raped, tortured, their bodies carried around naked and spat on by bearded men shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’?”“Then,” Ms. Kanko said from behind the podium, her voice echoing across the chamber, “you can never call yourself a feminist again.” It was a sharp denouncement of the European Union, which, she said, joins the so-called feminists of the #MeToo movement in funding “the oppressor” in the Israel-Hamas war, “not the victims.” In the audience was the European Union’s high representative for foreign policy, Josep Borrell, who declared last week that “one horror does not justify another” as he warned Israel to hold back on its attempt to eradicate the Hamas terrorist organization.During a debate over whether the EU should support a ceasefire last month, Mr. Borrell suggested that Israel’s offensive had broken international law. Ms. Kanko, meanwhile, urged in her speech that “a real lasting ceasefire will start with bringing back all the hostages to their homes and the rapists to justice.”While the European Union and its legislative body, the European Parliament, have shrunk from its defense of Israel, Ms. Kanko is emerging as a leading advocate for the Jewish state. She points to Western hypocrisy when she sees it. She advocates for human liberty wherever it is at risk. She cherishes freedom of speech in the face of attempts to silence it. “There are a lot of people who would like me to not speak,” Ms. Kanko tells the Sun during a video call from her home in Belgium. “But it gives me a sense that I should continue doing what I’m doing.” She went viral last month for telling the European Parliament, “Shame on you,” in light of the pro-Hamas protests that have erupted in cities across the continent. She asked: “Why don’t you speak up against the violation of our fundamental rights and our values in Europe?”“It just kind of jumped out of my heart,” Ms. Kanko says of that speech. Messages of support flooded into her inbox from people all over the world, including soldiers who had returned from the front lines as well as Holocaust survivors. “I noticed a lot of demand for genuine political commitment to our Western values,” she says, referring to freedom, justice, and human rights. To defend those values, Ms. Kanko says, is “the first reason why people even enter politics.” A journalist and human rights activist, she was elected in 2019 to represent a nationalist and conservative political party in Belgium, the New Flemish Alliance, in the European Parliament. Raised in the largely Muslim country of Burkina Faso, she has long been outspoken against “radical Islam” and elements of Sharia law that have become apparent in European laws. Critics see Ms. Kanko “as someone who is betraying the community of migrants and choosing the other side,” she says. “But I’m just choosing the human side, and we should all be on that side regardless of our color, of our gender, of our ethnicity, of our religion. We should share these common values that are enjoying the heritage of the Enlightenment, that are in our constitutions and in our laws that are above everything.”Members of the public and elected officials, meanwhile, seek to silence Ms. Kanko’s speech. The left “didn’t really know how to accuse me of racism,” she says, so they resorted to mental intimidation. She receives racist messages on Facebook that call her “a modern slave” and “black from the outside, but white from the inside.” They say that Allah has cursed her. A drawing with a bullet in her head was once sent to her home. “They will try to make you feel bad and make you self-censor yourself,” Ms. Kanko says with a somber tone. “Politicians cannot be free anymore.” Yet, having witnessed the evil grip of dictatorship as a teenager in Burkina Faso, she cannot be stopped by vitriolic threats. “I just totally don’t care,” she asserts, “because I am most afraid to live in a world where this kind of thinking rules than in a world where I have to face brutal people.” What enrages Ms. Kanko is the refusal by multilateral organizations and several European heads of state to call Hamas a terrorist organization. Belgium, Spain, and Ireland are among the EU members criticizing Israel’s offensive at Gaza. Meanwhile, she says, the left is encouraging harmful practices to prevail in Europe at the expense of Western values. She cites the widespread subjugation of Muslim women in Europe that is normalizing backward gender roles and threatening the freedoms of all women.“They’ll use foreign values to seduce foreign voters,” Ms. Kanko says of her left-wing colleagues. This represents “the deepest level of racism, because you refuse to unlock the potential of so many people. You want to keep them electoral hostage to permanently vote for you, so you tell them that their very aggressive values are fantastic.”Nationalism, meanwhile, is eroding in Europe. Social benefits entice many migrants to the continent, but many do not learn their new national language upon earning citizenship. “These people will choose to be Belgium, French, Dutch, or German, only on paper, but not in their heart,” Ms. Kanko says. “So they will choose the social advantage, but they will never commit to the other part of the contract.”Invoking the wisdom of a British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, Ms. Kanko asserts that once the money to finance alluring social programs dries up, voters will demand social and economic emancipation. The short-term satisfaction, she suggests, imperils the long-term peace of a society. “Look at all the terror attacks that we had. Look at what is happening to the women on the streets. The erosion of women’s rights is a reality,” she says.When Ms. Kanko speaks to voters of migrant descent, she asks them, “Don’t you want a better life for your child?” During our conversation, she turns away from the video screen for a moment to say something in French to her young daughter, who has been listening all along in the background. “I want her to be one of those who stand with her chin up,” she tells me, “and not one of those who are going to be the hostage of the politicians in the future.”I asked Ms. Kanko what she wishes to tell those who neglect the sacredness of social, economic, and political liberty. “If you take freedom for granted,” she responds, “one day it goes away without warning.”

‘It Just Kind of Jumped Out of My Heart’

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