The Philadelphia Inquirer's Trudy Rubin is not someone with whom I often agree. But in her editorial today, she has it right when she sees assimilation as the key to successful immigration:

One of the most articulate critics of Europe's immigration policy, especially toward Muslim immigrant communities, spoke this week in Philadelphia at a conference on Islam and the West sponsored by the World Affairs Council. Aayan Hirsi Ali is an elegant, Somalia-born member of the Dutch parliament who always travels with bodyguards because she is under constant death threat. The reason: her strong critique of radical Islam and the European policies that help it grow.

Hirsi Ali speaks softly, but her words are uncompromising. "In Europe, there is a tendency to appease radical Muslims," she says. "We have forgotten how to draw the line."

This is no right-wing diatribe. The Dutch legislator defies political stereotypes - though she belongs to a party of the right, her political support cuts across party lines. Her goal is to goad the Dutch and a global audience to think about crucial topics from which polite people often shy away.

The educated daughter of a Muslim Somali intellectual, she fled an arranged marriage and sought asylum in the Netherlands. Working for social-service agencies, she saw the hidden plight of many Muslim immigrant women in Holland - battered, forced to undergo ritual circumcision, sometimes killed for crimes of honor (when family members suspected them of sexual impropriety).

She wrote an 11-minute film called "Submission, Part 1" about violence against women and Koranic verses that could be used to justify this. Theo van Gogh, the film's director, was subsequently murdered by a Dutch-born Islamist of Moroccan descent.

Hirsi Ali had to go into hiding. But she later entered politics and continues to call for reforms within Islam, and for immigration reforms. She lives in constant danger: two tall bodyguards hovered wherever she moved in the conference hall.

Her message is two-fold: Muslims must openly debate why their religion has provided justification for acts of terrorism. And Europeans need to debate why they have failed so badly at assimilating immigrant communities, especially those that practice Islam.

Unlike the United States, Europe never had a culture of assimilation where second-generation immigrants become hyphenated Europeans. European immigrants often wind up segregated in slums, living on welfare, not speaking the language of their new country.

I'd go a little further and say that multiculturalism is best ally of Islamic radicalism, but I realize there are limits to what can be said in an editorial column. The piece also touched on the Muhammad cartoons, and misplaced tolerance -- i.e. tolerance of intolerance:

Until recently, this effort at tolerance led policymakers to ignore the serious problems within some of their Muslim communities - from the preachings of radical imams to repression of women to the teaching of radical Islamist ideas to children.

Hirsi Ali also blames misplaced tolerance for confusing Europeans about how to react to the Danish cartoons that satirized the Prophet Muhammed. For her the issue is clear - Europeans value free speech and separation of church and state, and immigrants must learn to accept those values if they want to be part of their adopted country. That is the line she wants Europeans to draw.

"We fought for centuries for those values," she says. "These are cultural achievements and we must defend them. This has nothing to do with disrespect for someone's religion."

In our country, laws "respecting an establishment of religion" are off limits.

A government that can't require respect can't stop disrespect either. (Submission is of course an extreme form of respect. . .)