Ayaan Hirsi Ali: A Woman of Courage and Dignity

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a woman of courage and dignity. She is also someone with a prodigious number of talents. The multilingual Somali-born former member of the Dutch lower-house of parliament is an author, a film-maker, an academic, a leading feminist and insightful critic of Islam. Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim who has renounced Islam, declared herself to be an atheist after being inspired by the Lieden philosopher, Herman Philipse. In 2003, she famously commented on the founder of the Islamic faith saying "Muhammad is, seen by our Western standards, a perverse man". Hirsi Ali was referring primarily to the marriage between Muhammad (then in his fifties) to Aisha, a young girl of only nine years of age (according to the Muslim Hadith). Hirsi Ali is also an outspoken critic of female circumcision, practiced in many parts of the Muslim world and justified by a saying attributed to Muhammad.

Hirsi Ali also wrote the script for a film, directed by Theo Van Gogh, criticizing the treatment of women in Islamic society. The director, Van Gogh, was subsequently murdered by the Islamist, Mohammed Bouyeri, in an Amsterdam street in November, 2004. A death threat, primarily directed to Hirsi Ali, was pinned onto Van Gogh's body. As a consequence of this and other threats by Islamists, Ali Hirsi has been forced to spend large periods of time in hiding. In November 2005, Hirsi Ali reported being threatened by Scheich Fawaz, an Iman in a mosque in the Hague, who said that she would be "blown away by the wind of changing times" and could also anticipate "the curse of Allah".

In January 2006, Hirsi Ali was awarded Reader's Digest "European of the Year". In her acceptance speech, she urged action to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Commenting on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's outrageous remarks denying the Jewish Holocaust, she noted: "Before I came to Europe, I'd never heard of the Holocaust. That is the case with millions of people in the Middle East." She urged the formation of conference on the Holocaust saying that it "should be able to convince many people away from their denial of the genocide against the Jews."

Hirsi Ali also said in her acceptance speech: "So-called Western values of freedom and justice are universal; that Europe has done far better than most areas of the world at providing justice, because it has guaranteed the freedom of thought and debate that are required for critical self-examination; and that communities cannot reform themselves unless scrupulous investigation of every former and current doctrine is possible."

In March 2006, she co-signed the MANIFESTO: "Together facing the new totalitarianism" with eleven other individuals, including Salman Rushdie. This manifesto was published in response to the violent over-reation in the Islamic world following the publication in Jyllands-Posten of cartoons depicting Muhammed.

This courageous and intelligent woman, who has stood up and spoke out against Islamic totalitarianism and has put her life on the line in the process, is, however, about to be scapegoated by cowardly and weak-minded Dutch politicians. Following a recent television program in the Netherlands that presented facts that were already widely known, but which were presented as revelations, about how she actually came to originally claim refugee status in the Netherlands, Hirsi Ali has been declared an illegal alien. In other words, she has been effectively stripped of her Dutch citizenship, and now faces an uncertain and possibly dangerous future. Of course, the reality is that Hirsi Ali is being fed to the Islamist crocodiles by Dutch appeasers who hope such an offering will delay their eventual consumption. Or as respected author Melanie Phillips puts it, "Drive out Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and they will drive out (or so they think) the threat of the jihad. Thus the authentic voice of appeasement; thus courage is punished and resistance abandoned; thus the murdered Theo van Gogh is doubly betrayed. A shocked friend of Ms Hirsi Ali says that the mood in the Netherlands today reflects a thirst for a public hanging. But this public anger is being funnelled not at the clerical fascism that has caused Dutch public figures to be guarded day and night against the threat of murder, but at one of those very figures. Thus the victim of violence is turned into its cause, and her institutionalised lynching will purge the terror from the people."

Is the future of the West in relation to uncompromising Islamic threats and terror, is this to be the response to their intolerance and rejectionism? Step by appeasing step, some of them noticable, some of them imperceptible, we eventually surrender all our hard-won freedoms, our rationality, our enlightenment, and, finally, our soul.