Ayaan Hirsi Ali
| One of the |
| And a dirty dozen more |
“”I think that we are at war with Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars. There is infiltration of Islam in the schools and universities of the West. You stop that...there comes a moment when you crush your enemy.
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| —Ayaan Hirsi Ali, replacing the word "Communism" with "Islam" in Joseph McCarthy speeches[1] |
Ali is a rabid critic of Islam and multiculturalism, going so far as to advocate amending Western constitutions to make it possible to shut down all Muslim schools because "the jihadi genie is out of the bottle".[3] Her books, columns and talk-show appearances helped pave the way for the rise of Dutch populist wackaloon Geert Wilders — and Jörg Haider is spinning in his grave.
Ali was born as a member of the Somali elite. She is daughter of the revolutionary leader Hirsi Magan Isse. Isse sent his family to Kenya when she was a child. There, she was forced by her grandmother to undergo female genital mutilation. She later fled to Europe to avoid an abusive arranged marriage. She went to Germany first, but she decided to move to the Netherlands, where she was granted political asylum. She later received a refugee scholarship to study at Leiden University.
Ali was elected to the Dutch Parliament in 2003, but had to resign in 2006 because she had given some false information to obtain citizenship. She then moved to the United States and now works for the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative think tank.
Ali has authored several books: Infidel, her autobiography; The Caged Virgin, a set of essays on the role of women in Islam; and Nomad, the story of her life after leaving Somalia. In the Netherlands, her main impact came from her criticism of the country's diversity policies, and her openly hostile attitude to Islam. The fact that she was a refugee, a woman, an African, and an ex-Muslim atheist lent political credibility to her views. She worked with other Dutch critics of multiculturalism, such as Paul Scheffer and Paul Cliteur, and was to some extent their spokesperson. She advocated a rigorous policy of 'integration' (cultural assimilation) for immigrants, insisting that they must abandon their identity, or actually not their identity, but rather those traditions being practiced by Muslim immigrants that ran contrary to the beliefs and practices of the established community; for instance, she spoke against the marriage of underage girls, and intolerance shown towards gay people.
Ali is perhaps unique in that unlike many wingnuts she splits her time fairly evenly between having genuine critiques of Islam and being a raving Islamophobe. She is probably one of the best examples of "Your mileage may vary" when it comes to her writings on the subject.
[edit] Murder of Theo van Gogh
In 2004, Ali collaborated with Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh to produce a short film about Islam's attitude to women (Submission). The film showed verses from the Koran painted on the naked bodies of women, which provoked a predictable controversy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was threatened with death by Islamists, and received police protection. In November 2004, Van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam by the Islamist Mohammed Bouyeri. [4] The killer first shot Van Gogh, then stabbed him with a knife several times, and finally stabbed a note to his chest, [5] addressed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She immediately went into hiding under heavy police guard at a naval base in Amsterdam, among other places, and then in the United States.
When she returned to parliamentary politics in 2005, her high profile led to friction with her party. In 2006 a current affairs show revealed that she used the wrong name on her asylum and citizenship applications. After the immigration minister declared her citizenship void, she had no option but to resign from parliament. That precipitated her decision to move to the United States. She became a US citizen in 2013.