In This Article
30-Second Summary
Headline Links: Author returns to the Netherlands
Background: Van Gogh's murder and immigration issues
Opinion: The Hague, Islam and 'Infidel'
Reference Material: The death threat and Islam in Europe
Key Players: Hirsi Ali
Related Links: Salman Rushdie and Muslims’ letter to the pope
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Imperiled Dutch Author Loses Protection
October 11, 2007 06:32 PM
by
findingDulcinea Staff
The Netherlands withdraws security funding from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an activist for Islamic Women's rights threatened with death by extremists; The Hague cites financial reasons in response to accusations of cowardice.
30-Second Summary
The Dutch government awarded Somalian-born author Ayaan Hirsi Ali around-the-clock protection in 2004, after an Islamic extremist killed the filmmaker Theo van Gogh.
Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh had collaborated on a short movie, “Submission,” about abused Muslim women. That project cost the director his life.
Pinned with a knife to his dead body was a letter threatening Hirsi Ali.
On Oct. 1, she returned to the Netherlands from the United States after The Hague declared it would no longer offer her protection while she was beyond Dutch borders.
The withdrawal of protection came a week after Hirsi Ali received resident alien status for the United States, where she has resided since 2006.
Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said that the security arrangements for her stay overseas were always explicitly temporary.
Balkenende referred to the expense of her bodyguards, who cost the Netherlands $2.8 million a year, according to The International Herald Tribune.
In a strongly worded denouncement of The Hague, appearing in the LA Times, Salman Rushdie stated that the Dutch government promised full “diplomatic protection” to Hirsi Ali as early as 2002.
That offer was made to encourage Hirsi Ali to run in the Dutch parliamentary elections.
Other prominent writers have come to her defense, such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, authors respectively of “The End of Faith” and “God Is Not Great.”
Behind the withdrawal of funding, they argue, is a hypocritical attempt to appease extremists in a misguided search for cultural inclusiveness.
Although other voices have questioned whether the combative Hirsi Ali misrepresents Islam in her writing, it is hard to find anyone outside of the Dutch government defending the move to withdraw her protection.
Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh had collaborated on a short movie, “Submission,” about abused Muslim women. That project cost the director his life.
Pinned with a knife to his dead body was a letter threatening Hirsi Ali.
On Oct. 1, she returned to the Netherlands from the United States after The Hague declared it would no longer offer her protection while she was beyond Dutch borders.
The withdrawal of protection came a week after Hirsi Ali received resident alien status for the United States, where she has resided since 2006.
Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said that the security arrangements for her stay overseas were always explicitly temporary.
Balkenende referred to the expense of her bodyguards, who cost the Netherlands $2.8 million a year, according to The International Herald Tribune.
In a strongly worded denouncement of The Hague, appearing in the LA Times, Salman Rushdie stated that the Dutch government promised full “diplomatic protection” to Hirsi Ali as early as 2002.
That offer was made to encourage Hirsi Ali to run in the Dutch parliamentary elections.
Other prominent writers have come to her defense, such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, authors respectively of “The End of Faith” and “God Is Not Great.”
Behind the withdrawal of funding, they argue, is a hypocritical attempt to appease extremists in a misguided search for cultural inclusiveness.
Although other voices have questioned whether the combative Hirsi Ali misrepresents Islam in her writing, it is hard to find anyone outside of the Dutch government defending the move to withdraw her protection.
Headline Links: Author returns to the Netherlands
Oct. 5—The Dutch government’s protection was due to end in July, but Hirsi Ali was granted two extensions. When her security funding finally ended, she returned immediately to the Netherlands. Dutch authorities took her to a secret location, and she has communicated that she is not allowed to comment on her case.
Source: The International Herald Tribune
Oct. 5—Dutch Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin said in parliament that his government was not obliged to continue to pay for Hirsi Ali's security guards while she is in the United States. He added that when she was in the Netherlands "protection measures will be taken."
Source: The New York Times
Background: Van Gogh's murder and immigration issues
Hirsi Ali went into hiding after the murder of Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker and her collaborator on “Submission,” a 10-minute film about abused Muslim women. The women appeared in the film wearing transparent clothes. Visible on their skin were lines from the Quran that describe the physical punishments men are permitted to inflict on “misbehaving” women.
Source: The BBC
The asylum debate
When applying for asylum in the Netherlands in 1992, Hirsi Ali falsified her name and date of birth. She has since apologized for the deception and said that it was necessary to ensure that the husband she had been forced to marry couldn’t find her.
In 2006, the Dutch immigration minister, Rita Verdonk, called for Hirsi Ali to be stripped of her Dutch citizenship. Verdonk, a member of the same political party as Hirsi Ali, eventually backed down. But the affair encouraged the author to resign from The Hague and move to the United States.
When applying for asylum in the Netherlands in 1992, Hirsi Ali falsified her name and date of birth. She has since apologized for the deception and said that it was necessary to ensure that the husband she had been forced to marry couldn’t find her.
In 2006, the Dutch immigration minister, Rita Verdonk, called for Hirsi Ali to be stripped of her Dutch citizenship. Verdonk, a member of the same political party as Hirsi Ali, eventually backed down. But the affair encouraged the author to resign from The Hague and move to the United States.
June ’06—This profile of Hirsi Ali was written shortly after the call to have her citizenship revoked and details the political fallout that followed.
Source: The BBC
In her resignation speech, Hirsi Ali attributed her decision to leave the Netherlands to two factors. First, a Dutch court ruled in favor of her neighbors who had filed for her eviction on the grounds that her presence exposed them to danger. Second, there was the publicity surrounding the fact that she had lied on the asylum application in 1992. She told Dutch lawmakers that she had been “very open” about her deceit, and explained her motive for lying: “I was frightened that if I simply said I was fleeing a forced marriage, I would be sent back to my family.” An English translation of Hirsi Ali’s resignation speech, which she delivered in the Dutch parliament, is available online.
Source: ReligionNewsBlog.com
Christopher Hitchens writes that “as was said several times in heated debate in the Dutch parliament, the discovery of a false statement on an immigration form (even when the proof is not provided by the person concerned, as in this case) is not automatic grounds for the removal of citizenship.”
Source: Slate
Opinion: The Hague, Islam and 'Infidel'
On the Dutch Government
Authors Salman Rushdie and Sam Harris write that Hirsi Ali “may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust … There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.” They draw attention to a little-reported aspect of her story. According to Rushdie and Harris, her security situation forced Hirsi Ali to move from Holland to the United States in 2002, well before Van Gogh’s murder. She returned to the Netherlands at the request of the Dutch deputy prime minister, Gerrit Zalm, who promised her all the “diplomatic protection” that she might need.
Source: The LA Times
Dutch writer Leon de Winter is convinced that “without protection she doesn’t have a day left to live.” De Winter lauds Hirsi Ali for her courage, but also argues that “whether we think she is nice, kind or opportunist, we cannot afford anything happening to her.”
Source: Die Spiegel
Anne Applebaum, a Washington Post columnist, has little time for the Dutch government’s argument that its recent decision to cease funding Hirsi Ali’s security is purely financial. “To put it bluntly,” Applebaum writes, “many in Holland find her too loud and too public in her condemnation of radical Islam.” The article contrasts Hirsi Ali’s predicament with that of Salman Rushdie, who, so argues Applebaum, remains alive because he is still “under the protection of the British police and secret services.”
Source: Slate
Self-proclaimed contrarian Christopher Hitchens begins his op-ed by looking back to 1995 and the Dutch withdrawal from the U.N.-protected “safe haven” at Srebrenica, in Bosnia. The massacre that followed claimed an estimated 8,000 ethnic Muslim lives. This event, argues Hitchens, stained Holland’s well-deserved reputation for “peaceful democratic consensus” and “civic fortitude.” He claims that discontinuing security funding for Hirsi Ali will be a blemish on Dutch history comparable to the military negligence of 1995. Hitchens writes, “Ayaan Hirsi Ali has become a symbol of the resistance, by many women from the Muslim world, to gender apartheid, ‘honor’ killing, genital mutilation, and other horrors of clerical repression.”
Source: Slate
On immoderation among Islam’s critics
Karen Armstrong is a former Catholic nun, a prominent religious scholar, and the author on several well-respected studies of religion.
Karen Armstrong is a former Catholic nun, a prominent religious scholar, and the author on several well-respected studies of religion.
Armstrong has compared the Muslim woman’s veil to the nun’s habit, and finds that customs of religious dress point to other similarities between the religions. Armstrong calls for moderation among those who present Islam as intrinsically misogynistic, arguing that “where the veil is forbidden, women hasten to wear it.”
Source: The Guardian
In many articles and books, Armstrong has addressed what she perceives as the misrepresentation of Islam as inherently violent. In the article “Balancing the Prophet,” she rebuts Islam’s critics: “The traditions of any religion are multifarious. It is easy, therefore, to quote so selectively that the main thrust of the faith is distorted.” Armstrong, a scholar who has made a number of studies on the history of faith, adds, “Islam has a far better record than either Christianity or Judaism of appreciating other faiths.”
Source: Medieval News
On Hirsi Ali’s bestselling memoir ‘Infidel’
Review aggregator Metacritic.com collates all the book reviews from the major international newspapers and magazines. Overall, “Infidel” gets a 77 percent rating, signaling “generally favorable reviews.”
Source: Metacritic.com
The Economist questions how frank the author of “Infidel” really is. The reviewer refers to a Dutch documentary that claimed that though Hirsi Ali came to the Netherlands fleeing an arranged marriage, her life was not in danger. The uproar that followed the documentary, which also drew attention to the false details she entered on her asylum application, almost cost Hirsi Ali her Dutch citizenship. Regarding her new book, The Economist writes, “The facts as she tells them about the many chances she passed up to get out of the marriage—how her father and his clan disapproved of violence against women; how relatives already in the Netherlands helped her to gain asylum; and how her ex-husband peaceably agreed to a divorce—hardly seem to bear her out.”
Source: The Economist
Reviewer William Grimes finds the memoir to be that of “a woman very like one of George Eliot’s heroines—earnest, high-minded and ardent, forever chafing at the limits imposed by her religion and her society.” Grimes describes the book as “brave, inspiring and beautifully written.”
Source: The New York Times
Reference Material: The death threat and Islam in Europe
MilitantIslamMonitor.org purports to carry an accurate English translation of the letter pinned to Van Gogh’s body.
Source: MilitantIslamMonitor.org
Approximately 6 percent of the Dutch population is Muslim. The number of Muslims started to rise in the ‘60s, as the Dutch government encouraged immigration from Turkey and Morocco to meet a shortage of workers. This MSNBC roundup covers the importance of Islam to the politics of many European countries.
Source: MSNBC
By mid-century, one in five Europeans will be Muslim, according to the Chicago Tribune. The report argues that Europe is struggling to adjust to the growing Islamic population and re-evaluating its laws and culture in this context.
Source: The Chicago Tribune
The Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based policy think tank, has a detailed Q&A on the influence of Islam on European culture and politics. The report quotes Oliver Roy, a French scholar, who according to the CFR claims that “fewer than 10 percent of Europe’s Muslims actively support radical Islamist causes, but that the result is tainting their neighborhoods.”
Source: The Council on Foreign Relations
The Netherlands (also known colloquially as Holland) is a constitutional monarchy with a tradition of rational liberalism. The Economist carries a detailed overview of the country and a round-up of important Dutch news stories from the last couple of years.
Source: The Economist
Hirsi Ali is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. This think tank’s Web site carries the tag line “Competition of ideas is fundamental to a free society,” and the AEI describes itself as a “private, nonpartisan, not-for-profit institution,” the purposes of which “are to defend the principles and improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism.”
Source: The American Enterprise Institute
Key Players: Hirsi Ali
Hirsi Ali at the American Enterprise Institute
Hirsi Ali is a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, which publishes a short biography and a selection of her publications online.
Hirsi Ali is a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, which publishes a short biography and a selection of her publications online.
According to her AEI profile, Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia. She escaped an arranged marriage in 1992 by seeking asylum in the Netherlands.
Source: The American Enterprise Institute
In her essay “Islam as I See It,” the Somalian-born former Muslim writes, “The Western world would be wise to recognize the realities of Islam, a religion laid down in writing over a millennium ago with violence and oppression at its heart.”
Source: The American Enterprise Institute
Related Links: Salman Rushdie and Muslims’ letter to the pope
Oct. 11—Islamic scholars wrote to the leader of the Roman Catholic Church to ask for efforts to achieve greater understanding between the two religions. In a 29-page open letter titled “A Common Word between Us and You,” they write, “Muslims and Christians together make up well over half of the world’s population. Without peace and justice between these two religious communities, there can be no meaningful peace in the world.”
Source: The Guardian
For a rundown on recent developments concerning Hirsi Ali’s fellow author and supporter Salman Rushdie, see our story “Rushdie’s Knighthood Prompts New Threats.”
Source: findingDulcinea
© 2009 Dulcinea Media, Inc.
