Excellent profile of Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the New York Times Magazine. Hirsi Ali is the Somali refugee who came to the Netherlands in 1992; she eventually renounced her Muslim faith, went into national politics, and has repeatedly taken on the dark side of Islam. Inevitably, a never-ending stream of death threats from Dutch Muslims has been her reward. This is what she now faces when she grabs a meal at a restaurant:
That day at the Dudok [a brasserie in The Hague], several dozen vocational students were taking up the main restaurant, so she and her guards parked at two tables near the bar. Hirsi Ali had her back to the restaurant when one of the students, apparently a Dutch convert to Islam, tapped her on the shoulder. "I turned around," she recalls in her elegant English, "and saw this sweet, young Dutch guy, about 24 years old. With freckles! And he was like, 'Madam, I hope the mujahedeen get you and kill you.' " Hirsi Ali handed him her knife and told him, "Why don't you do it yourself?"
In thirteen years, she's come a long way — from cleaning lady who neither spoke nor understood a word of Dutch, to one of the most eloquent and certainly most widely-recognized Dutch parliamentarians. In the process, she's had to divorce herself from religious indoctrination such as this (which her one-time teacher, Sister Aziza, called "inner jihad"):
When Hirsi Ali was 16, an Iranian-trained Shiite fundamentalist arrived to teach at the previously Anglophile Muslim Girls' Secondary School in Nairobi. The girls had been reading "Little Women" and Mark Twain and Dickens. That changed. Sister Aziza wore a full Muslim wrap and gloves. She was so pale, graceful and charismatic that Hirsi Ali's eyes still widen when she speaks of her. In the tender way of an elder sister, Aziza began questioning the girls about their Muslim observance. A Muslim prayed five times a day, she told them, and anyone who did not was not a Muslim. A Muslim did not wear shorts and T-shirts, even to sports class. The teacher took them to eat sweets and read magazines at the Iranian Embassy — the East African equivalent of being wined and dined. "Gradually we were covering ourselves," Hirsi Ali remembers. "We were not taking part in sports, we were not laughing anymore, we were not visiting each other anymore. We were praying five times a day. We were reading the Koran. And suddenly we hated Israel with a passion. We didn't even know where Israel was. I was 16, and I had never seen an Israeli, but we hated them because it was 'Muslim' to hate them."
Times writer Christopher Caldwell ends his piece by saying that
Hirsi Ali has been dealt a full house of the royal virtues: courage, intelligence, compassion.
Roger, that.
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