Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Witch

The fearless Ayaan Hirsi Ali spoke at Harvard last week, facing down an audience of moonbats and Islamist sympathizers. A sampling:

On immigrating to The Netherlands:

She described her life in the camp with other asylum seekers and what became a growing fascination: "I am a Muslim," she began, “How on Earth was it possible for a non-western country to be so peaceful? I realized that we asylum seekers from Tunisia, from Somalia, from Iran, from Iraq, we from Muslim countries misunderstood Islam. In our countries, government terrorized you. Here, government served the people. Governments did nasty things to you, they terrorized you, they took your money. In the West, they did things like take your garbage away. It was unthinkable."

The enlightened Harvard audience bristled with excuses to reject her right to say things they don't like:

The Q&A afterwards demonstrated the forces that Ayaan is working against. Most questions to her were fairly hostile: How can an atheist reform Islam? What is your agenda? Why are you speaking about Islam when you are not a theologian? Isn't what you're doing extreme and dangerous and how is it serving the cause? Why should a Muslim listen to you? Aren't you setting up a straw man argument, saying that Muslims are either good Muslims or they're Osama bin Laden? Why are you only harping about Islam? What about the Hindu texts?

Ayaan was unflappable and graceful in her responses."I speak about Islamic texts because that is what I know. Religion is public, ideas are public. It is necessary and urgent to review, revise, and discuss Islam as a body of ideas. It is time to examine the links between religion and values."

Ali, a duly elected Dutch parliamentarian, has been living under round-the-clock police protection for years now, for saying things like this loudly and repeatedly. Her neighbors find all the fuss terribly inconvenient, and have succeeded in using the European Convention on Human Rights to evict her:

Liberal Party MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been ordered to vacate the high-security home she is renting in The Hague within four months.

An appeal court sided with her neighbours who complained her presence put their own safety at risk and caused disruption to their lives.

Hirsi Ali and fellow MP Geert Wilders spent several months in hiding in secret locations due to death threats made against them because of their stance on Islam. "I think this is dreadful, horrible to have to move. I am happy living here and I feel safe," Hirsi Ali said in response to the judgement.

The neighbours lost their case initially but they won on Thursday when an appeal court accepted Hirsi Ali's presence meant they no longer felt safe in their own apartments or in the communal areas of the complex. The court ruled that is contravened Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights which guarantees respect for a person's private and family life.

No respect is owed to Ali's rights, of course. When the rights of the collective are placed over the rights of the individual, troublemakers become expendable.

And now, the final insult. Something like 95% of asylum claims are fraudulent, and a large number of "refugees" are jihadists of the sort who butchered Theo van Gogh. Generally, the problem is ignored, and certainly, few are deported. Yet the Dutch government is now investigating Ali's original asylum claim, with an eye to stripping her of Dutch citizenship and deporting her.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch legislator who has championed the rights of Muslim women, is returning from a book tour to a firestorm for lying on her asylum application when she fled to the Netherlands in 1992 to escape an arranged marriage.

Hirsi Ali, 36, said Saturday she was puzzled by the uproar since she publicly acknowledged the false refugee application when she stood for parliament in 2002. "Have they all gone mad?" she said, accusing her rivals of a political vendetta. "Yes, I did lie to get asylum in Holland. This is public knowledge since at least September 2002," she said in a telephone call from Hamburg, Germany.

Political opponents want her stripped of her Dutch citizenship and deported. Others say she should be expelled from parliament.

The latest political storm followed the airing of a 30-minute TV documentary Thursday tracing her steps from Somalia, where her father was an imprisoned opposition politician, to her family's exile in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya.

Hirsi Ali repeated on the TV documentary that when she arrived in 1992 she changed her name from Hirsi Magan and her birth date on her asylum application and did not tell the authorities that she had lived in three different countries since leaving Somalia.

"I invented a story that would be consistent with the conditions for asylum," she told The Associated Press.

Which was public knowledge four years ago, a more logical time to begin the investigation, if such a thing had to be done at all. The Netherlands is swarming with Islamist "refugees" who isolate themselves in dank shari'a ghettoes, and are largely left alone until they venture out and kill someone. Yet the immigrant they want to deport is Europe's model integration success story.

Better yet, European governments could try investigating the claims of asylum-seekers at the time application is made, and denying those that cannot be substantiated. This would also obviate the injustice of punishing bona fide refugees like Ali for the government's earlier negligence.

Further, they could try denying entry to terrorists wanted by their home governments -- killers who are given asylum in Europe because Arab dictatorships want to execute them. The ECHR prohibits European governments from repatriating anyone who might face the death penalty, often at the expense of their own citizens' safety.

(It would be interesting to tally up the number of Europeans killed as a direct result of the European Convention on Human Rights. An execrable piece of collectivist garbage, it covers all the minutiae, but ignores the big stuff -- like the right of law-abiding citizens to live unmolested on their own soil, or the right to speak freely of wanting this right.)

Such rational policies might have barred Ali's entry, but they would also have prevented Europe from becoming a sanctuary for the same Islamist butchers she fled in Somalia. Instead of rallying to protect her, the mob of terrified villagers clamors to toss her in a pond or burn her at the stake -- hoping, perhaps, that the alligator will eat them last.

But this is what Europeans do when times get tough. The more things change, the more they stay the same.