You won't beat terror with tolerance (an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali)

A letter staked through the heart of the dying film director Theo van Gogh began: “Open letter to Hirsi Ali.” So the men in black detailed to protect today’s special guest were bound to be twitchy.

Still, presidents have turned up in smaller motorcades than this. An advance team has already interrogated and frisked your interviewer, even dismantling the tape recorder in search of bombs. Tension crackles through the damp Dutch air as walkie-talkie chatter intensifies: “She’s arrived!” shouts a spook.

In Ayaan Hirsi Ali sweeps, as beautiful as she is reputedly brilliant, surrounded by a medium-sized army of minders.

Strife, you see, is Ali’s constant companion. She is Europe’s most vociferous opponent of radical Islam, who wrote the script of Submission, a film about Muslim mistreatment of women, which led to van Gogh’s murder. There is nothing like a former believer to scorn a religion. She has called it “backward” and attacked the Prophet’s alleged penchant for underage sex.

Her zeal made her a Dutch MP, international talk-show darling and one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. But it also made her many enemies. After a recent documentary accused Somali-born Ali of lying to gain asylum in Holland in 1992, the Dutch home secretary sent her a letter informing her she “never has been a Dutch citizen”. A refugee for the second time in her 36 years, she is resigning from the Dutch parliament and moving to America.

Van Gogh’s murderer promised Ali “torture and agony”. So, I suggest at our secret rendezvous in the Hague, surely those evil prayers have been answered.

“He wanted me to burn in hell,” she manages to smile. “What I am going through is at an emotional level.” Initially, she insists she had already decided to quit Holland. Later, finally lowering her guard, she explains how deep those emotions are.

“I hadn’t realised how sentimentally attached I had become to being Dutch,” she says, gazing into a garden of drenched tulips. “For the first time since Theo died, I cried. I knew politics was tough but this felt like a kick in the belly.”

This from one intimately acquainted with pain: as a child she suffered clitoral circumcision; aged 23 she absconded to Holland to avoid an arranged marriage. She has not seen her family since reaching Holland, where she worked as a cleaner before attending university and crawling through the political snake-pit.

Even before Submission — which projected words from the Koran onto the backs of naked women — Ali had bodyguards, but the hysteria grew so intense neighbours won a court order to evict her. Her presence, they claimed, infringed their human rights as she was a security risk. Oh, and she was murdering property prices. Well, her flat boasted bulletproof glass, panic buttons and live-in bodyguards. It must be weird finding secret service agents in the shower.

“Weird, and difficult,” she laughs. “But at least you don’t worry about your life. I am close to the bodyguards, in a businesslike way. During peaks in publicity I have to be particularly careful — I can’t even go to the supermarket.”

Any celebrity will tell you fame has a price, but the price Ali has paid is exorbitant. With her long neck, long nose and even longer legs (Peter Crouch with grace), it is easy to see why the media have embraced her. Does she regret using her glamour to quite such potent effect?

“I wasn’t aware of it,” she almost whispers, stroking a pearl earring. “The Somali idea of beauty is so different. I certainly didn’t grow up feeling beautiful.” If she has achieved anything, she says, it is that now when she appears on Newsnight she is taken sufficiently seriously for Jeremy Paxman to be rude. “At first the feeling was you can’t really grill a black woman. Now I am treated normally.”

Still, outside the studio, life must be lonely. Is marriage impossible? “Not impossible,” she says firmly. “I’m not going to compromise my happiness, but I must find someone strong enough,” she says, pointing to the door, behind which lurks half the Dutch army. “I do come with a huge price.”

Yet, I flirt shamelessly, you are a huge prize. “I will tell him that,” she smiles. Ah, so Ali does not live entirely like a nun! “I’m afraid I can’t say,” she giggles. How about family? It was an interview with her brother in the recent documentary, claiming Ali had not fled persecution in 1992, that led to the investigation into her background.

Ali has since spoken to her brother by phone: “He said he wanted to improve the relationship, but the first question he asked was, ‘Is it true you have renounced Islam?’ I could only reply, ‘Would it be all right if I answer later?’” For the record, Ali is now an atheist. Papa forgave her for escaping marriage, but was so furious about Submission they were only just back on speaking terms when the recent documentary aired.

“It is because I miss my family so much that I walked into the huge trap of taking part in the documentary. They told me they had footage of my brother, and I was happy like a little girl. I was naive.”

A critic might say she was hypocritical, for surely she is a victim of the hardline policies against terrorism — and by extension, immigration — that she championed?

“There is a misunderstanding,” she hits back. “I’m not for closed borders. What I advocated was ending the current system, which only lets in those who are miserable, and instead letting in those loyal to the country, believing in its values.”

She admits she lied to gain asylum — claiming she was fleeing Somalia, when she had spent the previous decade in relative comfort in Kenya — but insists she had already admitted this elsewhere.

Indeed, she says she even came clean to her VVD party when it invited her to stand for parliament. The party, she says, had the secret services investigate her and declared itself content: “Eighty per cent of asylum seekers cheat the system and most Dutch people laugh,” she says. “The action against me was just so un-Dutch.” But surely it was the murder of van Gogh that stirred the Dutch into being, well, less “Dutch”. Post- 9/11, they are no longer laughing.

She is a curious mix, Ali. Her hardline image has won her a job at a right-wing think tank. But her critique of Muslim immigrants is a liberal one: that they reject Dutch freedoms such as the sexual revolution. “We have had radical Muslims throwing paint bombs at nude paintings. They complain billboards advertising underwear are there to insult them. They aren’t, they are there to sell underwear.”

She supports a video Holland shows would-be immigrants of gays kissing and women letting it all hang out — the point being, if it offends you, don’t come.

“Something major happened in Holland in 1968, the year before I was born,” she says. “A view emerged that authority was bad — and not just the state’s. You should negotiate with children, not tell them what to do. There was a paradigm shift from authority to negotiation. It was extreme stuff: in Holland, students can negotiate their exam mark.”

Her new American friends might tut that this is precisely the wussy attitude that turned Europeans into cheese-eating surrender monkeys, but Ali applauds Holland’s liberalism. She paints pre-9/11 Amsterdam as Utopia, where drugs and prostitution were legalised.

“With legalisation went education, so though people might experiment once, drug addiction and use of prostitutes went down. It was fantastic.”

There is, inevitably, a “but” in her eulogy to Dutch life. Many immigrants still think in the “authoritarian” way of their homeland, not in the Dutch way of “negotiation”. Until newcomers are taught tolerance, Ali argues, the state will have to be more authoritarian to clamp down on Muslim extremists. If it is too laissez-faire, the underclass will turn still further against immigration, stirring racial unrest.

“The underclass says, ‘If we commit a crime, we are punished. Why aren’t immigrants? We wait 10 years for a house. They have to wait 10 days’.”

A familiar cry to British and, no doubt, French ears: proof that in one respect the nations of Europe are growing more alike — in their racial disharmony. What does she make of Britain’s response to the “clash of civilisations”? Before she gives her serious answer, she lampoons Tony Blair.

“I had a good laugh when he claimed to have read the Koran from cover to cover twice: nobody has. And when he said there was no conflict between the two civilisations, he missed 600 years of history.” She pauses, breaking into a grin: “I am no longer a politician. I can say such things now.”

While Britain beats Holland at encouraging immigrants to be entrepreneurs, our “politically correct attitudes are worse”, she says. Surely not worse than “pass the spliff” Holland’s? “You pretend it’s fine, you laugh about Londonistan, but you have all these terrorists who don’t accept basic British values. And you don’t really talk about it.”

We will be forced to talk about it next month when Ali comes over to promote a book, which promises to be as provocative as Submission, this time dealing with Muslim treatment of gays. It will also feature the Prophet transported to modern-day New York, forced by three great western liberal philosophers, Mill, Popper and Hayek, to recognise the failure of many Muslim societies.

She insists her new employer, the American Enterprise Institute, will let her stoke such dangerous fires, unlike timid old Europe: “I think it is why Europe is going down the drain. The United States seems more comfortable with competing ideas.”

Ali is compelling. But if her fervour is her strength, it is also her weakness, alienating the very liberals she should court. Throughout our afternoon together, she brands those who fail to stand up to “the historical mistake of radical Islam” as “the appeasers”. And she uses “appeasers” pointedly. When she was forced to leave her flat, she reflected: “My neighbours confirm the critical view that very few Dutch were brave enough to stand up to the Nazis.” True, perhaps, but not a way to win friends.

She is surely right that “appeasers” so fear being called “racist” they would rather let Muslim women in Europe live in submission. But the modern-day Nazis are not just the Islamo-fascists. There are plenty of whites keen to attack innocent Muslims. And the “appeasers” would claim these are the people they are trying to protect. Still, if Europe is no longer big enough for Ali, we are all in trouble. It is sad that the home of the Enlightenment can no longer cope with her right to free speech.

This brave woman tells truths that liberals hate (liberals hate truth - one wonders why they are always claiming to "speak truth to power" - a bit of bitter irony there). Typical of the mainstream British press to claim that she's too strident to court those "liberals" she should be trying to win over. Liberals are soft on Islamic fascism, just like they coddled the Communists. Welcome to America, Ms. Ali!

What a shame that Europe treated her like this!

True, but I think she might find her new friends at the American Enterprise Institute significantly more influential than her friends in Holland.

She is a curious mix, Ali. Her hardline image has won her a job at a right-wing think tank. But her critique of Muslim immigrants is a liberal one

Nonsense. She "gets it". The author of the article clearly doesn't. To the author, everything "liberal" is goodness and light, while right-wingers are Neanderthals. What a foolish attitude. Being "liberal" these days is the antithesis of being tolerant, at least when it comes to tolerating individual liberty, differences of opinion, independent thought instead of group-think, and reason. The only tolerance that liberals typically evidence is a tolerance of filth, lies, and treason, as long as it it compatible with their narrow orthodoxies and childish worldviews. There's not a chance that she would have been invited to join a liberal American think tank.

I read her book, The Caged Virgin. I am deeply shocked that she had to leave Holland. I know that the Dutch are working hard on the issues of immigration, but this is a disgrace. who cares if you legalize hash but don't defend free speech?

In a way it's a good thing that she had to leave Holland. Holland is just too small a place to hide in. In the US, she has more leeway to hide. Security is just going to be better. And if she lives in Virginia she can carry a gun openly.

"as a child she suffered clitoral circumcision"

What a dainty name for a complete amputation (clitorectomy), without anesthesia, and a less-than-sterile cutting tool, often the edge of a piece of broken glass.

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