No doubt, Ms. Hirsi Ali will also receive death threats in the US. She will also have networks carefully "balance" her comments with the likes of Ibrahaim Hooper and Company. Hopefully, she will expose the death threats, expose organizations like CAIR and, just maybe, attract some supporters and open some closed eyes and ears at American universities. It will be interesting to see how she is received in the African-American community too.

Posted by: maryrose at May 20, 2006 11:20 AM

An interesting article, from aljazeerah editorial opinions.

Hyaan Hersi Ali's Contemptible Performance

By Ali Al-Hail

"Al-Jazeerah, February 12, 2006

Hyaan Hersi Ali, is a typical Western bought – ‘supposed ’ Muslim. She is a Dutch – Somali born Member of Parliament. The Western media, led by the BBC have since yesterday, been acclaiming her as a Muslim voice, supporting the satirizing and caricaturing the Prophet Mohammed peace be upon him (PBUH), by the Jyllands Posten Danish paper, and who is in favor for republishing the 12 shameful cartoons.

For the sake of acquiring a Dutch nationality, (for which Hyaan Hersi Ali, had changed her Middle name to match up with those Dutch sounding names ‘Hersi’), that had disgracefully, filled a gap in her starving abdomen, and apparently, for a fistful of Euros, she sold out her skin.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in an attempt to please her masters in the Netherlands said in an interview with the BBC in Berlin yesterday that, it was "correct to publish the cartoons" in Jyllands Posten and "right to republish them" (BBC, Feb. 9).

She dishonorably, sounded as a loyal slave, who was eager to bow and to submit to her masters. What a great humiliation, when a person fleshes off her \ his identity for a ‘smutty loaf of bread’?

According to the BBC, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has finished up writing a script which is ready for Acquiescence. Her anti Muslim - insulting work, debatably, reinforces Certain stereotypes, regarding women in Islam.

This stereotypical subject, was also the centerpiece of the late Dutch film writer, Theo van Gogh, whose Hersi talked about as a colleague, and who was assassinated in Amsterdam during November 2004. Like Hyaan Hersi Ali, Van Gogh, had spread a poke of lies about women in Islam.

Professor, Dr. Ali Al-Hail, Professor of Mass Communication, Fulbright Visiting Scholar and Board Member of AUSACE ASC, IABD, NEBAA, BEA, IMDA and EAJMC American Associations. "

I believe the Fulbright program was meant to increase mutual understanding between Americans and other peoples.
(Can't seem to paste link: just type @ayaan hersi ali denmark' into google)

Posted by: wallyUK at May 20, 2006 8:40 PM

By continuing to lift her (Hirsi Ali) voice in anger, she stands in the way of an -

Illusory "multicultural harmony."

What is clear is that all over Europe we are having trouble with Islamic peoples; there are serious issues of loyalty to one’s country, of wishing to practice their laws over ours, violating the rights of the individual, in particular the female. And we are being told that we need to bring in even more Islamic citizens, [if you can call them citizens - as many don’t believe in Europe].

Though, what has to be put down as miraculous - we are going to bring X million amount of new Turkish citizens into Europe in this slow motion train wreck called Turkish ascension.

Are we dreaming here? Turkey is a democratic country, that means that the Turkish have every right to an Islamic state. But in Europe we are choosing to call those who want Islamic law in Turkey – subversive. In fact there was a vote some years ago, where the Turkish were asked to make that choice and the city dwellers won out and secular law was upheld. Just this week a practicing lawyer killed a judge, in the court room, in protest against a secular ruling. Even the Turkish leader is not in support of this forced secularization, has stated that he has sent his daughters to school in the US, because they are allowed to wear their Islamic headscarves to school, where they cannot in Turkey.

Believe it of not - that this is the Turkey we are going to get.

Our dream seems to be that these Islamic newcomers to Europe will either remain this subdued, peasant type of citizen, or that they will on mass adjust and become European-like. But a large enough group of organized Islamic citizens – within Europe can wreak havoc on the systems of law, by demanding political change in accordance with Islam.

Will we end up with areas of Europe where the rights of the individual are not respected? Or where women have little or no rights?

There is a reason why there are loads of Islamic people living on the borders of Europe, because when they tried to take Europe over, they were pushed back. Perhaps we need to respect these boundaries again. We must trust ourselves.

Posted by: Pass It On at May 20, 2006 9:33 PM

Al-Jazeerah article,

The very obvious ill-treatment and the low status given to the women in Islam – must prove a constant source of embarrassment for those within the religion like Dr. Ali Al-Hail, who at least outwardly - wish to appear modern and forward thinking.

******
Any way I could tell it was an Islamic man who wrote the article - an Islamic woman (being just a step above a ‘beast of the field’) would have needed permission to speak so freely.

It must be so difficult for this man to accept that Hirsi Ali is capable of doing her own thinking – by herself.

Posted by: Pass It On at May 20, 2006 10:08 PM

Sadly, you can now add the Canadian leftist elites to the list of European leftist elites who have abandoned anyone who dares to criticize the practices of Islamic culture. Haroon Siddiqui wrote this lead editorial in the Toronto Star. I hope you have a strong stomach:

Why the jig is up for Hirsi Ali in Holland
She catered to the worst prejudices about Muslims, Islam says Haroon Siddiqui

May 21, 2006. 01:00 AM
HAROON SIDDIQUI

The sudden fall from grace of Dutch Muslim MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali offers a cautionary tale about Western gullibility in these Islamophobic times.

She has been exposed as the equivalent of such Iraqi exiles as Ahmad Chalabi and Iyad Allawi. They told the tall tales the Bush administration wanted to hear to wage war. She told the stories the Dutch, and many Europeans, craved, to confirm their anti-Muslim prejudices.

Like the Iraqi exiles, she knew exactly which buttons to push.

She was an abused wife who had fled a forced marriage and also her vengeful family and clan. An "ex-Muslim," she was out to liberate Muslim women and tame Islam to her liking and those of her benefactors.

She wrote and narrated the Theo Van Gogh documentary Submission about the subjugation of Muslim women that led to his murder and to death threats against her, placing her under 24-hour guard.

Along the way she let it be known she had lied about her name, age and how she had entered Holland in 1992, not directly from her homeland of Somalia but via Saudi Arabia, Kenya and Germany, a fact that would have undermined her claim, rather than expedited it.

The Dutch didn't mind. Many refugee claimants embellish their stories. Besides, she was a heroine they had embraced, a "moderate" Muslim waging war against "fanatical" believers.

To her detractors, hers was a case, at best, of bitter personal experience passed off as the norm for all Muslims, and, at worst, relentless self-promotion that had won her fame and invitations from such places as Toronto during the so-called sharia debate and to the U.S. to bask in the company of Dick Cheney and Bernard Lewis.

Her well-ordered world came crashing down recently when a TV documentary suggested her entire claim to stardom was a fraud; not only had there been no forced marriage and no family vendetta but that she enjoyed good relations with her family and husband, both before and after settling in Holland.

Professor Jytte Klausen of Brandeis University, author of The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe, who knows Hirsi Ali and has followed her case closely, said in a telephone interview Thursday:

"She wasn't forced into a marriage. She had an amicable relationship with her husband, as well as with the rest of her family. It was not true that she had to hide from her family for years."

Why, then, has her estranged/former husband not spoken up?

"Because Hirsi Ali has asked him not to. They parted company amicably."

The revelation, Klausen said, proved the last straw for Ali's colleagues in government.

The ruling right-wing VVD party was already running out of patience with her, not because it had discovered multicultural tolerance or political correctness but because "it was just tired of her jumping up like a jack-in-a-box" anytime anyone poked holes in her neatly knitted tale or differed with her.

For example, when a government think-tank issued a report last month puncturing the prevailing anti-Islamic orthodoxy, she accused its authors of "sticking their heads in the sand."

The Scientific Council for Government Policy had simply stated the obvious: Islam, like any religion, has many strands, conservative to liberal, with varying attitudes toward gender parity, and that Muslim nations "do not satisfy contemporary international standards on democracy and human rights, (but) in this, they do not differ from many other developing countries."

The council also condemned "the climate of confrontation and stereotypical thinking," the turf Hirsi Ali plays on.

The jig is up for Hirsi Ali in Holland. She may move to the U.S., as a fellow at the neo-con American Enterprise Institute.

She would be welcomed in certain circles, which, Klausen warned, "want to see in American politics the development of a kind of Islam-bashing we've seen in Europe for a while."

The American ambassador to The Hague has already met her to pave the way.

She and the Bush administration may deserve each other.

Also, it goes without saying that she is fully entitled to her views, however provocative.

The problem lies elsewhere — in the readiness of the paranoiac post-9/11 world to hear and believe the worst about Muslims and Islam. Hirsi Ali is just one of many to cater to that demand.

Haroon Siddiqui, the Star's editorial page editor emeritus, appears Thursday and Sunday. hsiddiq@thestar.ca.

Of course, Siddiqui never bothers to analyze Hirsi Ali's positions directly. Instead, he uses every rhetorical fallacy, including ad hominem attacks, guilt by association (Cheney???), argument from adverse consequences, etc., to shoot down an opponent whom he doesn't like. Typical of left-wing screeds, I have found.

Haroon Saddiqui has a long, well-deserved professional reputation. He never met a Third World practice he didn't like, and he always blames the West for everything in the world. I'll give you one guess what his position was in the Mohammed cartoon controversy. I don't know if he is Muslim himself. But it doesn't matter. As far as he's concerned, if Islam comes out of the Middle East (sans Israel), it's gotta be good. A Google search of his past writings, or of the Toronto Star archive, will confirm this.

Posted by: Steven L. at May 21, 2006 12:31 PM