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Ayaan Hirsi Ali

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Political People

   CAPTION: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

        Born       November 13, 1969
                   Mogadishu, Somalia
      Known for    Submission
                   The Caged Virgin
                   The Infidel
     Occupation    politician, author, film maker
   Political party People's Party for Freedom and Democracy
      Religion     Atheist

   Ayaan Hirsi Ali ( pronunciation ), born Ayaan Hirsi Magan 13 November
   1969 in Mogadishu, Somalia, is a Dutch feminist and politician,
   daughter of Hirsi Magan Isse. She is a prominent (and often
   controversial) author, film maker, and critic of Islam. She was a
   member of the Tweede Kamer (the Lower House of the States-General of
   the Netherlands) for the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD)
   from January 30, 2003 until May 16, 2006.

   Hirsi Ali has had to maintain a high level of security due to threats
   against her life for voicing views critical of Islam. For example, her
   film Submission, directed by Theo van Gogh (who himself was
   assassinated for this film), made her one of the targets of the Hofstad
   Network.

   On May 15, 2006, officials of the Netherlands government cast doubt on
   Hirsi Ali's status as a Dutch national, because she provided false
   information in her application for refugee status in the Netherlands.
   She later used the same false information when she applied for, and was
   granted, Dutch citizenship. The Dutch minister of immigration and
   integration, Rita Verdonk, moved to annul her citizenship, a move that
   was later overridden on the urging of Parliament. She released to the
   New York Times personal letters from her father and other family
   members that affirmed her story about fleeing a forced marriage. On
   June 27, 2006, the Dutch government announced that Hirsi Ali would keep
   her Dutch citizenship after she signed the mea culpa dictate that
   indirectly lead to the fall of the second Balkenende cabinet.

   On May 16, Hirsi Ali announced her resignation from parliament and
   confirmed her previous statement that she would move to the United
   States to work at the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-market
   economics think tank. Her prospective arrival in September 2006 was
   welcomed by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick.

Biography

Youth

   Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia into the Majeerteen sub-clan of the
   Darod clan. Her first name, Ayaan, means "lucky person" or "luck" in
   the Somali language. Her father, Hirsi Magan Isse, was a prominent
   member of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front and a leading figure in
   the civil war of Somalia. Although her father, who had studied in Italy
   and the United States, was opposed to female genital cutting, a Somali
   tradition, when Hirsi Ali was five years old her grandmother had the
   procedure performed on her while her father was abroad.

   When she was six, her family left the country for Saudi Arabia, later
   moving to Ethiopia and then to Kenya, where the family obtained
   political asylum. In Kenya she attended the English-language Muslim
   Girls' Secondary School in Nairobi under sponsorship of the UNCHR,
   where, for a brief period she received guest lessons from a
   fundamentalist teacher called Aziza. Following the invasion by the
   secular nation of Iraq of the Islamic republic of Iran, she sympathised
   with Iran, and the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and wore a hijab (full
   head-scarf) together with her school uniform. After secondary school
   she attended a secretarial course at the Valley College in Nairobi
   (near Yaya centre) for one year.

Pre-political career

   Hirsi Ali arrived in the Netherlands in 1992. There is considerable
   lack of clarity about the events leading up to her arrival, because she
   has since admitted to making false statements in her application for
   asylum.

   Hirsi Ali maintains that in 1992 her father arranged for her to marry a
   distant cousin living in Canada. Her family has denied this, however.
   It is not disputed that in 1992 she traveled from Kenya to visit family
   in Düsseldorf and Berlin, Germany. Others have put the story of her
   forced marriage in doubt. After a brief stay in Germany, she decided to
   go to the Netherlands instead of Canada.

   Once in the Netherlands, she requested political asylum and received a
   residence permit. It is not known on what grounds she received
   political asylum. Legally, since her first stop was in Germany, she
   should have applied for asylum there. Also she had already resided in
   and had been granted refugee status in Kenya, a safe country. In the
   Netherlands, she gave a false name and date of birth to the Dutch
   immigration authorities. She is known in the West by her assumed name,
   Hirsi Ali, instead of her original name, Hirsi Magan. On the advice of
   her aunt, she told the immigration authorities that she had come
   straight from Somalia, instead of Kenya where she had been living for
   eleven years. In Somalia there was a serious famine at that time and a
   civil war leading to the Operation Restore Hope by the United States.
   Due to these circumstances, asylum seekers from Somalia were routinely
   granted asylum on humanitarian grounds. Hirsi Ali received a residence
   permit within three weeks on arrival in the Netherlands.

   After receiving asylum, she held various short-term jobs, ranging from
   cleaning to mail sorting. During this time she took courses in Dutch
   and a one-year course in Social Work. Following her initial studies,
   she studied political science at the University of Leiden until 2000.
   Between 1995 and 2001, she worked as an independent interpreter and
   translator for many years speaking for Somali women in asylum centres,
   hostels for battered women (an experience that has marked her deeply)
   and the National Migration Service.

   She saw at firsthand the way certain practices she thought she had left
   behind in Africa continued in the West. While working for the NMS, she
   saw inside the workings of the Dutch IND migration system. She was
   heavily critical of the way the Dutch system handled asylum seekers. .

Political career

   After earning her masters in political science, Hirsi Ali became a
   fellow at the Wiardi Beckman Foundation, a scientific institute linked
   to the social-democratic PvdA, of which Leiden University Professor
   Ruud Koole was steward.

   Inspired by the Atheist Manifesto (Atheistisch Manifest) of Leiden
   philosopher Herman Philipse, she renounced Islam and became an atheist.
   During this period she began to formulate her critique on Islamic
   culture, which she put to words in a book De Zoontjesfabriek ("The Son
   Factory"). After the publication of this book, she received the first
   threats on her life.

   After some disagreements with the PvdA about the lack of security
   measures in November 2002, she asked Cisca Dresselhuys (the editor of
   the feminst magazine Opzij) for advice. Dresselhuis introduced Hirsi
   Ali to Gerrit Zalm, the parliamentary leader of VVD and party member
   Neelie-Smit Kroes, current European Commissioner for Competition. Hirsi
   Ali agreed to switch to the VVD and stood for election to the
   parliament. She was staying abroad and put on the payroll as an
   assistant of the VVD parliamentary party between November 2002 and
   January 2003. From January 2003 to June 2006 she worked as a
   shortlisted MP for that party. She was forced to step down as an MP
   when minister Verdonk (also VVD) announced that the Dutch nationality
   of Hirsi Ali had to be considered as invalid because Ayaan admitted in
   a television interview that it had been acquired using a false name and
   a false date of birth.

   Because of her statements about the Islamic prophet Muhammad in a Trouw
   interview, a discrimination complaint was filed against Hirsi Ali on
   April 24, 2003. The Prosecutor's office decided not to prosecute her,
   because her critique did "not put forth any conclusions in respect to
   Muslims and their worth as a group is not denied..

   Hirsi Ali wrote the script for Submission, a short, low-budget film
   directed by Theo van Gogh. The film criticized the treatment of women
   in Islamic society. One woman was provocatively dressed in a
   semi-transparent burqa, under which texts from the Qur'an were
   projected on her skin. The texts referred to the subordinate role of
   women. Other women in the film showed signs of physical abuse. In
   addition to writing the script, Hirsi Ali also provided the voice-over.
   The release of the film sparked much controversy, as well as violent
   reaction, when radical Islamist Mohammed Bouyeri gunned down Van Gogh
   in an Amsterdam street on November 2, 2004. A letter pinned to Van
   Gogh's body with a knife was primarily a death threat to Hirsi Ali.

   Earlier that year, the group "The Hague Connection" produced and
   distributed the rap song Hirsi Ali Dis on the Internet. The lyrics of
   this song included violent threats against Hirsi Ali's life. The
   rappers were prosecuted under Article 121 of the Dutch criminal code,
   because they hindered the execution of Hirsi Ali's tasks as politician.
   In 2005 the rappers were sentenced to community service and a suspended
   prison sentence.

   After the incident, Hirsi Ali went into hiding in the Netherlands, and
   even spent some time in New York, a situation which lasted until
   January 18, 2005, when she returned to parliament. On February 18,
   2005, she revealed the location of herself and her colleague Geert
   Wilders, who had also been in hiding. She demanded a normal, secured
   house, which she was granted one week later.

   On November 16, 2005, Hirsi Ali reported being seriously threatened by
   the Imam Sachemic FAA. This Imam, who worked in a mosque in The Hague,
   announced on the Internet that Hirsi Ali would be "blown away by the
   wind of changing times" and that she could anticipate "the curse of
   Allah".

   In January 2006, Hirsi Ali used her acceptance speech for the Reader's
   Digest "European of the Year" award to urge action to prevent Iran from
   developing nuclear weapons and to say that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must be
   taken at his word in wanting to organize a conference to investigate
   objective evidence of the Holocaust. "Before I came to Europe, I'd
   never heard of the Holocaust. That is the case with millions of people
   in the Middle East. Such a conference should be able to convince many
   people away from their denial of the genocide against the Jews."

   She also said that "so-called Western values" of freedom and justice
   are universal; that Europe has done far better than most areas of the
   world at providing justice, because it has guaranteed the freedom of
   thought and debate that are required for critical self-examination; and
   that communities cannot reform themselves unless "scrupulous
   investigation of every former and current doctrine is possible."

   In March 2006 a letter she co-signed entitled MANIFESTO: Together
   facing the new totalitarianism with eleven other individuals (most
   notably Salman Rushdie) was published in response to violent and deadly
   protests in the Islamic world surrounding the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad
   cartoons controversy.

   On April 27 a Dutch judge ruled that Hirsi Ali had to abandon her house
   - a highly secured secret address in the Netherlands. Her neighbours
   had complained that living next to her was an unacceptable security
   risk to them although the police had testified in court that it was one
   of the safest places in the country due to the many personnel they had
   assigned there.

   Hirsi Ali is currently working on a successor to Submission, which will
   probably deal with the position of homosexuals in Islam.

The citizenship controversy

   In May 2006 the Dutch television program "Zembla" reported that Hirsi
   Ali had given false information about her real name, her age and the
   country she arrived from when originally applying for asylum in the
   Netherlands. The program also presented evidence that she was
   untruthful about the main reason for her asylum application being
   forced marriage.

   Hirsi Ali admitted that she had lied about her full name, her date of
   birth and the manner in which she came to the Netherlands. However,
   several sources, including her first book The Son Factory, which was
   published in 2002 stated her real name and date of birth, and Hirsi Ali
   also publicly stated her real name and date of birth in a September
   2002 interview published in the political magazine HP/De Tijd. and in
   an interview in the VARA gids (2002). So these details were considered
   by many to be public knowledge. Furthermore, Hirsi Ali has asserted
   that she had made full disclosure of the matter to VVD officials when
   she was first invited to run for parliament in 2002.

   Media speculation arose that she could lose her Dutch citizenship
   because of this 'identity fraud', rendering her ineligible for
   parliament. In a first reaction Minister Rita Verdonk said she would
   not look into the matter, but after Member of Parliament Hilbrand
   Nawijn officially asked her for her position, she declared that she
   would investigate Hirsi Ali's naturalisation process. This
   investigation took three days. The findings were that Hirsi Ali never
   received Dutch citizenship after all, because she lied about her name
   and date of birth. Hirsi Ali had stated that she was Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
   born in 1967, but she is actually Ayaan Hirsi Magan, born in 1969.
   Therefore the Dutch government's position is that Hirsi Ali's Dutch
   citizenship is invalid and declared null and void.

   On May 15, 2006, after the broadcast of the "Zembla" documentary, news
   stories erupted saying that Hirsi Ali is likely to move to the United
   States in September 2006. There she is expected to work on her book
   Shortcut to Enlightenment and work for the centre-right think tank
   American Enterprise Institute.

   On May 16, Hirsi Ali resigned from Parliament after admitting to lying
   on her asylum application. On that day she gave a press conference in
   which she restated that although she felt it was wrong to be granted
   asylum under false pretences, the facts had been publicly known since
   2002 when they were reported in the media and in one of her
   publications. In the press conference she also restated that she spoke
   the truth about the reason for asking asylum which was the threat of
   forced marriage despite the claim to the contrary in the Zembla program
   by some of her relatives. The reason, she stated for resigning
   immediately were not the continuous threats, making her job as a
   parliamentarian "difficult" but "not impossible" but the news that the
   Minister would strip her of her Dutch citizenship.

   After a long and emotional debate in the Dutch Parliament all major
   parties supported a motion, requesting the Minister to explore the
   possibilities of special circumstances in Hirsi Ali's case. Although
   Verdonk remains convinced that jurisprudence does not leave her any
   room to consider such circumstances, she decided to accept the motion.
   During the debate she astonished MPs by claiming that Hirsi Ali still
   has Dutch citizenship during the period of reexamination. Apparently
   the decision she made public, wasn't a decision after all, but merely a
   report of the current position of the Dutch government. Hirsi Ali still
   has six weeks to react to this before any final decision about her
   citizenship is taken. Verdonk was heavily criticized for not acting
   more prudently in a case that has so many political implications.

   Apart from a Dutch passport, Hirsi Ali does still have a Dutch
   residency permit (similar to a Permanent Resident Card) on the grounds
   that she is a political refugee. According to the Minister, this permit
   cannot be taken away from her since it was granted more than 12 years
   ago, in 1992.

   In a reaction to the announced move, former VVD minister Hans Wiegel
   stated that her departure "would not be a loss to the VVD and not be a
   loss to the Tweede Kamer". Wiegel said that Hirsi Ali was a brave
   woman, but that her opinions were polarizing. Former parliamentary
   leader of the VVD, Jozias van Aartsen, was more positive about Hirsi
   Ali, saying that it is "painful for Dutch society and politics that she
   is leaving the Tweede Kamer". Another VVD MP, Bibi de Vries, claimed
   that if something were to happen to Hirsi Ali, some people in her party
   would have "blood on their hands." Laetitia Griffith succeeded Hirsi
   Ali as parliamentarian.

   Christopher DeMuth (President of the AEI) has confirmed in a letter
   that recent events in the Netherlands will not affect the appointment.
   On May 16 he stated that he was still looking forward to "welcoming her
   to AEI, and to America."

   United States Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick has later
   stated that "we recognise that she is a very courageous and impressive
   woman and she is welcome in the US."

   On May 23 2006 Ayaan Hirsi made available to the The New York Times
   some letters she believes provide insights into her 1992 asylum
   application. In one letter, her sister warned her that the entire
   extended family was searching for her (after fleeing to the
   Netherlands) and in another letter her father denounced her.
   Rita Verdonk
   Enlarge
   Rita Verdonk

   On June 27, 2006, the Dutch government announced that Hirsi Ali would
   keep her Dutch citizenship. On the same day a letter was disclosed in
   which Hirsi Ali expressed regret that she had misinformed Minister
   Verdonk. Apparently Hirsi Ali was allowed after all to carry the name
   Hirsi Ali because the Dutch government believes that Somalis are
   allowed to carry the name of their grandfather according to Somali
   family law. As it turned out, her grandfather used the last name Ali
   until his thirties and only then switched to Magan. The fact that this
   grandfather was born in 1840 complicated the investigation. Also, the
   issue of the false date of birth on retrospection was not that
   important according to the Minister.

   Later in the same day Hirsi Ali through her lawyer and in television
   interviews made a statement declaring that she signed the letter which
   was drafted by the Justice Department under duress. She felt she was
   pressured into signing the statement in exchange for the passport but
   that she agreed to do this, swallowing her pride and in order not to
   complicate her pending visa application for the US (although to this
   date she still carries her Dutch passport, despite the upheaval). An
   intimate friend of Hirsi Ali, Leon de Winter presented in his weblog a
   detailed account of events taking place on June 27 leading to Hirsi Ali
   signing the statement confirming in his view, the involuntary nature of
   her action.

   In a special parliamentary session on June 28 questions were raised
   concerning the alleged coercion of the Hirsi Ali statement by minister
   Verdonk, the dismissal by the minister of the false date of birth as a
   relevant issue and whether Somali law prevails over Dutch law.

   The ensuing political upheaval on June 29 ultimately lead to the fall
   of the Second Balkenende cabinet.

Political views

   Hirsi Ali is a member of the VVD, a Dutch political party that combines
   right wing views on the economy, foreign policy, crime and immigration
   with a liberal stance on drugs, abortion and homosexuals. She claims to
   be a great admirer of one of the party's ideological leaders Frits
   Bolkestein (former Euro-commissioner). Ali received substantial
   criticism as a result of her defection from the Dutch Labour Party
   (PvdA) to the VVD. By way of response she has asserted that she will
   show greater loyalty to the VVD. She claims that her personal views are
   for the most part inspired by her change from a Muslim to an atheist.
   Hirsi Ali is very critical of Islam, and especially of the prophet
   Muhammad and the position of women in Islam.

Islam

   Hirsi Ali is very critical of the position of women in patriarchal
   Islamic societies and the punishments demanded by Islamic scholars for
   homosexuality and adultery. She considered herself a Muslim until 28
   May 2002, when she became an atheist . In an interview with Swiss
   magazine 'Das Magazin' in September 2006, she said she lost her faith
   while sitting in an Italian restaurant in May 2002, drinking a glass of
   wine. ("...I asked myself: Why should I burn in hell just because I'm
   drinking this? But what prompted me even more was the fact that the
   killers of 9/11 all believed in the same God I believed in.") Despite
   that, in the television program Rondom Tien of 12 September 2002 she
   still calls it "my religion". She has described Islam as a "backward
   religion", incompatible with democracy. In one segment on the current
   affairs program NOVA she challenged pupils of an Islamic primary school
   to choose between the Quran and the Dutch constitution.

Muhammad

   Her criticism of the Islamic prophet Muhammad mainly concerns his moral
   stature. In January 2003 she told the Dutch paper Trouw, "Muhammad is,
   seen by our Western standards, a pervert". She referred particularly to
   the marriage between Muhammad, who was 52 years old, and Aisha, who was
   nine years old, according to the collections of hadith.. She also has
   stated her opinions on the personality of the prophet Muhammad: In the
   Dutch newspaper Trouw Hirsi Ali is interviewed on the Ten Commandments.
   In the second paragraph she is asked about Muhammad. She answers:

     Measured by our western standards, Muhammad is a perverted man. A
     Tyrant. He is against freedom of expression. If you don't do as he
     says, you will be punished. It makes me think of all those
     megalomaniacs in the middle-east: Bin Laden, Khomeini, Saddam. Do
     you think it strange that there is a Saddam Hussein? Muhammad is his
     example. Muhammad is an example for all Muslim men. Do you think it
     strange that so many Muslim men are violent?

   In an interview with the Danish magazine Sappho she explains parallels
   she sees between the personality of Yasser Arafat and that of Muhammad.

Circumcision

   Hirsi Ali is an opponent of the practice of circumcision for both men
   and women, but in particular the more extreme form of Female genital
   mutilation.

     Female genital mutilation, girls dying in child birth because they
     are too young [...] The rise of radical Islam is an important part
     of this. I feel I have the moral obligation to discuss the source. I
     think if I think you are enriching the debate if you question it,
     you are not the enemy of Islam. We can look elsewhere using reason
     to discover answer to these problems, and we do not have to abolish
     religion. But we must do it by finding a balance.

Christianity

   Besides criticizing Islam, Hirsi Ali recently said in public, that she
   does not like Christianity and churches. Because of these kind of
   speeches, several Christian communities said Hirsi Ali was a radical
   example of an anti-clericalist and an anti-Christian liberal,
   extrapolating her criticism of radical Islam to Christianity in
   general. Such a strong anti-Christian stance is very uncommon in her
   political party, the somewhat conservative-liberal VVD. On August 31,
   2006, while addressing the Dutch press on the occasion of her departure
   for the United States to work for a well-known think thank, Hirsi Ali
   (Hirsi Magan) told the press: "...with like-minded one cannot discuss.
   With like-minded one can only participate in a church service, and, as
   is widely known, I do not like church services!"

Freedom of speech

   Hirsi Ali is a proponent of free speech. In a 2006 lecture in Berlin,
   she defended the right to offend, following the Jyllands-Posten
   Muhammad cartoons controversy. She condemned the journalists of those
   papers and TV channels that did not show their readers the cartoons as
   being "mediocre of mind" and of trying to hide behind those
   "noble-sounding terms such as 'responsibility' and 'sensitivity'." She
   praised publishers all over Europe for showing the cartoons and not
   being afraid of what she labeled the intolerance of many Muslims
   worldwide.

     I do not seek to offend religious sentiment, but I will not submit
     to tyranny. Demanding that people who do not accept Muhammad’s
     teachings should refrain from drawing him is not a request for
     respect but a demand for submission.

Freedom of assembly

   Hirsi Ali supported the move by the Dutch courts to abrogate the party
   subsidy to a conservative Protestant Christian political party, the
   Political Reformed Party (SGP), which did not grant full membership
   rights to women and still witholds passive voting right from female
   members. She stated that "any political party discriminating against
   women or homosexuals should be deprived of funding."

   Hirsi Ali has also stated that she wants the Belgian authorities to ban
   the Vlaams Belang party, claiming that "it hardly differs from the
   Hofstad Group. Though the VB members have not committed any violent
   crimes yet, they are just postponing them and waiting until they have
   an absolute majority. On many issues they have exactly the same
   opinions as the Muslim extremists: on the position of women, on the
   suppression of gays, on abortion. This way of thinking will lead
   straight to genocide." The Hofstad Group is a Dutch Islamist terrorist
   organization.

   Vlaams Belang party leader Frank Vanhecke however responded in a
   friendly way by writing an open letter to Hirsi Ali, stating that she
   is "closer to the Vlaams Belang with her viewpoints than to the Flemish
   Liberals." He also rejected the likeness with the Hofstad Group, saying
   that the Vlaams Belang "has never and nowhere called for violence."

     [W]e do not threaten politicians with death or plan murder attempts.
     Like you and Geert Wilders, we only call for common sense and for a
     different immigration policy.

   The Vlaams Belang also reacted to the retirement of Hirsi Ali from
   Dutch politics, saying that the party has "respect for the way she has
   conducted and promoted the debate in the Netherlands with respect to
   Islam, female oppression and failed integration."

Freedom of education

   In the Netherlands about half of all education is organised in the form
   of special schools (most of them Catholic or Protestant). Because a few
   of these schools are muslim, Ayaan Hirsi Ali had stated in November
   2003, that no religious school should receive government financing.
   This brought her into conflict with Hans Wiegel, a prominent former VVD
   leader.

Development aid

   The Netherlands has in the past always been one of the most prominent
   countries that supported aiding developing countries. As a member of
   the VVD, Hirsi Ali has said that the current development aid policy did
   not work to increase prosperity, peace and stability in the developing
   countries.

     The VVD believes that Dutch international aid has failed until now,
     as measured by [the Dutch aid effects on] poverty reduction, famine
     reduction, life expectancy and the promotion of peace.

Terrorism

   In the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant of April 8, 2006 she has proposed
   the special screening of any Muslim applying for any job on possible
   links with terrorist groups.

Immigration

   In 2003 Hirsi Ali worked together with fellow VVD MP Geert Wilders for
   several months. They questioned the government about immigration
   policy. In reaction to the UNDP Arab Human Development Report Hirsi Ali
   asked the following question of Minister of Foreign Affairs Jaap de
   Hoop Scheffer and the Minister without Portfolio for Development
   Cooperation Agnes van Ardenne.

     Will you please pay attention to the consequences for Dutch policy
     concerning the limitation of immigration from the Arab world to
     Europe c.q. The Netherlands ?

   Although publicly Hirsi Ali always supported the policy of VVD minister
   Rita Verdonk regarding limited immigration, privately she was not
   supportive, as she explained in a recent interview for Opzij. In
   parliament she supported the way Verdonk handled the Pasic case,
   although privately she felt that Pasic should have been allowed to
   stay. On the night before the debate Hirsi Ali phoned Verdonk to tell
   her that she herself had lied when she fled to the Netherlands, just
   like Pasic. Verdonk responded that if she had been minister at that
   time, she would have deported Hirsi Ali. Subsequent actions of Verdonk
   led to the possibility to revoke Dutch citizenship from Ayaan. The
   ensuing political upheaval ultimately led to the fall of the second
   Balkenende cabinet.

   In the Opzij interview Hirsi Ali also said she supported a general
   pardon for a group of 26,000 refugees. These refugees, who spent more
   than five years in the Netherlands, without hearing about the status of
   their asylum, should all be granted Dutch citizenship in Hirsi Ali's
   view. The VVD forbade her to speak her mind of this issue.

Criticism of Hirsi Ali

Muhammed

   While most Muslims, Dutch and abroad, have denounced her insulting of
   Muhammed, the civil court in The Hague has also warned Hirsi Ali's
   insulting of Muhammed. They did however acquit her of any charges:

     It seems that the defendant, using these words, has approached the
     borders of what can be ought to be allowed.

Multiculturalism

   Hirsi Ali has taken a prominent place in the Dutch debate about
   multiculturalism. The left-liberal intellectual Dick Pels describes
   Hirsi Ali as the exponent of liberal fundamentalism.

     This ideology is similar to orthodox islam in the sense that it
     thinks its perspective is superior and all people should be forced
     to have it. He thinks the way these liberal fundamentalists try
     debate with islam, by taunting and insulting them is not
     constructive. They only deteriorate the relations between migrants
     and native Dutch people.

Awards

     * In January 2004, Hirsi Ali was awarded the Prize of Liberty by Nova
       Civitas, a classical liberal think tank in the Low Countries.

     * On November 20, 2004 Ayaan Hirsi Ali was awarded the Freedom Prize
       of Denmark's Liberal Party, which was the largest party and part of
       the government at the time, "for her work to further freedom of
       speech and the rights of women". Due to threats from Islamic
       fundamentalists she was not at the time able to receive it
       personally; however a year later, November 17, 2005, she travelled
       to Denmark to thank Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the then-prime minister
       and leader of Denmark's Liberal Party, for the prize.

     * On February 25, 2005 she was given the Harriet Freezerring by Cisca
       Dresselhuys, editor of the feminist magazine Opzij, "for her work
       for the emancipation of Islamic women".

     * According to the American Time Magazine of April 18, 2005 she was
       amongst the 100 Most Influential Persons of the World. She was put
       in the category "Leaders & Revolutionaries".

     * On March 7, 2005 she was awarded the Tolerance Price of the
       comunidad de Madrid

     * In June 2005, Hirsi Ali was awarded by the Norwegian Political
       Think Tank, Human Rights Service (HRS), with the annual Prize, This
       Year's European Bellwether. According to HRS, Hirsi Ali is “beyond
       a doubt, the leading European politician in the field of
       integration. (She is) a master at the art of mediating the most
       difficult issues with insurmountable courage, wisdom,
       reflectiveness, and clarity.

     * On August 29, 2005, Hirsi Ali was awarded the annual Democracy
       Prize of the Swedish Liberal Party "for her courageous work for
       democracy, human rights and women's rights."

     * Hirsi Ali was voted European of the Year for 2006 by the European
       editors of Reader's Digest magazine. At a ceremony in The Hague on
       January 23, Hirsi Ali accepted the Reader's Digest award from EU
       Competition Commissioner, Neelie Kroes.

     * On May 4, 2006, Hirsi Ali accepted the Moral Courage Award from the
       American Jewish Committee.

     * The Norwegian member of parliament Christian Tybring-Gjedde has
       nominated Hirsi Ali as candidate for Nobel Peace Prize of 2006.

     * On October 1 Ayaan Hirsi Ali was given in the German town Kassel
       the civilian prize "Glas der Vernunft". The organisation reward her
       with this prize for her dedication to the integration of migrants
       and against discrimination of women. Other laureates were for
       example Lea Rabin, the wife of former Israelian prime-minister
       Yitzhak Rabin and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, former Foreign Minister
       of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Trivia

     * Hirsi Ali speaks six languages: English, Somali, Arabic, Swahili,
       Amharic and Dutch.

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