'The trouble is the West': Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Islam, immigration, civil liberties, and the fate of the West.

Extract

---

'The trouble is the West': Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Islam, immigration, civil liberties, and the fate of the West.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

IT WAS A HEINOUS murder that made the best-selling memoirist Ayaan Hirsi Ali internationally famous, but she was neither the victim nor the perpetrator. The corpse was that of Theo van Gogh, a writer and filmmaker who in November 2004 was stabbed, slashed, and shot on an Amsterdam street by a Dutch-born Muslim extremist of Moroccan descent. The assassin, driven to rage by Submission, a short film Van Gogh had made about the poor treatment of women under Islam, left no doubt about his motives. A letter he pinned to his victim's chest with a knife was a call to jihad. It was also a death threat against Ayaan Hirsi All a member of the Dutch parliament. She had persuaded Van Go to make Submission and had written the movie's script.

Then 35, Hirsi Ali had already seen plenty of turmoil. She had endured a heavily religious upbringing in Somalia, SaudiArabia, and Kenya, including a brutal circumcision to keep her"pure." She chafed under the yoke of an embittered and sometimes violent mother and longed for a father who was perennially absent--often imprisoned or in hiding, due to his opposition to the Somali dictator Siad Barre.

In July 1992, Hirsi Ali defied her family's wishes, refusing to marry the man to whom her father had betrothed her. She fled Kenya for the Netherlands, gaining refugee status and finding employment as a cleaning woman and a factory worker. She assimilated quickly, learning perfect Dutch and studying political science, a choice that led to a job as an analyst at the Labor Party's think tank. There, to...

See the full content of this document

---