Islam's Female Foe Reported to Seek Washington Perch
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/worldopinionroundup/2006/05/islam_critic_reported_to_seek.html

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has become a household name in Europe for her controversial renunciation of Islam, may soon be coming to Washington, according to the European online media. Today, Ali resigned her seat in the Dutch parliament and said she will soon leave the Netherlands.

For supporters, Ali's odyssey exemplifies the threat of Islamic intolerance. Raised in Kenya, Ali reportedly fled an arranged marriage in 1992 and moved to The Netherlands where she renounced Islam for atheism. She won a seat in parliament in 2003 and emerged as the continent's leading critic of Islam and multiculturalism.

Radio Netherlands reported Monday that the Somali-born Ali "will announce later this week that she is to move to the United States." The Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant reports that she will be working for the American Enterprise Institute.

Ali gained notoriety in 2004 for a short film that she wrote and narrated about the Islamic mistreatment of woman. Entitled "Submission," the 11-minute film was directed by Theo Van Gogh, a great grand-nephew of the painter Vincent Van Gogh. Muslims found it blasphemous because it depicted passages of the Koran about women projected onto the body of a woman in a see-through burka. In November 2004, a radical Islamist tracked Van Gogh down on the street, shot him, stabbed him, and left a knife in his chest pegged to a five-page letter containing a threat to Ali's life.

Ali, given tight security by the Dutch government, became famous overnight. She was seen as a latter-day version of novelist Salman Rushdie, whose impious novel, Satanic Verses, earned him a death sentence fatwa from outraged Muslim clerics in 1988.

Ali has not ceased to speak out against Islamic intolerance. She does not discourage reports that she is considering making a sequel to "Submission."

Last Sunday, she told Spiegel Online that "those Muslims who wish to kill someone receive a great deal of support from their home countries. There is plenty of wealth, there are plenty of sponsors and there are plenty of desperate people who choose this path. We must defend ourselves if we wish to preserve our Western values. The price we pay is to be threatened."

Her outspoken views were not received well in the Netherlands, the prosperous and tolerant enclave on the northern European coast where consensus-oriented politics reign.

"Ali is internationally lauded," notes ANP, the Netherlands news service. "Time Magazine selected her as among the 100 most influential people in the world - but in the Dutch media, she is often approached as a pariah."

Last month, Ali praised the publication of cartoons of Muhammad in European newspapers. The Dutch prime minister criticized her stance, as did the speaker of Iran's parliament.

The reports of Ali's resignation and possible move to Washington follow a Dutch television documentary, shown last week, which suggested she had misrepresented how she fled her native country. According to The Independent of London, the program features interviews with members of Ali's family who denied her story of a ducking out of an arranged marriage.

"The programme also alleged that, contrary to her claims of having fled a war zone in Somalia, the MP had lived in comfortable upper middle-class circumstances safely in Kenya for at least 12 years before she sought refugee status in the Netherlands in 1992. Her family home -- which is large and comfortable by Kenyan standards -- was shown in the programme."

So that justifys murder and death threats?

Next time Gavin, do more research and post more evidence.

Dutch ex-MP retains citizenship  
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/5120846.stm

Ms Hirsi Ali has been offered a job in the USA
Somali-born former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali is to be allowed to keep her Dutch citizenship despite lying in her asylum application in 1992.

Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk was forced to make a U-turn after her calls for Ms Hirsi Ali to lose her citizenship met with criticism.

Ms Hirsi Ali resigned from parliament in May after Ms Verdonk's comments.

She came to prominence in 2004 after a Muslim extremist killed her film-maker colleague Theo van Gogh.

In a letter to the Dutch parliament, Ms Verdonk said she had found a loophole which made it legitimate for Ms Hirsi Ali to have used her grandfather's name in her asylum claim, the Associated Press news agency reported.

"Taking everything into consideration, I have reached the conclusion that the naturalization decision of 1997 identifies Ayaan Hirsi Ali sufficiently and thus she did indeed correctly receive Dutch citizenship," AP quoted Ms Verdonk as saying in the letter.

Confession

In 1992, Ms Hirsi Ali gave a false name and date of birth to the immigration authorities when she arrived in the Netherlands claiming she was fleeing an arranged marriage.

She did not declare that she had arrived in the country via Kenya and Germany - refugees are usually required to seek asylum in the first safe country they reach.

But Ms Hirsi Ali, 36, said she confessed when she was vetted for parliament in 2002 but was still offered a seat as a member of the centre-right VVD party.

In a statement released on Tuesday, she said regretted giving authorities the wrong impression about her identity.

Her lawyer said the former MP was "happy there are no more questions about her Dutch citizenship", AP reported.

Ms Hirsi Ali has been offered a job at the Washington-based think tank The American Enterprise Institute to start in September.

She rose to international attention in 2004 as the writer of a controversial film on violence against Muslim women, Submission, after Mr van Gogh was murdered.

Can you please post links to the articles as well, Gav?

Secrets and lies that doomed a radical liberal
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1779723,00.html
Jason Burke in Rotterdam
Sunday May 21, 2006
The Observer

Late afternoon and the grubby 1950s glass and concrete alleyways of Rotterdam's centre are full of teenagers. Black, white, dreadlocked, shaved, speaking Dutch, Chinese, or a French-Arabic-Dutch mixture, all of them wear jeans, T-shirts, and cheap leather bomber jackets for boys, sequined belts for the girls. One or two wear headscarves with their make-up and bangles. On a bench is a stack of newspapers, the front page recounting the latest twist in the saga of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. 'The rise, the fall and then the rise again,' comments the seller sourly. 'I hope this time she goes for good.'

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia in 1969, raised in Kenya and Saudi Arabia, in Holland since 1992, is to move on, once more a refugee of a sort.

Her spokesman, Ingrid Pouw, yesterday finally put an end to a week of rabid speculation, telling The Observer that the 36-year-old MP will leave her adopted country at the end of August to take up a position at a conservative think-tank in Washington DC. After announcing her retirement from Dutch political life at a press conference last week, Hirsi Ali went straight to a meeting with the US ambassador to arrange for fast-track visas or even US residency documents, Pouw said.

Yesterday the dust was far from settling on the Hirsi Ali affair. A TV programme highlighting lies Hirsi Ali told on her asylum application and the subsequent decision by hardline immigration minister Rita Verdonk to strip her of her Dutch citizenship, has triggered a political crisis in Holland. Elsewhere in Europe, the shockwaves created by the controversy are spreading too, with some claiming that another voice against repression had been silenced by force and others welcoming the end of a campaign seen as provocative and negative.

Once more, Hirsi Ali had succeeded in forcing the most difficult, uncomfortable issues of immigration, integration, religion and culture to the forefront of debate in a fiercely uncompromising way.

Hirsi Ali fled Somalia with her family to Saudi Arabia when her father's political activities brought him into conflict with the Somali government, and then on to Kenya.

In 1992, fleeing an arranged marriage, she arrived in Holland where she worked first as a cleaner and then as a translator at a refugee centre in Rotterdam - an experience that marked her deeply, according to one friend interviewed by The Observer. A victim herself of female circumcision, Hirsi Ali was shocked by the male repression of immigrant women living in one of the most developed and tolerant societies in the world.

She studied political science at Leiden University and found a position in a leftwing think-tank. With such credentials, as well as her striking looks, she was well placed when the attacks of 11 September 2001 focused global attention on Islamic radicalism. Her self-appointed mission was to make the Dutch and Europeans aware of 'the repressive nature of Islam' and of the dangers of mass immigration, which led to an invitation from the Dutch Liberal party to join them and, very rapidly, to a seat in parliament.

Despite the Liberals' right-wing economics and uncompromising anti-immigration stance, Hirsi Ali pronounced the party her political home.

Yet, though increasingly known in Holland, it was only in 2004 that she became an international figure when film-maker Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death by a radical Islamist after he made a film with Hirsi Ali called Submission, using quotes from the Koran projected over a semi-naked woman to highlight domestic violence in Muslim societies. After the murder, Hirsi Ali went into hiding, surrounded by bodyguards.

But though she continued with her public, parliamentary and international engagements, the stress of constant death-threats and increasing criticism of her trenchant statements, began to tell. When, earlier this year, a court decided that she would have to leave her home in The Hague because she was endangering her neighbours, Hirsi Ali, friends said, started thinking about moving overseas. And then a new documentary was broadcast on Dutch TV. It was made by Gus van Dongen, an experienced TV journalist. He travelled to Somalia and Kenya to interview members of Hirsi Ali's family.

'There was no agenda,' van Dongen said last week. 'She is a politician who had made much of her background, telling one story. We set out to check those facts. That is all.'

The TV programme, broadcast 10 days ago, highlighted the fact that Hirsi Ali had falsified her original asylum application in Holland, saying that she had not come from war-torn Somalia as she claimed, but from Kenya, where she had lived peacefully for 10 years. The fact that she had lied was well-known, retorted Hirsi Ali, making the point that was she was fleeing a forced marriage. Not so, said van Dongen, using testimony from her brother and husband to allege that the marriage was not made under compulsion. Nor van Dongen said, was Hirsi Ali raised in a strict Muslim family.

i highlighted the interesting part in bold for you:

The TV programme, broadcast 10 days ago, highlighted the fact that Hirsi Ali had falsified her original asylum application in Holland, saying that she had not come from war-torn Somalia as she claimed, but from Kenya, where she had lived peacefully for 10 years. The fact that she had lied was well-known, retorted Hirsi Ali, making the point that was she was fleeing a forced marriage. Not so, said van Dongen, using testimony from her brother and husband to allege that the marriage was not made under compulsion. Nor van Dongen said, was Hirsi Ali raised in a strict Muslim family.

no it doesn't, but what did she expect? 
if u pass off lies as being the truth, then u expect to get burned.