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She inspires both admiration and rage, and has become one of the most familiar faces in Dutch politics. Now she's in hiding. Ayaan Hirsi Ali's path from war-ravaged Somalia to the Dutch parliament has been marked by a readiness, as a women's rights advocate, to say and do things others never dared.
The threat level has shot up because of her part as scriptwriter of Theo van Gogh's film "Submission," the fictional story of a sexually abused Muslim woman. Van Gogh was shot and stabbed to death Nov. 2. His alleged killer, a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim, left a five-page letter that said: "I dare wager my life, Hirsi Ali, that when you read this letter you will break out into a sweat of fear."
Hirsi Ali has described herself as a lapsed Muslim, and says Islamic culture needs modernizing. "I want to show that there's also another reality than the 'truth' which is being spread over the world with the help of Saudi money," she said in a 2003 interview with the newspaper Trouw. The daughter of a Somali politician, Hirsi Ali, 35, was a U.N. translator before fleeing an arranged marriage and seeking asylum in the Netherlands in 1992.
She learned Dutch while working odd jobs, eventually becoming a translator for courts and women's shelters. She studied political science at Leiden University, and got a job as a researcher for the then ruling Labor Party. But she felt Labor wasn't trying hard enough to force Dutch Muslims into mainstream society and switched to the Liberal VVD party, becoming a media star.
Tall and calm in manner, Hirsi Ali is a sharp and relentless debater in her slightly accented Dutch. In 2002 she was elected to Parliament, but began receiving death threats from Islamic hard-liners, and was put under police protection. She remains in hiding since the murder, but in a letter read aloud Friday at a caucus of her party, she said the killing had only made her "more combative and stronger." "You can never kill thinkers, writers and artists, or threaten or intimidate them, even if this golden rule is not self-evident for everyone," she wrote. Source: AP SomNet
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