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Europe |
Ayaan Hirsi Ali profiled in the Guardian |
2005-05-19 |
![]() She arrived in the Netherlands as an asylum seeker and became a fiery critic of both multiculturalism and her own religion, Islam. Then last November the director of a film she wrote about the subjugation of Muslim women was killed, sparking a crisis over the country's attitudes to immigration. I don't think the WaPo or the NYTimes have featured this woman yet but now that the Guardian has done this they probably will do something. Don't expect the fools in Hollywood to support her artistic rights however. In 1989, the year that Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was a devout student attending the Muslim Girls' Secondary School in Nairobi...Hirsi Ali is an activist, for sure, but her targets are not so much political as theological. And what she wants to do now is to produce a follow-up to Submission - this time, the story of the men. She has just won a court case, brought by a group of Muslims aiming to prevent her going ahead with the project... I don't want somebody else to be murdered," she says. "But if I stop doing what I'm doing, it will be like another murder. That's the real trauma, perhaps, the thought of going through what happened to Theo van Gogh again. We told each other we would make part two, and the thing that keeps me going is the thought, 'I have to do it, I have to do it, I have to do it.'" |
Posted by:mhw |
#3 There's hope. Interesting that Holland had to go outside its own borders to find a woman with the brains and guts to stand up for freedom and individual dignity. |
Posted by: thibaud (aka lex) 2005-05-19 15:21 |
#2 Damn straight. If I wasn't in an already republican congressional district, I'd swap one Ayann Hirsi Ali for One Cynthia McKinney and to hell with the residency requirement. Yeah, it'd be a really uneven swap: this lady seems to have more guts in her left pinkie than the entire Georgia Democratic congressional delegation now that Zell's retired... |
Posted by: Ptah 2005-05-19 15:17 |
#1 She should be designated a Nederlander National Treasure. In this one woman, we find all of the testicles present in their society, culture, country. |
Posted by: .com 2005-05-19 11:14 |