Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Guilty of the freedom to choose

By: Tolbert Yarkpawolo

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, 38-year-old, was born in Mogadishu, Somalia. She was raised a Muslim and spent her childhood and young adulthood in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya. In 1992, Hirsi Ali moved to the Netherlands as a refugee escaping a forced marriage to a distant cousin she had never met. She sought and obtained political asylum in the Netherlands in 1992. In 1997 Hirsi Ali applied and received Dutch citizenship. Before moving to the Netherlands, Hirsi Ali endured genital mutilation, tropical diseases, a nearly fatal beating by her Quran teacher, a brutal civil war, unspeakable poverty, and parental rejection.

While in the Netherlands, Hirsi Ali learned Dutch and worked as an interpreter in abortion clinics and shelters for battered women. Hirsi Ali became an activist, politician, and a fierce critic of Islam's treatment of women. After earning her masters degree in political science at Leiden University, she worked for the Labor Party. Her ultimate goal to enter politics to try to alert the European left to this danger. She was subsequently elected as a deputy for the Labor Party, but following the September 11 terrorist attacks, she denounced Islam. She states that her personal views are for the most part inspired by her change from Islam to atheism. Hirsi Ali is critical of Islam, especially of the Quran and its endorsement of the abuse of women.

In November 2002, she became a member of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) and served as a member of parliament from January 2003 to May 2006, working for the rights of Muslim women in Europe, the enlightenment of Islam and security in the West. Her reason for switching party, was because many Labor spokesmen preferred to think of immigrants as possessing "group rights." They had become so infatuated by their own "multi-culti" style that they had ignored the rights of individualism, specially women and girls who were imprisoned within their own ghetto.

Hirsi Ali received death threats after writing a short movies script for Theo van Gogh's short film 'Submission' criticizing women's treatment in Muslim society. A Muslim extremist shot and murdered Theo van Gog, a movies director, in an Amsterdam street, as he was bicycling to work one morning, soon after the film aired on Dutch TV in 2004. The murderer left a long open letter addressed to Hirsi Ali pinned to Theo van Gogh's chest by an equally long knife. In it, he warned Hirsi Ali that she was the next target, and he gave a long and detailed account of all the offenses that would condemn her to an eternity in hell. These so-called fanatical Islamics lack the power to act according to their own values instead but instead allow themselves to be acted upon by other people, groups, circumstances and religion.

In May 2006, Hirsi Ali resigned her position in the Dutch parliament due to a controversy over the "passport scandal." The so-called "passport scandal," started after Ms. Verdonk, the Dutch minister of Immigration and Integration threatened to confiscate her passport after Ayaan had been accused of lying about her name and birth date when she first arrived in the Netherlands in 1992.

But after the decision sparked uproar, Ms. Verdonk made an above face and said Ms. Hirsi Ali could keep her Dutch citizenship after all. It will not be enough to keep Hirsi Ali in the country, however. She has been offered a job at a Washington-based conservative think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute, starting in September.

What crimes have Hirsi Ali committed

Last April, Hirsi Ali was at the University of Pittsburgh in Johnstown, PA, to deliver a lecture on religious freedom. The Local Muslim groups protested Hirsi Ali’s appearance at the university. Imam Fouad El-Bayly, President of the Johnstown Islamic Center, led the charge. Fouad El Bayly, stated that Hirsi Ali deserves the death sentence, but that she should be tried and judged in a Muslim country. Who would Fouad El Bayly suggest she be trial by?

Who the hell are Fouad El Bayly and his fellow Muslim extremists to issue a death sentence against an individual simply because of their expressed desires of not wanting to submit to a primitive, inhumane and abusive treatment by some barbaric male chauvinists.

As a matter of fact, this is precisely what Ms. Ali is preaching against,. Guys hiding under the umbrella of a faith with the book in their hands and treating women as objects by abusing, molesting, and barbarically killing them in the name of honor-killing when they stray from the so-called faith. The same freedom that protects the Imam and other from their dumb statements is the same freedom that protects others in the United States and else where.

Studies have shown that more and more Muslims men migrate to Western countries and obtain a change in residence status only to return home and bring back native wives who would never integrate; the men would see to it by keeping them as a piece of object, veiled and under virtual house arrest and eventually triggering a so-called “honor killing,” when the wives gravitate towards the freedom to choose.

In her memoir “Infidel,” Hirsi Ali noted “I lived by the Book, for the Book. The only thing missing was a husband and children. Soon, a distant cousin was selected to be my husband. This would mean submission not only to Allah, but to my husband-to-be. The hell at the end of life for me seemed abstract, whereas the hell of being forced to submit to a stranger, was immediate, and final.”

“This would be the hell of never feeling love, the hell of never choosing my mate, the hell of spending my life with a man to whom I would have to ask permission before being allowed to exercise my everyday freedom. A man who could take my body without permission. This stranger had the Holy Book on his side,” she also added.

“I had to make the leap to believing the Holy Book was relative – not absolute, not the literal syllables pronounced by God, but a historical record, written by men 150 years after the Prophet Muhammad's death. In other words, it was just another book,” “I am not a Muslim because I lost respect for the book and its author and his messenger. “

Hirsi Ali described her intellectual and religious journey as one in which she “lost respect for them because of their bloodthirsty demands to kill and hate. I now feel the common humanity with those I once shunned: the Jews, Christians, atheists, gays, sinners of all stripes and colors. I lost respect not for Muslims but for what they fear.”

Hirsi Ali moved to the United States in September 2006 and was a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. A recent and unconfirmed report had indicated that was forced to return to the Netherlands because paying for her bodyguards in the United States was too expensive for the Dutch government.

The only crime Hirsi Ali is guilty of, in my opinion, is exercising her freedom to choose not to submit her free will. In her own words “I am accused of hating Muslims, and vilifying the Qur'an and Muhammad, I want to clarified that I do not hate Muslims, but rather the submission of free will.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Interviewed On Swedish Television

The Film “Submission”

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