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AI Overview

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the prominent author, activist, and former outspoken atheist, announced she has converted to Christianity. While she was not received into the Catholic Church specifically, she was baptized into the Christian faith with her family, and she has publicly praised Catholic values, particularly their defense of the nuclear family. [1, 2, 3]

Her conversion to Christianity was outlined in her widely read essay, “Why I Am Now a Christian”. Her journey toward faith was driven by two main factors: [1]

Her Relationship to Catholicism

While Hirsi Ali's conversion was part of a broader return to the Christian faith, she and her family were formally baptized in September 2024. However, she frequently aligns with Catholic perspectives in her cultural critiques. For instance, she has strongly defended the traditional nuclear family based on lifelong marriage—a structure she highlights that the Catholic Church has long upheld and promoted to protect children and strengthen society. 1, 2, 3, 4]

You can read her full essay explaining her departure from atheism on the Free Press where she first detailed her shift in worldview. Additionally, discussions surrounding her controversial and widely debated pivot from atheism to faith can be explored via Catholic Answers Magazine. 1

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6 26 Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Wikipedia SOME TALK ON XIAN

Ayaan Hirsi Ali[a], Lady Ferguson (Somali: Ayaan Xirsi Cali; born Ayaan Hirsi Magan, 13 November 1969) is a Somali-born Dutch-American and writer, activist, conservative thinker and former politician.[1][2][3]

Hirsi Ali was born in the Somali Democratic Republic. At the age of five, Hirsi Ali underwent female genital mutilation organized by her grandmother. Her family moved across various countries in Africa and the Middle East, and at 23, she received political asylum in the Netherlands, gaining Dutch citizenship five years later.[4] In her early 30s, Hirsi Ali renounced the religious beliefs of her childhood, began identifying as an atheist, and became involved in Dutch centre-right politics, joining the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD).

In 2003, Hirsi Ali was elected to the lower house of the States General of the Netherlands.[5] While serving in parliament, she collaborated on a short film with Theo van Gogh, titled Submission, which depicted the oppression of women under fundamentalist Islamic law and was critical of the Muslim canon itself.[6] The film led to death threats, and Van Gogh was murdered shortly after the film's release by Mohammed Bouyeri, driving Hirsi Ali into hiding.[6] At this time, she became more outspoken as a critic of Islam. In 2005, Time magazine named Hirsi Ali as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.[7] Her outspoken criticism of Islam made her a controversial figure in Dutch politics.[5]

Moving to the United States, Hirsi Ali joined the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank,[8] where she established herself as a writer, activist, and public intellectual.[9][10] Her books Infidel: My Life (2007), Nomad: From Islam to America (2010) and Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (2015) became bestsellers.[11]

Ali was a central figure in New Atheism since its beginnings.[12] She announced her conversion to Christianity in 2023.[13] Critics have accused Hirsi Ali of being Islamophobic or neo-orientalist and question her scholarly credentials "to speak authoritatively about Islam and the Arab world", saying she promotes the notion of a Western "civilizing mission".[14][15][16] Hirsi Ali is married to Scottish-American historian Niall Ferguson. The couple are raising their sons in the United States, where she became a citizen on 25 April 2013.[17][18]

Early life

Hirsi Ali was born Ayaan Hirsi Magan in Mogadishu, Somali Democratic Republic, on 13 November 1969.[8][19][20] Her father, Hirsi Magan Isse, was a Sunni Muslim of Somalia's Darod clan who had attended Columbia University in New York.[8] A prominent member of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front and a leading figure in the Somali Revolution, her father was imprisoned due to his opposition to Siad Barre's Communist government the year Ayaan was born.[8][21][22] Hirsi Ali's father was an intellectual, a dissident and a devout Muslim who had studied abroad and he was opposed to female genital mutilation; while he was imprisoned, Hirsi Ali's grandmother had a man perform the procedure on her, when Hirsi Ali was five years old. According to Hirsi Ali, she was fortunate that her grandmother could not find a woman to do the procedure, as the mutilation was "much milder" when performed by men.[21]

After her father escaped from prison, he and the family left Somalia, going to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and finally Kenya, where they lived for ten years.[8] There he established a comfortable upper-class life for them. Hirsi Ali attended the English-language Muslim Girls' Secondary School. By the time she reached her teens, Saudi Arabia was funding religious education in numerous countries and its religious views were becoming influential among many Muslims. A charismatic religious teacher, trained under this aegis, joined Hirsi Ali's school. She inspired the teenage Ayaan, as well as some fellow students, to adopt the more rigorous Saudi Arabian interpretations of Islam, as opposed to the more relaxed versions then current in Somalia and Kenya. Hirsi Ali said later that she had long been impressed by the Qur'an and had lived "by the Book, for the Book" throughout her childhood.[23]

She sympathised with the views of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and wore a hijab with her school uniform. This was unusual at the time but has become more common among some young Muslim women. At the time, she agreed with the fatwa proclaimed against British Indian writer Salman Rushdie in reaction to the portrayal of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in his novel The Satanic Verses.[24] After completing secondary school, Hirsi Ali attended a secretarial course at Valley Secretarial College in Nairobi for one year.[25] As she was growing up, she also read English-language adventure stories, such as the Nancy Drew series and Enid Blyton novels, with modern heroine archetypes who pushed the limits of society.[26] "Secret Seven, Famous Five and some of the other Enid Blytons – what they do is, they encourage you as an individual to imagine that you're a part of the Secret Seven. You're solving mysteries, you're a part of the Famous Five. So that's very different from the world I grew up in, where you are told, 'Stay inside the house. Do not mingle with boys," she recalled."[27] Also, remembering her grandmother refusing soldiers entry into her house, Hirsi Ali associated with Somalia "the picture of strong women: the one who smuggles in the food, and the one who stands there with a knife against the army and says, 'You cannot come into the house.' And I became like that. And my parents and my grandmother don't appreciate that now—because of what I've said about the Qur'an. I have become them, just in a different way."[21]

Life in the Netherlands

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After gaining her degree, Hirsi Ali became a Fellow at the Wiardi Beckman Stichting (WBS), a think tank of the center-left Labour Party (PvdA). Leiden University Professor Ruud Koole was steward of the party. Hirsi Ali's writing at the WBS was inspired by the work of the neoconservative Orientalist Bernard Lewis.[32]

She became disenchanted with Islam and was shocked by the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001, for which al-Qaeda eventually claimed responsibility. After listening to videotapes of Osama bin Laden citing "words of justification" in the Qur'an for the attacks, she wrote, "I picked up the Qur'an and the hadith and started looking through them, to check. I hated to do it, because I knew that I would find Bin Laden's quotations in there."[33] During this time of transition, she came to regard the Qur'an as relative—it was a historical record and "just another book."[23]

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Film with Theo van Gogh

Theo van Gogh

Working with writer and director Theo van Gogh, Hirsi Ali wrote the script and provided the voice-over for Submission (2004),[37] a short film that criticised the treatment of women in Islamic society.[38] Juxtaposed with passages from the Qur'an were scenes of actresses portraying Muslim women suffering abuse. An apparently nude actress dressed in a semi-transparent burqa was shown with texts from the Qur'an written on her skin. These texts are among those often interpreted as justifying the subjugation of Muslim women. The film's release sparked outrage among many Dutch Muslims.

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Hirsi Ali in 2006

In 2006, Hirsi Ali took a position at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.;[8][75] as the Dutch government continued to provide security for her, this required an increase in their effort and costs.[76]

On 17 April 2007, the local Muslim community in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, protested Hirsi Ali's planned lecture at the local campus of the University of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh imam Fouad El Bayly said that the activist deserved the death sentence but should be tried and judged in an Islamic country.[77]

Hirsi Ali was granted permanent residency in the United States in 2007.[8][78] In October 2007, she returned to the Netherlands, continuing her work for AEI from a secret address. The Dutch minister of Justice Hirsch Ballin had informed her of his ruling that, as of 1 October 2007, the Dutch government would no longer pay for her security abroad. That year she declined an offer to live in Denmark, saying she intended to return to the United States.[79] She became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 2013.[8]

She was a Fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at The Harvard Kennedy School from 2016 to 2019.[80]

Al-Qaeda hit list

In 2010,[81] Anwar al-Awlaki published a hit list in his Inspire magazine, including Hirsi Ali, Geert Wilders, and Salman Rushdie along with cartoonists Lars Vilks and three Jyllands-Posten staff members: Kurt Westergaard, Carsten Juste, and Flemming Rose.[82][83][84] The list was later expanded to include [Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A9phane_%22Charb%22_Charbonnier "Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier"), who was murdered in 2015 in a terror attack on *Charlie Hebdo* in Paris, along with 11 other people. After the attack, Al-Qaeda called for more killings.[85]

Brandeis University

In early 2014, Brandeis University, a private liberal-arts university in Massachusetts, announced that Hirsi Ali would receive an honorary degree. In April, the university rescinded the honor, expressing concern over Hirsi Ali's views on Islam.[8] This occurred in response to protests by the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) and lobbying by Joseph E. B. Lumbard, Head of the Islamic Studies Department, other faculty members and several student groups that accused Hirsi Ali of hate speech. University president Frederick M. Lawrence said that "certain of her past statements" were inconsistent with the university's "core values" because they were "Islamophobic".[86] The university said she was welcome to come to the campus for a dialogue in the future.[citation ^needed]

The university's withdrawal of its invitation generated controversy and condemnation among some.[who?][87][88] According to The Economist, Hirsi Ali's "wholesale condemnations of existing religions just aren't done in American politics." It said that "the explicit consensus in America is ecumenical and strongly pro-religious".[89] The university was distinguishing between an open intellectual exchange, which could occur if Hirsi Ali came to campus for a dialogue and appearing to celebrate her with an honorary degree.[89]

A Brandeis spokesperson said that Hirsi Ali had not been invited to speak at commencement but simply to be among honorary awardees.[90] Hirsi Ali said CAIR's letter misrepresented her and her work, but that it has long been available on the Internet.[91][92] She said that the "spirit of free expression" has been betrayed and stifled.[93]

David Bernstein, a law professor at George Mason University, criticised the Brandeis decision as an attack on academic values of freedom of inquiry and intellectual independence.[94]

Designation by Southern Poverty Law Center

In 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) accused Hirsi Ali and Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz of being "anti-Muslim extremists".[95] The Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice wrote a public letter to the SPLC asking them to retract the listings.[96][non-primary ^source ^needed] In 2018, the SPLC retracted the "Anti-Muslim Extremist" list in its entirety after Nawaz threatened legal action over his inclusion on the list.[97][98]

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Hirsi Ali joined the VVD political party in 2002; it combines "classically liberal" views on the economy, foreign policy, crime and immigration with a liberal social stance on abortion and homosexuality. She says that she admires Frits Bolkestein, a former Euro-commissioner and ideological leader of the party.[102]

Hirsi Ali is the founder and president of the AHA Foundation, a non-profit humanitarian organisation to protect women and girls in the U.S. against political Islam and harmful tribal customs that violate U.S. law and international conventions. Through the AHA Foundation, Hirsi Ali campaigns against the denial of education for girls, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, honour violence and killings, and suppression of information about the crimes through the misuse and misinterpretation of rights to freedom of religion and free speech in the U.S. and the West.[103]

Hirsi Ali has praised western liberalism.[104] She was a participant in the first conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, speaking on the personal choice to support a narrative for western civilisation.[105][106]

Hirsi Ali is an opponent of "Wokeism" and the Black Lives Matter movement, comparing them to ISIS, saying both reflected the "intolerant doctrines of a religious cult".[107] In an interview with Douglas Murray on Piers Morgan Uncensored, she called Ibram X. Kendi a racist, adding, "A very loud minority wants to get ahead and is claiming they speak for all blacks and all women, all gender-identity minorities. They don't speak for any of these minorities. They do this so that they can get ahead. Ibram X. Kendi speaks for himself. Claudine Gay speaks for herself. She doesn't speak for me."[108]

Islam and Muslims

Hirsi Ali is critical of Islam,[109] including the treatment of women in Islamic societies and the punishments demanded by conservative Islamic scholars for homosexuality, blasphemy and adultery. She publicly identified as Muslim until 28 May 2002, when she acknowledged in her diary that she knew she was not.[110]

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Update: Read Max Blumenthal's overview of the neocon network's mobilization [3] against the facts contained in this article. His response to the National Review's allegations of a "lie" are included.

As seen onFavicon for http://news.google.comnews.google.com

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Neoconservative Honor Brigade}:

A look at the militant neoconservative network that has mobilized to defend the honor of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the world's leading Islamophobes, against my factual reporting.

byAvatar for Max BlumenthalMax Blumenthal4 days ago1 Like4,588 Views

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My piece for Alternet calling into question Ayaan Hirsi Ali's claim that Muslims are "responsible" for most global conflict deaths and exposing her history of fraud and religious bigotry sent her anti-Muslim supporters into a rage. Leading the charge was her husband, the British right-winger and imperial cheerleader Niall Ferguson:

*Ferguson has previously referenced IISS data on global conflict deaths in his own writing for the Wall Street Journal:  http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303945704579391492993958448*

How did such apparently misappropriated IISS data wind up at the top of an anti-Muslim polemic by Ferguson's wife, Hirsi Ali, also published in the Wall Street Journal? Why was Ferguson so defensive about the dubious statistic?

On March 23, Hirsi Ali went on the Daily Show to claim: “If you look at 70 percent of the violence in the world today, Muslims are responsible.” Below, Ferguson attempted to spin her wild statement.

Acting apparently on Ferguson and Hirsi Ali's behalf, right-wing pro-Israel campus activist Daniel Mael accused me of lying about IISS comments in an article for the National Review.

I produced my original email query to IISS Media Relations and Communications Officer Kat Slowe, which I sent through an official media form. Following standard journalist protocol, I identified myself as a journalist and directly, exactly quoted the comments she supplied to me in writing and on the record.

Ferguson had previously accused me of collaborating with an Islamist-oriented "honor brigade" to shut down honest intellectual debate.

After a salvo of bogus claims, Ferguson promoted an earlier piece by Daniel Mael that painted me as (what else?) an anti-Semite.

*Mael is a far-right pro-Israel campus activist who was accused of harassment by Brandeis University. Brandeis backed down only after Mael's friends at the pro-Netanyahu Emergency Committee for Israel hired the corporate law firm Covington & Burling to intimidate Brandeis administrators: http://www.cov.com/media_mentions/*

Here is Daniel Mael claiming that Ayaan Hirsi Ali risks her life to keep Hamas from killing innocent civilians:

Delivered to Mael by her handlers, Hirsi Ali claimed to the young anti-Palestinian activist that "nerves and fatigue" caused her to hold Muslims directly responsible for most of the conflict-related deaths in the world:

Mael's attack piece was published in the Weekly Standard, a neoconservative magazine run by William Kristol, the orchestrator of Sen. Tom Cotton's notorious letter to the leaders of Iran. Kristol promoted Mael's piece here:

Niall Ferguson served as an advisor to John McCain's 2008 campaign for president. McCain was backed heavily by Kristol and his neoconservative political network.

On the McCain campaign, Ferguson worked alongside neoconservative cadre Michael Goldfarb, a close understudy of Kristol: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Goldfarb_Michael Goldfarb also happens to be the founder of the Free Beacon.

Before I published my piece on Hirsi Ali, she or someone close to her (Ferguson?) forwarded a query I had emailed her to the Free Beacon.

On her personal Twitter account, Hirsi Ali promoted the Free Beacon article attacking me for attempting to fact check her.

She did so by retweeting Avi Mayer, a professional social media troll paid by the Israeli government-funded Jewish Agency to propagandize on behalf of Netanyahu and the Israeli army.

In his 1500 page manifesto, Anders Breivik reprinted a far-right article declaring that Ayaan Hirsi Ali deserved a Nobel Peace Prize.

For her part, Hirsi Ali said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deserved a Nobel Prize for overseeing the military assault on the Gaza Strip in 2014 that left over 2200 dead, most of them civilians.

At a recent Israeli government sponsored event, the anti-Islam atheist Hirsi Ali said she considered converting to Judaism.

Among those who mobilized to defend Hirsi Ali from my factual reporting was her close ally, the self-styled "New Atheist" Sam Harris.

Harris has a lengthy record of attacking Muslims, cheering on the self-proclaimed Jewish State and defending the foreign policy of George W. Bush, an evangelical Christian who said his faith influenced his decision to invade Iraq.

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While promoting her new book, Heretic, on a March 23 episode [4] of "The Daily Show," Somali-born author and anti-Islam activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali made a staggering claim: “If you look at 70 percent of the violence in the world today, Muslims are responsible,” she told host Jon Stewart.

Stewart did not demand any evidence and Hirsi Ali provided no citation. However, she made a strikingly similar statement in a March 20 essay [5] previewing her new book for the Wall Street Journal: “According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies,” Hirsi Ali wrote in WSJ’s Saturday Essay, “at least 70% of all the fatalities in armed conflicts around the world last year were in wars involving Muslims.”

I contacted the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a leading British foreign policy think tank, to inquire about the source of Hirsi Ali’s statistic. According to IISS Media Relations and Communications Officer Kat Slowe, IISS did not explicitly state such a figure in its research.

“I have spoken to a number of our experts and they cannot identify where this statistic may have come from,” Slowe told me.

“Their best guess is that the journalist in question [Hirsi Ali] may have access/a subscription to the [IISS] Armed Conflict Database and may have calculated this statistic independently. There are some concerns that it could be misleading as, without Syria (near 200,000 total deaths, and almost half of last year’s global conflict deaths) the figure would look massively different (and of course, this conflict did not have its root in religion),” Slowe added.

Hirsi Ali’s AHA Foundation did not respond to my request for a citation on the statistic, nor did the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute that employs Hirsi Ali as a resident scholar. My email query to Hirsi Ali’s personal account at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where she serves as a fellow, also went unanswered.

Around 24 hours after my initial query, Hirsi Ali publicly backed off her claim that Muslims are “responsible” for most of the violence in the world. “Depressing that 70% of fatalities in armed conflicts around the world last year were in wars involving Muslims,” she declared on her personal Twitter account [6].

Hirsi Ali linked to a survey of casualties [7] in global conflicts by IISS’ Hanna Ucko Neill and Jens Wardenaer which made no reference to Muslims or religiously inspired violence. Apparently Hirsi Ali calculated the statistic on her own by using an IISS report that documented fatalities in conflicts in territories from eastern Ukraine to sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East to Mexico, where drug gangs fueled widespread killing. The IISS's Slowe noted that year's surge in conflict-related deaths occured thanks to the fighting in Syria, explaining that Hirsi Ali's claim "could be misleading" because "this conflict did not have its root in religion."

Instead of responding to my question about her statistic, Hirsi Ali’s AHA Foundation forwarded my email query to the Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing publication with its own history of Islamophobic tall tales[8] and hoaxes [9]. In a currently un-bylined article [10] about the query, the Free Beacon accused me of anti-Semitism.

History of fraud

Hirsi Ali’s highly suspect statistic is only the latest deception by one of the world’s most prominent opponents of Islam. While other anti-Muslim activists like Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller have marginalized themselves on the fringes of the far-right, Hirsi Ali remains a darling of the American mainstream media. In Heretic, a polemic recycling many of her past arguments against Islam, she calls for the emergence of a Muslim Martin Luther — the authoritarian 16th-century zealot who called for [11] burning down the synagogues of Jews, whom he compared to a gangrenous disease. With the book's release, Hirsi Ali has been welcomed with open arms by the BBC, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, and a relatively accommodating Jon Stewart. ABC News has even run an excerpt from Heretic [12], while the New York Times Book Review hosted her for an interview filled with hardball questions [13] about her favorite children’s books.

Hirsi Ali’s power to persuade lies in her dramatic personal story and the public persona she has constructed. She has marketed herself as a expert native informant who has emerged out of the dark heart of radical Islam and into the light of Western civilization. Her tale is an uplifting, comforting one that tells many Westerners what they want to hear about themselves and their perceived enemies. With anti-Muslim attitudes at their peak across Europe and the US, her sweeping critique of Islam as an endemically violent faith has enormous cachet. The only problem is that like her writings on Islam, much of what she has told the public about herself is questionable.

In May 2006, the Dutch television program Zembla thoroughly debunked the dramatic story Hirsi Ali had told to advance her career, concluding that Hirsi Ali had sold the Dutch public “a story full of obscurities.”

Born Ayaan Hirsi Magam, she migrated to the Netherlands in 1992, changed her name to Hirsi Ali, and lied to Dutch authorities about her past. Contrary to the story she told the government, she arrived in the Netherlands not from war-torn Somalia, but from Kenya, where she lived in a secure environment and under the protection of the United Nations, which funded her education at a well-regarded Muslim girls’ school. Though she told immigration authorities and the Dutch public she had fled from civil war in Somalia, she left that country before its war broke out. Indeed, she did not live through a war there or anywhere else. Thanks to her fabrications, Hirsi Ali received political asylum in just five weeks.

Hirsi Ali told astonished audiences on Dutch talk shows that her supposedly devout family had forced her to marry a draconian Muslim man, that she had not been present at her own wedding, and that her family had threatened to kill her for offending their religious honor. However, Zembla told a drastically different story. Hirsi Ali’s brother, aunt and former husband each testified that she had indeed been present at her wedding. It turned out that Hirsi Ali’s mother had sent her brother to a Christian school, not exactly an indication of Islamic fanaticism.

“Yeah, I made up the whole thing,” Hirsi Ali admitted on camera to a Zembla reporter who confronted her with her lies. “I said my name was Ayaan Hirsi Ali instead of Ayaan Hirsi Magan. I also said I was born in 1967 while I was actually born in 1969.”

Hirsi Ali’s claim of honor killing threats also appears to be empty; she remained in touch with her father and aunt after she left her husband. In fact, her husband even came to visit her in the Dutch refugee center where she lived after leaving him. Even though he had paid her way to Europe on the grounds that she would join him in Canada, Hirsi Ali’s husband consented to the divorce she sought.(Watch [14] the full Zembla program on Hirsi Ali.)

Fabrications that toppled a government

In 2003, just a decade after gaining political asylum in the Netherlands, Hirsi Ali was elected to the Dutch parliament on the ticket of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy. VVD leadership knew that the story Hirsi Ali told on her immigration forms was a gigantic lie — she had told them as much — but covered up the fraud and even advanced it to propel her career.

“She’s witnessed five civil wars in her youth, and has fled with her family many times. She’s made of iron and steel,” the VVD’s Neelie-Smit Kroes said of Hirsi Ali at the time, reciting claims her party knew were false.

A year after joining the Dutch parliament, where she said she attempted to ban Islamic schools in the Netherlands, Hirsi Ali teamed up with Dutch director Theo van Gogh to produce a documentary called Submission. The film portrayed violence against women in Muslim communities as a logical result of Islamic belief, relying on actresses to portray abused women and featuring semi-nude, niqab clad women with Quranic verses scrawled across their torsos. Van Gogh, a filmmaker and columnist who had taken to calling Muslims “goat fuckers [15],” was gunned down and stabbed to death soon after the film’s release by a Dutch Islamist radical. Before fleeing the scene, the killer pinned a note to van Gogh’s body threatening Hirsi Ali with death. Hirsi Ali’s persistence in the face of the episode helped earn her hero status across the West, particularly in post-9/11 America, where Time magazine named her one of its 100 Most Influential People in 2005.

Zembla’s revelations of Hirsi Ali’s lies in May 2006 interrupted her ascent and threw the Dutch government into chaos. No one was more damaged than her friend and close party ally, Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk. Nicknamed “Iron Rita” for her ruthless anti-migrant crackdowns and her demagogic appeals to xenophobia, Verdonk was shamed by the revelations of Hirsi Ali’s deceptions. When she announced her intention to strip Hirsi Ali of her citizenship, however, she was skewered in parliament and forced to relent.

Days after Zembla aired its exposé, Hirsi Ali announced her plans to leave parliament and take up a position with the American Enterprise Institute,the Washington-based think tank that housed many of the neoconservatives who helped orchestrate the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In the immediate aftermath of the furor she caused, Verdonk introduced the so-called “Law on Integration,” one of Europe’s harshest anti-immigrant bills. Only one member of the Dutch House of Representatives opposed it. However, the governing coalition soon collapsed because of the scandal Hirsi Ali’s deceptions inspired. With a new coalition seated in February 2007, and without Verdonk and Hirsi Ali in power, the government was able to adopt a more tolerant approach to immigrants.

Winning a Harvard fellowship, defending Breivik

Upon her relocation to the US, Hirsi Ali was embraced by a coalition of liberal interventionists, neoconservatives and “New Atheists” like Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Bill Maher. With extended appearances[16] on the Christian Broadcasting Network of Pat Robertson, who blamed homosexuality for the 9/11 attacks, self-proclaimed feminist Hirsi Ali won droves of fans among the Christian right. Despite her views on Islam, which she called [17] a “destructive, nihilistic cult of death,” or perhaps because of them, she received a fellowship [18] from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

As she rose in prominence among America’s intellectual elite, Hirsi Ali’s history of lying tumbled conveniently down the Orwellian memory hole. In promotional material [19] for her best-selling 2007 memoir, Infidel, Hirsi Ali’s publishers at Simon & Schuster have pushed the discredited claim that “Hirsi Ali survived civil war.” More recently, conservative pundit Peggy Noonan glossed over the reasons behind Hirsi Ali’s flight from the Netherlands, writing [20], “Ayaan Hirsi Ali got death threats and eventually fled to America.” Few, if any, American outlets have noted that Hirsi Ali left the Netherlands as her public credibility collapsed and her anti-immigrant party fell into crisis.

With support from across the American ideological spectrum, Hirsi Ali sharpened her rhetoric against Muslims. In a candid 2007 exchange with Reason Magazine, she declared [21] that the religion of Islam had to be “defeated.” “Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful,” Hirsi Ali stated. “It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now….There comes a moment when you crush your enemy.”

Junketed to Berlin in 2012 to receive the Axel Springer Honorary Award from the right-wing German publisher, Hirsi Ali appeared to blame [22] liberal defenders of multiculturalism for the killing spree committed by the Norwegian extremist Anders Breivik, claiming they left Breivik with “no other choice but to use violence. (Breivik cited Hirsi Ali’s work in his 1,500 page manifesto explaining his plans to commit a series of terrorist attacks across Norway.)

“[T]hat one man who killed 77 people in Norway, because he fears that Europe will be overrun by Islam, may have cited the work of those who speak and write against political Islam in Europe and America – myself among them – but he does not say in his 1500 page manifesto that it was these people who inspired him to kill. He says very clearly that it was the advocates of silence. Because all outlets to express his views were censored, he says, he had no other choice but to use violence.” (Her words were met with an extended standing ovation.)

When Brandeis University canceled plans [23] to award Hirsi Ali an honorary degree in April 2014, it appeared that her increasingly vitriolic tirades against Islam and its adherents had caught up with her. But then came the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, a seemingly clarifying moment that Hirsi Ali and fellow anti-Islam activists seized on as confirmation of their darkest prophecies. Two months later, she released Heretic.

Having rebranded herself a brave “reformer” following in the footsteps [24] of the Selma marchers, Hirsi Ali has found her way back into the mainstream limelight. While American media demonstrates an endless appetite for her polemics about Islam, holding her to account remains taboo.

Editor's Note: Cat Slowe's official title with IISS has been clarified -- her official title is Media Relations and Communications Officer.

Max Blumenthal is a senior writer for AlterNet, and the award-winning author of Goliath [25] and Republican Gomorrah [26]. Find him on Twitter at @MaxBlumenthal [27].

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Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [28]

[29]

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*Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/media/anti-islam-author-ayaan-hirsi-alis-latest-deception*

*Links:

[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/max-blumenthal

[2] http://alternet.org

[3] https://storify.com/MaxBlumenthal/ayaan-hirsi-ali-s-anti-muslim-honor-brigade

[4] http://thedailyshow.cc.com/episodes/aoti6l/march-23--2015---ayaan-hirsi-ali

[5] http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-reformation-for-islam-1426859626

[6] http://twitter.com/Ayaan/status/580736807769403392

[7] http://www.iiss.org/en/iiss%20voices/blogsections/iiss-voices-2015-dda3/february-04dc/acd-2014-fatalities-3023

[8] http://mondoweiss.net/2014/03/outlets-attack-divestment

[9] http://paper-bird.net/2014/03/04/iran-how-assaulting-eight-women-and-girls-can-make-you-a-gay-man

[10] http://freebeacon.com/issues/anti-israel-activist-fact-checks-hirsi-ali

[11] http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/Luther_on_Jews.html

[12] http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/excerpt-heretic-ayaan-hirsi-ali/story?id=29807824

[13] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/books/review/ayaan-hirsi-ali-by-the-book.html

[14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbxP8Uys8kc

[15] http://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/nov/04/features.jonhenley

[16] http://www.cbn.com/tv/1420602061001

[17] http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/04/11/why-aayan-hirsi-ali-gets-a-conservative-media-s/198856>

[18] http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/experts/2635/ayaan_hirsi_ali.html

[19] http://www.amazon.com/Infidel-Ayaan-Hirsi-Ali/dp/0743289692

[20] http://www.peggynoonan.com/salman-rushdie-meet-charlie-hebdo/

[21] http://reason.com/archives/2007/10/10/the-trouble-is-the-west/singlepage

[22] http://www.loonwatch.com/2012/05/ayaan-hirsi-ali-sympathizes-with-terrorist-anders-behring-breivik/

[23] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/brandeis-cancels-plan-to-give-honorary-degree-to-ayaan-hirsi-ali-a-critic-of-islam.html?_r=0

[24] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ayaan-hirsi-ali/from-selma-to-tunis-when-will-we-march-against-the-segregation-of-our-own-time_b_6915660.html

[25] http://www.amazon.com/Goliath-Life-Loathing-Greater-Israel/dp/1568586345

[26] http://republicangomorrah.com/

[27] http://twitter.com/maxblumenthal

[28] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Exposing Anti-Islam Author Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Latest Deception

[29] http://www.alternet.org/

[30] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B*

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