What Happens To Ayaan Matters To Us All

Last week, the Dutch government announced it would remove the security protection it has provided to Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

The Somali-born Ayaan is perhaps the world's best-known living critic of the maltreatment of women in Islamic culture. First as a parliamentarian, then as a writer and filmmaker, she has spoken out against honour killings, genital mutilation and the degradation of women in traditional Islam.

Her close collaborator, Theo van Gogh, was murdered and mutilated on an Amsterdam street in 2004. She herself lives under constant threat of death -- so much so that last year, in order to have any hope of leading a normal life, she accepted an appointment at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. Yet even in the U.S., the threats keep coming.

The Dutch government says that since Ayaan no longer serves in Parliament or lives in the Netherlands, it is not obliged to protect her.

The British government took a different view in the case of Salman Rushdie. Rushdie took up temporary residence in New York in the 1990s, for reasons very similar to Ayaan's. The British continued to maintain his security detail and to co-ordinate information with the U.S. government.

The Dutch record to date is not so creditable as the British.

In 2002, a former Dutch academic named Pim Fortuyn organized a political party to defend cherished Dutch liberties (including sexual liberties -- Fortuyn was a flamboyant homosexual) against pressure from radical Islam. Fortuyn too encountered terrible threats. Yet the left-wing government of the day declined to provide Fortuyn with security. No, worse, the prime minister of the day, Wim Kok, denounced Fortuyn as a racist and a fascist.

After the van Gogh murder, the Dutch government did extend protection to Ayaan, but only in a very unwelcome form. It put her into remote seclusion under police guard --protecting her by silencing her.

Then in 2006, a new government announced that it had "discovered" that Ayaan had given a false name on her refugee application in 1992.

I put the word "discovered" in quotes. Not only had Ayaan herself confessed and apologized for the misstatement in television interviews in 2002. She had privately disclosed the matter to her parliamentary colleagues even earlier. Yet four years later, one of those colleagues, immigration minister Rita Verdonk, declared herself shocked to discover the false name. She ordered the withdrawal of Ayaan's Dutch citizenship.

Why? The minister in question was seeking the leadership of her party, the same party to which Ayaan had once belonged. She calculated that there existed in the Netherlands a constituency that regarded Ayaan as more trouble than she was worth.

In the immediate sense, the minister miscalculated: it was her own career that was destroyed. Ayaan's citizenship was restored.

But in the larger sense, the minister had perceived something unfortunately true. In the Netherlands and throughout the Western world, there are unfortunately people who flinch from the responsibilities of freedom. Confronted with a Danish cartoon crisis -- or to an Iranian nuclear program; or religiously motivated assassins on their own streets -- they do not blame freedom's enemies. They blame freedom's champions for stirring things up, for making too much trouble. As Belgian foreign minister Louis Michel said in a statement after Fortuyn's murder, "Democratic parties have to campaign in a very cautious way."

I suppose there is some truth in Michel's advice. But democracy sometimes needs to be defended by the incautious -- and Ayaan is gloriously, defiantly incautious. If this global struggle against extremism means anything, it means defending her right to be incautious. As the Dutch writer Leon de Winter aptly phrases it, "The costs of protection are completely disproportionate to the outcome: the continued existence of our values and norms."

What happens to Ayaan matters to us all. There have been moments in the glorious past of the Dutch Republic when Holland stood on the front-lines of freedom against religious tyranny. Those days have returned again. The Netherlands' embassy in Ottawa can be reached by e-mail at www.netherlandsembassy.ca/algemeen/contact. I'm sure it would like to hear from you.