Fearless Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The other day I met Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Talk about fearless!

As most people probably know, Ayaan immigrated to Holland from Somalia. She became a member of parliament and wrote the film 'Submission,' a highly critical account of the treatment of women in Islamic cultures, which incited a young Muslim radical to slit the throat of the filmaker, Theo van Gogh, on a street in Amsterdam. The assassin left a note stuck to a knife in van Gogh's chest saying Ayaan Hirsi Ali was next.

Since then she has been under protection by Dutch security. In a convoluted series of politically nuanced events earlier this year, her citizenship was momentarily revoked by Dutch authorities for dissembling in her immigrant application documents, then restored after wide protests.

Now, she has given up on the Dutch and moved to the US, where she is publishing her memoir, "Infidel," at the end of January.

Ayaan is that rare intellectual who doesn't live in abstractions but whose personal experience has made her the embodiment of our historical moment. A conversation with her moves effortlessly from the story of her clitorectomy as a young girl to the Hollywood film where she first saw a boy and girl kiss in public to a book she is writing which imagines a doubting Prophet. She has been described as an "Enlightenment fundamentalist" and tells it as she sees it in her soft voice. One example: Men may make the oppressive rules in traditional Islamic cultures, but it is the women, the mothers and grandmothers, who are more often than not the complicit enforcers.

There is an undeniable aura of destiny about Ayaan Hirsi Ali. We are living, as she puts it, "in an age of confrontation." And as a global symbol, she is in dead center of the conflict because it is all about women. Particularly the Arab Muslim culture, she believes, will adapt to almost anything -- but will not cede any ground on the role of women.

We will hear a lot more about this brave person in our troubled times ahead, I'm sure. Now that she is in America, her presence is bound to grow internationally because she is determined to stand up and resist. She is engaged with her whole being, not one to stand by quietly as the territory of intolerance expands.

For a taste of her deadly serious spunk, take a look at the following article she wrote for NPQ's weekly Global Viewpoint column on Iranian President' Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial conference in Tehran last week:

A RESPONSE TO AHMADINEJAD'S HOLOCAUST DENIAL: MY PERSONAL STORY

By Ayaan Hirsi ALI

WASHINGTON -- One day in 1994, living in Ede, a small town in Holland, I got a visit from my half-sister. She and I had both applied for asylum in Holland. I was granted it, she was denied. The fact that I got asylum gave me the opportunity to study. My half-sister couldn't.

In order for me to be admitted to the institute of higher education I wanted to attend, I needed to pass three courses: a language course, a civics course and a history course. It was in the preparatory history course that I, for the first time, heard of the Holocaust. I was 24 years old at that time, and my half-sister was 21.

In those days, the daily news was filled with the Rwandan genocide and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. On the day that my half-sister visited me, my head was reeling from what happened to 6 million Jews in Germany, Holland, France and Eastern Europe.

I learned that innocent men, women and children were separated from each other. Stars pinned to their shoulders, transported by train to camps, they were gassed for no other reason than for being Jewish. It was the most systematic and cruel attempt in the history of mankind to annihilate a people.

I saw pictures of masses of skeletons, even of kids. I heard horrifying accounts of some of the people who had survived the terror of Auschwitz and Sobibor. I told my half-sister all this and showed her the pictures in my history book. What she said shocked me more than the awful information in my book.

With great conviction, my half-sister cried: "It's a lie! Jews have a way of blinding people. They were not killed, gassed or massacred. But I pray to Allah that one day all the Jews in the world will be destroyed."

My 21-year-old sister was not saying anything new. My shock over what she said was partly in light of so much evidence I had been recently shown and partly because of the genocides of our own time.

Growing up as a child in Saudi Arabia, I remember my teachers, my mom and our neighbors telling us practically on a daily basis that Jews are evil, the sworn enemies of Muslims whose only goal was to destroy Islam. We were never informed about the Holocaust.

Later in Kenya, as a teenager, when Saudi and other Gulf philanthropy reached us in Africa, I remember that the building of mosques and donations to hospitals and the poor went hand in hand with the cursing of Jews. Jews were said to be responsible for the death of babies, epidemics such as AIDS, and for the cause of wars. They were greedy and would do absolutely anything to kill us Muslims. If we ever wanted to know peace and stability, and if we didn't want to be wiped out, we would have to destroy the Jews. And for those of us who were not in a position to take arms against them, it was enough for us to cup our hands, raise our eyes heavenward and pray to Allah to destroy them.

Western leaders today who say they are shocked by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's conference this week denying the Holocaust need to wake up to that reality. For the majority of Muslims in the world, the Holocaust is not a major historical event that they deny. We simply do not know it ever happened because we were never informed. Worse, most of us are groomed to wish for a Holocaust of Jews.

I remember in Africa the presence of Western philanthropists, NGOs and such institutions as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Their agents brought those they considered needy medicine, condoms, vaccines and building materials -- but no information on the Holocaust.

Unlike philanthropy given in the name of Islam, secular and Christian donors and relief organizations did not come with an agenda of hate. But they didn't speak out against hate, either. This was surely a missed opportunity in light of the hate-spreading charities from oil-rich Muslim countries.

The total number of Jews in the world today is estimated to be around 15 million, certainly no more than 20 million. In terms of fertility, their growth can be compared to that of the developed world, and in terms of aging, too.

On the other hand, the world's Muslim population is estimated to be between 1.2 and 1.5 billion; and not only is this population rapidly growing, but it is also very young.

What's striking about Ahmadinejad's conference is the (silent) acquiescence of mainstream Muslims. I cannot help but wonder: Why is there no counter-conference in Riyadh, Cairo, Lahore, Khartoum or Jakarta condemning Ahmadinejad? Why are the 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference silent on this?

Could the answer be as simple as it is horrifying: For generations, the leaders of these so-called Muslim countries have been spoon-feeding their populations a constant diet of propaganda similar to the one that generations of Germans (and other Europeans) were fed: that Jews are vermin and should be dealt with as such. In Europe, the logical conclusion was the Holocaust. If Ahmadinejad has his way, he shall not want for compliant Muslims ready to act on his wish.

To be sure, the world needs conferences of love, a promotion of understanding of cultures and anti-racist campaigns. But more urgently, the world needs to be informed again and again about the Holocaust. Not only in the interest of the Jews who survived the Holocaust and their offspring, but in the interest of humanity in general.

Perhaps the first place to start is to counter the Islamic philanthropy laced with hatred against the Jews. Western and Christian charities in the third world should take it upon themselves to inform Muslims and non-Muslims alike about the Holocaust.