Hirsigate: AHA vroeg echtgenoot te zwijgen over haar leugens

[Hein van Meeteren]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Dr. Marc-Alexander Fluks wrote:

>REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl
>
>In een Canadese krant in Toronto (de woonplaats van haar ex-echtgenoot),
>
Dit is het hele verhaal, die *buttons to push* zijn opvallend!

> She has been exposed as the equivalent of such Iraqi exiles as Ahmad
> Chalabi and Iyad Allawi. They told the tall tales the Bush
> administration wanted to hear to wage war. She told the stories the
> Dutch, and many Europeans, craved, to confirm their anti-Muslim
> prejudices. Like the Iraqi exiles, she knew exactly which buttons to
> push. She was an abused wife who had fled a forced marriage and also
> her vengeful family and clan. An "ex-Muslim," she was out to liberate
> Muslim women and tame Islam to her liking and those of her
> benefactors. She wrote and narrated the Theo Van Gogh documentary
> /Submission /about the subjugation of Muslim women that led to his
> murder and to death threats against her, placing her under 24-hour
> guard. Along the way she let it be known she had lied about her name,
> age and how she had entered Holland in 1992, not directly from her
> homeland of Somalia but via Saudi Arabia, Kenya and Germany, a fact
> that would have undermined her claim, rather than expedited it. The
> Dutch didn't mind. Many refugee claimants embellish their stories.
> Besides, she was a heroine they had embraced, a "moderate" Muslim
> waging war against "fanatical" believers. To her detractors, hers was
> a case, at best, of bitter personal experience passed off as the norm
> for all Muslims, and, at worst, relentless self-promotion that had won
> her fame and invitations from such places as Toronto during the
> so-called sharia debate and to the U.S. to bask in the company of Dick
> Cheney and Bernard Lewis. Her well-ordered world came crashing down
> recently when a TV documentary suggested her entire claim to stardom
> was a fraud; not only had there been no forced marriage and no family
> vendetta but that she enjoyed good relations with her family and
> husband, both before and after settling in Holland. Professor Jytte
> Klausen of Brandeis University, author of /The Islamic Challenge:
> Politics and Religion in Western Europe/, who knows Hirsi Ali and has
> followed her case closely, said in a telephone interview Thursday:
> "She wasn't forced into a marriage. She had an amicable relationship
> with her husband, as well as with the rest of her family. It was not
> true that she had to hide from her family for years." Why, then, has
> her estranged/former husband not spoken up? "Because Hirsi Ali has
> asked him not to. They parted company amicably." The revelation,
> Klausen said, proved the last straw for Ali's colleagues in
> government. The ruling right-wing VVD party was already running out of
> patience with her, not because it had discovered multicultural
> tolerance or political correctness but because "it was just tired of
> her jumping up like a jack-in-a-box" anytime anyone poked holes in her
> neatly knitted tale or differed with her. For example, when a
> government think-tank issued a report last month puncturing the
> prevailing anti-Islamic orthodoxy, she accused its authors of
> "sticking their heads in the sand." The Scientific Council for
> Government Policy had simply stated the obvious: Islam, like any
> religion, has many strands, conservative to liberal, with varying
> attitudes toward gender parity, and that Muslim nations "do not
> satisfy contemporary international standards on democracy and human
> rights, (but) in this, they do not differ from many other developing
> countries." The council also condemned "the climate of confrontation
> and stereotypical thinking," the turf Hirsi Ali plays on. The jig is
> up for Hirsi Ali in Holland. She may move to the U.S., as a fellow at
> the neo-con American Enterprise Institute. She would be welcomed in
> certain circles, which, Klausen warned, "want to see in American
> politics the development of a kind of Islam-bashing we've seen in
> Europe for a while." The American ambassador to The Hague has already
> met her to pave the way. She and the Bush administration may deserve
> each other. Also, it goes without saying that she is fully entitled to
> her views, however provocative. The problem lies elsewhere — in the
> readiness of the paranoiac post-9/11 world to hear and believe the
> worst about Muslims and Islam. Hirsi Ali is just one of many to cater
> to that demand.

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