By Ian Buruma, a professor at Bard College, is a co-author of "Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies." (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 19/05/06):
WHEN Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk of the Netherlands suddenly decided last Monday that the Somali-born politician and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali should never have been granted Dutch citizenship because she had lied about her name, a storm was unleashed. Ms. Hirsi Ali resigned her seat in Parliament. Her supporters spoke of "judicial murder." Ms. Hirsi Ali herself had referred a few weeks ago to the "terror regime of political correctness ruling our nation." It was as though she were being punished in a timid country for being an outspoken critic of Islam.
One might easily see this as a story of good versus bad: Ms. Verdonk ("Iron Rita"), the sturdy former deputy prison warden, cracking down on the delicate freedom fighter. There are compelling reasons to sympathize with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Once a fervent Islamist, now a scourge of Islamic iniquity, she has paid a huge price for expressing her convictions. After writing "Submission," the short film about brutality to women in the name of Islam that led to the murder of its director, Theo van Gogh, she had to go into hiding, still cannot move without bodyguards and has even been ordered by a court to move out of her apartment because her neighbors feel insecure in her vicinity. No wonder, she said, so many Dutch people had failed to resist the Nazis during the war.
The proposed revocation of her citizenship would appear to be the last straw in a long story of injustice and Dutch pusillanimity. And it seemed gratuitous too. When applying for refugee status and citizenship in 1992, Ms. Hirsi Ali had not used her father's name, Magan, and had pretended that she was escaping the civil war in Somalia instead of a forced marriage to a stranger.
Much of this was already known. Making an issue of it now looked cruel and vindictive, which is why many people, including most politicians in the conservative party to which both Ms. Verdonk and Ms. Hirsi Ali belong, rallied to her cause.
But the whole affair actually has nothing to do with Ms. Hirsi Ali's convictions. Rita Verdonk is far from being "politically correct." In fact, she is running for the party leadership as a hard-liner with a "straight back" who will no longer tolerate bogus asylum seekers, radical imams and immigrant youths "terrorizing" Dutch cities. In Dutch politics, Rita Verdonk was Ayaan Hirsi Ali's ally. They were fighting for the same cause. So why this sudden ruckus?
The Netherlands, proud of its multicultural tolerance, its hospitality to strangers, its free and easy social ways, used to be thought of as a soft touch for would-be immigrants with a story of persecution or war. Once you got across the Dutch border, officials of the welfare state would take care of you. Ms. Hirsi Ali was even coached by members of Dutch refugee organizations on how to finesse her story in order to get asylum. Economic immigration from outside the European Union was (and is) almost impossible, so such finessing was often the only way to get in.
The free and easy climate began to change in the late 1990's, and even more so after 9/11. Pim Fortuyn, the populist leader gunned down in 2002, gained a huge following by saying that the country was full, and warning that Muslims posed a danger to Dutch society. Mr. Fortuyn was an extraordinary figure, for he was not only a populist promising law and order, but also an openly gay man who saw Islam as a threat to his own sexual freedom.
In this new climate Ayaan Hirsi Ali began to flourish. Though neither a populist nor a xenophobic opponent of immigrants (how could she be?), she warned the Dutch about the Muslim menace. In the name of the Enlightenment, she would do battle against the new counter-Enlightenment, and she found allies among a variety of conservative intellectuals and politicians — and some former leftists, too — who were convinced that multiculturalism had failed, that the Dutch were timid, even cowardly, in the face of the Muslim challenge and that a tough line had to be taken.
Rita Verdonk was only a particularly extreme and unimaginative exponent of this new mood. One of her wildly impractical suggestions, mostly shot down in Parliament, was that only Dutch should be spoken in the streets. It was she who sent back vulnerable refugees to places like Syria and Congo. It was under her watch that asylum seekers were put in prison cells after a fire had consumed their temporary shelter and killed 11 at the Amsterdam airport. She was the one who decided to send a family back to Iraq because they had finessed their stories, even though human rights experts had warned that they would be in great danger. This was part of her vaunted "straight back."
So when Ayaan Hirsi Ali told her own story of fibbing in a television documentary last week, Ms. Verdonk felt that she had no choice. If she didn't investigate this case, and act tough, the law would not be applied equally. This was inflexible, and given Ms. Hirsi Ali's value as a courageous activist who had already suffered a great deal, harsh. But it had nothing to do with her views on Islam.
In this context, Ms. Hirsi Ali's earlier remarks about the "terror" of "political correctness" have an unfortunate ring. It would have been better if she had taken this opportunity to speak up for the people who face the same problem that she did, of trying to move to a free European country, because their lives are stunted at home for social, political or economic reasons. By all means let us support Ayaan Hirsi Ali now, but spare a thought also for the nameless people sent back to terrible places in the name of a hard line to which she herself has contributed.