MP in immigration row to leave Netherlands

"Somali-born politician admits lying to get asylum"

Some comments on a documentary produced and shown in Holland:

"The documentary I believe demonstrates, in devastating fashion, that Hirsi Ali is an even bigger fraud than she is given credit for by people with genuine knowledge about the subjects she pontificates on. Why? Because she is an invented persona. As you may know, her reputation is built on her purported suffering as an oppressed Islamic woman, forced marriage, and determination to escape not only this forced marriage but the purported consequence of leaving it - an honour killing at the hands of her shamed relatives.

Among the facts revealed by this documentary, that I can of course not independently verify:

• Apart from the occasional spat with her brother and sister during her youth, which are not discussed in the documentary, she never experienced civil/political conflict, whether in her native Somalia or anywhere else. Period.

• Her family are such Islamic fanatics that they sent her older brother to a Christian school in Nairobi. Ayaan herself was sent to a Muslim school, apparently for reasons of educational quality rather than religion. They were also not exactly suffering economically. Although the parents were divorced, mother and 3 children grew up in a spacious house in one of the best districts in Nairobi, the house is now inhabited by 3 families.

• Her mother was against her purportedly forced marriage, because she felt strongly that Ayaan should not get married before getting a university degree to protect her from the consequences of an eventual divorce.

• She claims she met her husband, a distant relative, on her wedding day. He claims they knew each other beforehand and were in love, or at least so he thought. He claims he would not have married her against her will. He also notes that rather than dragging her by the hair to Canada after the marriage he went there alone and sent her a ticket to join him some months later.

• She claims the whole reason she had to escape to Holland (her flight to Canada included a stopover in Germany whence she took a train to Amsterdam) was to escape her family and certain death at the hands of her shamed father etc. Yet the first thing she did was contact relatives in Amsterdam; she participated in a television documentary about refugees in the Netherlands very soon after arriving there; she was in regular contact with her father by phone and letter; and her husband in fact visited her at the asylum center and, rather than killing her like a lamb at Eid, agreed to a divorce.

• The documentary does not go beyond the facts, but my own provisional conclusion is that it was indeed an arranged marriage, arranged either by herself for opportunistic reasons or, perhaps, also with the collaboration of her 'husband', to escape Kenya and get to Europe - I suspect she would not have been able to obtain a visa to make the flight so easily if she did not have a marriage certificate to show the Canadian consulate in Nairobi. Her brother comes within the vicinity of stating this, but another thing that struck me is that he spoke very highly of her, while her parents refused to cooperate in the documentary because they did not want their words to be used against her. Not quite as aggrieved by their supposed "culture of shame" and her subsequent career as we have been led to believe.

• Given the sensitivity of the topic and anti-immigrant mood in the Netherlands I also felt the documentary was quite responsible in this respect, making it a main issue that she represents a party that has championed anti-immigrant measures; that the party leaders were apparently informed about the above or much of it and kept it under wraps; and that its government ministers have been expelling genuine refugees for precisely the kind of thing related above.

• To sum up, Hirsi Harisa whatever her name may be appears to have given "freedom of expression" an entirely new meaning...

ZEMBLA: `The Holy Ayaan', Thursday 11 May 2006 at 20.20 on NPS/VARA on Netherlands 3.

From an article in The Economist (sorry, you have to have a subscription to see the whole article):

"the muddy account given in this book of her so-called forced marriage becomes more troubling when one considers that Ms Hirsi Ali has built a career out of portraying herself as the lifelong victim of fanatical Muslims. Another, even more disturbing story concerns her sister Haweya's sojourn in the Netherlands. In her earlier book, "The Caged Virgin", which came out last year, Ms Hirsi Ali wrote that her sister came to the Netherlands to avoid being "married off". In "Infidel", however, she says Haweya came to recover from an illicit affair with a married man that ended in abortion. Ms Hirsi Ali helped Haweya make up another fabricated story that gained her refugee status, but the Netherlands offered her little respite. After another affair and a further abortion, Haweya was put into a psychiatric hospital. Back in Nairobi, she died from a miscarriage brought on by an episode of religious frenzy. "It was the worst news of my life," Ms Hirsi Ali writes. Mental illness, abortion, failed marriages, illicit affairs and differing interpretations of religion: much as she tries, the kind of problems that Ms Hirsi Ali describes in "Infidel" are all too human to be blamed entirely on Islam. Her book shows that her life, like those of other Muslims, is more complex than many people in the West may have realised. But the West's tendency to seek simplistic explanations is a weakness that Ms Hirsi Ali also shows she has been happy to exploit.