They called a meeting to tell Ayaan that it wasn’t their party’s role to take positions on theological controversies. They tried to explain that she was a member of the governing party now, and that the Liberal creed—and the idea behind the Dutch state—was that government should deal with the actions of citizens, not their beliefs. As one party member said, “It is not liberal to take a stand on religious beliefs. In this country we have separation of religion and state.”
Ayaan would not accept it. Eyes blazing, she insisted that what she had said was true and that she had the right and duty to say so. The Prophet had married Aisha when she was nine. A man who did that in Holland today would be considered a pervert, would he not? Therefore the Prophet was a pervert, and anyone who said he wasn’t was either a fool or a coward.
One of her mentors approached her afterward and asked why she had talked back to the Liberal leaders when he’d told her not to. “Because it’s true,” she retorted. “I’m not going to apologize for the truth.” She would not concede that even if it was historically true that the Prophet married a nine-year-old, which some scholars doubt, the society of seventh-century Arabia was different from ours and calling him a pedophile was her opinion, not “the truth.”
It’s unlikely that Ayaan’s fellow Liberals knew a peculiarity of the Somali language—that (except for foreign borrowings) its range of words for colors is extremely limited. But the Trouw affair gave them their first inkling that shades of meaning they considered vital to politics were practically invisible to their Somali comrade. “She spoke Dutch well, but the nuances escaped her,” observed Frank de Grave, a Liberal member assigned to coach her in political etiquette. Yet she took her oath of office in the Binnenhof fortress, which houses the Dutch government, and, at the age of thirty-three, became a member of Parliament.
In February, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which represents fifty-seven Islamic countries, sent four ambassadors to the Liberal Party leader, asking him to remove Ayaan from Parliament for her remarks about the Prophet. Theodor Holman held one of his dinner parties not long afterward. Ayaan and Holman were discussing a newspaper article about the complaints of the Muslim ambassadors when she first met the filmmaker Theo van Gogh.
Van Gogh, a heavy man with curly yellow hair whose great-great-grandfather was the brother of the great artist Vincent van Gogh, was Holman’s best friend. A columnist and TV host as well as a filmmaker, van Gogh was notorious for his coarse verbal attacks on anyone who claimed that religion deserved special respect. He accused Ayaan’s new friend Leon de Winter, who often wrote about the Holocaust, of wrapping barbed wire around his penis and shouting, “Auschwitz! Auschwitz!” when he made love to his wife. He called Muslims “goatfuckers.” And when he climbed the narrow staircase to Holman’s apartment, Eveline van Dijk happened to be filming the party.
Van Gogh seems to have been rather subdued that night. Perhaps he was intimidated by Ayaan’s reputation for being fearsomely intelligent. He arrived late, wearing his usual suspenders, sat down heavily in an armchair, and started reading the newspaper article. “I think we still have free speech in the Netherlands,” he said, creasing the paper thoughtfully back and forth in his hands. He was clearly mulling it over in his mind: Ayaan and her comments, which were so like his own, and then the ambassadors’ attempt to punish her. Knowing, as we do, van Gogh’s fate, it was a poignant moment.
Later in the evening Ayaan told the party that her goal in life was to knock the Quran off its pedestal. She got so wound up about the need to stop Muslims from revering their holy book that she started going on about being prepared to die—yes, die!—if necessary.
The film shows Holman, van Gogh, and their friends clucking a bit and looking patronizing as they pat Ayaan on the shoulder and try to calm her. “Now, now, Ayaan,” one says. Clearly the Dutchmen wanted to protect and encourage her, but they didn’t think death would be required.
For them the issue was free speech. They wanted to argue that, as Dutch citizens, they had the right to criticize Islam.
Holland’s equal willingness to allow the same freedom to a very different type of expression escaped their attention. The country was also a platform for violent and murderous snuff movies that can be described as jihadi pornography—such as the video of Daniel Pearl’s beheading.
Pearl’s family continued to speak of their anguish over the film. But none of the men at the party knew that the Ogrish Web site that carried it and other jihadi snuff films was registered on Amsterdam’s busiest shopping street, the Kalverstraat, a short distance from Holman’s house. Ogrish’s German Web distributor had recently yanked its registration at the request of Germany’s public prosecutor, who had charged Ogrish with the crime of “glamorizing brutal force.” But hardly anyone in the Netherlands knew that the owner was Dutch, and there was no debate in Holland about Germany’s decision to shut the Web site down.
Ogrish used atrocity pictures to sell pornography. “Gore and porn is a good combination,” Dan Klinker, Ogrish’s owner, said in one interview. The complex psychological and neurological factors that made such a combination lucrative were forces that Theo van Gogh might have enjoyed exploring. But Holman says that neither he nor van Gogh had ever heard of the site.
That night, at Holman’s flat on Willemsparkweg, the lovely Ayaan and her talk of violence and death were exciting enough. “She’s incredibly hot,” van Gogh exclaimed to Holman after she had left. “I wish I could fuck her. Can a circumcised woman come?”
Chapter Fourteen
After her quick trip to Maryland, it becomes harder to say what Aafia was doing and why. In 2008, U.S. prosecutors filed a formal letter in federal court holding out the possibility that they might charge her in connection with opening the post office box for Majid Khan. But as of 2011, they have not done so.
It is possible, however, from evidence presented in court and at the military tribunals of her alleged coconspirators, as well as from a trove of secret documents about Guantánamo leaked to the press in 2011, to piece together what U.S. prosecutors believe was the scheme involving the two of them.
The plot also involved a Karachi businessman and his family, whom Aafia seems not to have known. Like Aafia, this businessman, Saifullah Paracha, was a successful Pakistani who had studied in the United States but retained his strong Deobandi faith. But unlike Aafia, Paracha in his outward life did not seem even slightly anti-Western.
His links with the plotters still appear contradictory. He may have been pulled in by the same undertow of religious guilt that caused Amjad, for years, to go along with Aafia’s yearning for jihad. Or perhaps he just wanted to do business with some “mujahideen” who had the money to invest in his various businesses.
In any case, at fifty-five, Paracha was a large balding man with a warm smile. He had studied physics in Karachi and won a scholarship in 1972 to attend the New York Institute of Technology. He had met his wife, Farhat, while he was running a travel agency and she was studying sociology at New York University. After the Paracha family returned to Pakistan in the 1980s, he formed an export-import business selling Pakistani textiles to U.S. retailers such as Kmart. The company had an office and a partner in New York, Charles Anteby, and the fact that Anteby was Jewish never presented a problem. “We had friendly talks on religion,” Anteby wrote in an e-mail released by the Paracha family, “and he never showed any animosity to the Jewish people or to America.” Farhat says the whole Paracha family loved America.
The Parachas had three children, all of whom attended select English-language schools in Karachi. And they lived in a luxurious villa, complete with gilded furniture, in the Defense Housing Authority neighborhood.
Paracha later told U.S. military investigators that he had met Osama bin Laden in 1999 and again on a 2000 visit to Afghanistan as head of a delegation from the Rice Exporters Association of Pakistan. He said another member of the group, Maulana Mazhar, whom Paracha described as “a well-known religious leader in Ka
rachi,” offered to introduce him to the al-Qaeda leader. Paracha testified that he had given bin Laden his business card and invited him to contribute to a television program about Islam that another enterprise of his, Universal Broadcasting, was developing. Bin Laden, in Paracha’s words, “said he would think about it.”
After 9/11, a man appeared at Paracha’s business office in Karachi and showed him the card that Paracha had given bin Laden. The man called himself “Mir,” but actually he was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. KSM wanted more information about the studios and equipment at Universal Broadcasting. He also asked for Paracha’s help in opening a bank account and finding rental houses. Over the summer of 2002, the U.S. government claims, Paracha laundered more than $500,000 of al-Qaeda money for KSM. KSM subsequently introduced Paracha to an “agriculturalist from Baluchistan” named “Mustafa.” This “Mustafa” was really KSM’s nephew Ali.
Later that year, Paracha allegedly agreed to perform an even more valuable service for al-Qaeda.
U.S. military prosecutors claim that he agreed to let KSM ship C-4 plastic explosives and other chemicals to New York in the containers Paracha used to ship women’s and children’s clothing to the United States. Once Majid Khan returned to the United States, using the refugee document Aafia had obtained for him, Paracha was supposed to help the young programmer set up a dummy import-export company to receive the shipments. Aafia was supposed to return to the United States, too, and rent houses and handle administrative tasks for the company. Eventually, Khan was supposed to attack American gas stations and underground fuel storage tanks in the Baltimore area with the explosives shipped in the containers. KSM and Paracha allegedly also discussed a plan to either poison or destroy the pumps to U.S. water reservoirs.
Paracha’s oldest son was supposed to have been another member of the plot. Uzair Paracha was twenty-two and had recently graduated from Karachi’s top business school. Now he was selling some Karachi condominiums for his father and was about to visit New York in search of well-heeled Pakistani buyers.
Uzair would testify later that, two weeks before he was due to leave, his father introduced him to a young man who he eventually learned was KSM’s nephew Ali. Ali told Uzair, at the Parachas’ business office, that he had a friend who needed help with a U.S. immigration problem.
A few days later, Ali showed up at the office again—this time with a Pakistani American about his own age who Uzair learned later was Majid Khan, the former resident of Baltimore. Khan told the Parachas he needed a certain travel document to return to the United States to earn enough money to support his new baby.
Uzair’s father asked him to help Khan. All four men met less than a week later at Snoopy Ice Cream Parlor, across from the glittering shops on Zamzama, Karachi’s most fashionable shopping street. Majid Khan and Uzair sat with their ice cream at one of the little tables while Uzair’s father, Saifullah, sat with Ali at another. Majid Khan had brought an envelope filled with documents and identification. He explained that a person had to be in the United States to apply for the travel document he needed, and he wanted Uzair to pretend to be him and to telephone the INS from an American pay phone, so that the INS would think he was still in the United States. He also wanted Uzair to use his credit cards and to deposit money in his bank account. Majid Khan gave Uzair the key to his new post office box in Gaithersburg, Maryland, where the INS was supposed to mail the document.
“A good sister who wanted to help us out” had rented the box, Khan told Uzair.
Once the INS sent the document, Majid Khan wanted Uzair to pick it up. He should pretend to be Khan, open the box, collect the mail, close the box, and give the postal service a new forwarding address. Khan said that if anyone asked where the woman was who had rented the box, Uzair should say they had broken up.
Uzair seems to have been wary from the start about doing such a favor. He told the FBI later that, the summer before, his father had confided that members of al-Qaeda had come to him asking for money to buy weapons to fight in Afghanistan. His father had shown him a bag of money that he said he was holding for al-Qaeda. Around the time Paracha had introduced Uzair to Ali, Uzair said, he had also introduced him to a Pakistani scientist and chemistry professor who he said had been recruited to develop chemical weapons for the group.
Now, at Snoopy, Uzair asked uneasily what using Majid Khan’s credit cards and putting money into Khan’s bank account had to do with the INS. He became so nervous that he rose from the table and said he had to pick up some passport photos. But Majid Khan and Ali weren’t about to let him go.
Khan offered Uzair a lift to the photo studio on his motorbike. En route, Uzair recalled, Majid Khan confided that he did not want Uzair to know too much in case he was captured and tortured. “We need brothers like you,” Khan told Uzair. As Uzair recalled, that was when he came to suspect that Khan belonged to al-Qaeda.
Khan’s words made Uzair so uncomfortable that he gave Khan’s envelope to his father when he got home, saying he didn’t want to carry it to New York. But his father persisted. As Uzair later described it to the FBI, Paracha told his son that they needed to help Khan and his colleagues, who were “supporters of Osama bin Laden” and who planned to invest at least $180,000 in the Parachas’ condos.
Uzair left the envelope behind when he flew to the United States on February 19. But his father gave the envelope to another relative traveling to New York. This relative took it to Uzair at his father’s office in Manhattan’s Garment District, and Uzair did eventually phone the INS and pretend to be Majid Khan.
Aafia—the “good sister” in this costly and time-consuming scheme to get one operative, Khan, into the United States—never met either of the Parachas. But about a week before Uzair was scheduled to leave for the United States, on February 11, she sent an e-mail from Pakistan to her former dissertation adviser at Brandeis, the neuroscientist Robert Sekuler. She told Sekuler she wanted to return to the United States and asked him to help her find a job. She added that she didn’t know whether her children would be coming with her.
Chapter Fifteen
During the first few months of 2003, while Ayaan was in Parliament, the United States made its case for invading Iraq. The planned U.S. attack was deeply unpopular in the Netherlands, and the Dutch who opposed the military action held huge demonstrations in Amsterdam and other cities.
The Dutch had taken pride ever since the Enlightenment in their commitment to international law. Erasmus of Rotterdam and Hugo Grotius, both Dutchmen, established the idea centuries ago that laws should govern even wars between states. Much later, the seat of the Dutch government, The Hague, became the home of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Like Immanuel Kant, who coined the Enlightenment slogan “Dare to know,” the Dutch professed to believe that only justice—dispensed freely, openly, and according to international law—could bring about lasting peace.
Once it was clear, however, that the UN Security Council would not approve the U.S. plan to invade Iraq, the Bush administration abandoned all pretense of obeying international law, and the Dutch government, over warnings from its own lawyers, went along with Bush.
Reports were already seeping out that Bush’s military and intelligence agents were torturing prisoners at Guantánamo and elsewhere. Torture had been illegal in the Netherlands since the eighteenth century; stamping it out had been one of the Enlightenment’s most celebrated achievements. In theory, anyway, the illegality of torture under international law (as well as U.S. law) could expose high U.S. officials to prosecution at The Hague’s International Criminal Court.
The previous Dutch government had protested Washington’s announcement that the Geneva conventions did not apply at Guantánamo. In April 2003, the Dutch Foreign Ministry’s lawyers warned the newly elected governing coalition that if the government supported the U.S. invasion, “the Netherlands would likely lose any case brought before the International Court of Justice” in The Hague. Yet the government agreed
to support the U.S. plan “politically but not militarily.” And they kept silent about Washington’s violations of international law.
Ayaan’s former professor Huib Pellikaan had forgiven her for not telling him that she wouldn’t be going to Harvard. He joined her for a meal in The Hague around the time U.S. troops occupied Baghdad. Ayaan was excited that night. She supported the U.S. invasion. She told Pellikaan she hoped the United States would attack Iran, too.
She told him that the Shiites of Iran and Iraq had a theory, as the Sunnis did, about the ordained “end times.” But whereas the Sunnis believed that Jesus would come to Jerusalem to save the Muslims, the Shiites believed the savior would appear at the holy Iranian city of Qom in the form of a mahdi or messiah. The Americans had only to bomb the mosques of Qom, Ayaan cried, and the Iranians would lose their morale and the war would be over!
Pellikaan insists that Ayaan was serious. She was more circumspect with reporters. But, rather like her father, Hirsi, when he had imagined in the 1960s that Somalia might quickly become a superpower, she did not seem to grasp the monumental social and political changes that would be required for the Middle East to replicate the Enlightenment. In her interview with Trouw about the Ten Commandments, she revealed a similar naïveté when she said that the U.S. invasion would demonstrate how much worse things had to get in the Islamic world before “Islam as we know it” came to an end. She didn’t seem to think the turnaround would take very long.
The United States was right, she said later, to try to make Iraq a democratic country, but Bush’s government underestimated how long and violent the task would be. When a Belgian newspaper asked whether she saw the invasion as “an enlargement of her own life,” in which the West brought freedom to caged Muslims, she answered that she did.
From the day she was elected, meanwhile, Ayaan had been setting her own parliamentary agenda. She still had friends in the Labor Party, and she relied on some of them to formulate policies that contradicted Liberal Party dogma. She favored an amnesty for asylum seekers, for example, and independent residence permits for immigrant brides.
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