“I can’t see how she can look herself in the mirror knowing that she supports policies that reject people with more claim to be here than she does,” a woman wrote next. “What an incredible sense of entitlement this woman has. I can walk all over everybody and lie to get what I want, but don’t you dare try the same thing.”
“Iron Rita” Verdonk was in the middle of her fight to take over the Liberal Party, and she hoped to become prime minister in the country’s next elections. At first the immigration minister said she didn’t expect the Zembla broadcast to have any legal consequences. But the day after the documentary aired, an attorney from the Dutch Association for Asylum Lawyers told reporters that Verdonk was mistaken. Under the naturalization law the Liberals had helped pass in 2003, he said, asylum seekers who were found to have lied on their applications were being stripped of their citizenship. The lawyer’s group planned to use Ayaan’s case as evidence that “two different standards were being applied” to the MP and to other former asylum seekers.
The following day, Verdonk announced that she was ordering an investigation. But before it could start, another immigration lawyer stepped forward. He said that an investigation was superfluous. If Ayaan admitted she had lied on her application for asylum, the asylum status that she had been granted in 1992 was simply invalid. Without that status, her citizenship was also invalid. Ayaan was not Dutch, the lawyer claimed, and never had been.
To the astonishment and consternation of the whole country, Verdonk came back with a verdict almost instantly. The lawyer was correct. Pending further notice, Ayaan, who had returned to Holland from the United States a few days earlier, must surrender her Dutch passport.
Ayaan gave a tearful press conference the next day at the Binnenhof, which I attended. She was dressed in black and white with her hair pulled back severely, and she looked exhausted. Announcing that she was moving to the United States, she resigned from Parliament.
Many intellectuals and politicians found the spectacle of her being hounded out of the country by her own party shockingly like a witch hunt. And in one of the amazing reversals that have marked Ayaan’s career, some of the same people who had been her fiercest critics joined forces with her friends to decry the way she was being treated.
Five million television viewers, nearly a third of the country, tuned in to a parliamentary debate that began that night and lasted almost until morning. From Ayaan’s own political party, Verdonk paced the floor while opposition politicians such as the Green Left leader, Femke Halsema, subjected her to a withering assault. Where exactly was Verdonk planning to send Hirsi Ali now that she had taken away her passport? Back to Kenya? If she hadn’t been in danger from Muslims there in 1992, she certainly was now. Didn’t the Dutch state have a responsibility to protect her?
Verdonk was forced to relent. Ayaan got her citizenship back, and later in the summer the whole government fell after one of the smaller parties quit the ruling coalition in protest over Ayaan’s treatment.
Yet Ayaan refused the calls of those who urged her to stay and help overturn the naturalization law that now threatened the citizenship of thousands of former asylum seekers who had also lied, including most of the Somalis still left in the country. “We begged her friends and her,” the historian Geert Mak recalled with some bitterness: “help to save the others, the poor Iraqis and Afghans who don’t have the benefit of her celebrity. She wouldn’t. As usual, it was only about Ayaan.”
Instead, she made plans to move to Washington, where Christopher DeMuth had written her in an open letter that he looked forward to welcoming her to “AEI and America.”
Ayaan could see the writing on the wall even if she hadn’t wanted to leave Holland. Many of the same politicians now making speeches about how sad her departure would be had been text-messaging one another congratulations since they’d heard the news. They wanted her gone. Polls showed that most of the Dutch public agreed.
What caused such fury at the woman they had lauded a year earlier as Holland’s Joan of Arc?
Ayaan’s supporters, especially overseas, tried to argue that the timorous, penny-pinching, lily-white Dutch taxpayers had gotten tired of protecting a troublemaking black woman.
It was true that she had made trouble; even her own party had never fully accepted her. But I came to think, and I was living in Holland then, that the real problem was the unflattering mirror the Zembla program held up to the Dutch themselves. Ayaan’s story had previously struck the country as a fairy tale in which the Netherlands played the knight in shining armor. But Zembla’s “Holy Ayaan” cast them very differently. According to Zembla, the Dutch hadn’t rescued a princess—they had been played for suckers. As a widely reprinted cartoon put it, Ayaan had used Holland as a stepping-stone to the United States, just as she’d used Osman Musse Quarre to get to Holland. She had been laughing all the way to Time magazine’s gala.
But there was also something darker about the way they cast her out.
“The Netherlands is under the spell of Ayaan,” were the ominous first words of “The Holy Ayaan.” To many of the Dutch, bewildered and even frightened by what seemed a national personality change, the word “spell” had the ring of truth. Ayaan hadn’t said anything about Islam that the country’s other “Islam critics” hadn’t also said. But amid the drama of van Gogh’s murder she had an uncanny ability to conjure up the public’s fears and anxieties. Of course, that changed rapidly when the Dutch began to see her as a clever foreigner on the make. Once she no longer seemed a victim, the embarrassed Dutch felt like pushing her out.
What’s more, the sun really did seem to shine again after the passage of “Hurricane Ayaan,” as a Dutch book called the crisis. For a while, a sullen mood lingered like a hangover. But before long the country’s divided intellectuals began speaking to one another again, and the pages of newspapers that for months had been filled with arguments for, against, and about Muslims slowly gave way to articles about art exhibits, problems in the pension system, and whatever the royal family was doing. For at least a little while, it seemed as though “the fever had broken,” as Geert Mak said.
Or, as a Somali might have put it, the cows had rid themselves of the leopard.
Chapter Eleven
Yvonne Ridley was another ambiguous figure thrown up by the war on terror. A former reporter for the Sunday Express in London, Ridley had converted to Islam after the Taliban took her prisoner in 2001. Once freed, she went on to become a star presenter for Britain’s Islam Channel. I wanted to meet her because of a program she had made about Aafia Siddiqui a few months earlier. And so, on the first anniversary of the 7/7 bombings, I went to London to hear her talk at the IslamExpo about how she had become a Muslim.
Even in her previous incarnation as a left-wing journalist, Ridley had been a strident critic of Israel, the United States, and Great Britain. One thing that seemed to attract her to Islamism was its stance against the West. “How can anyone be proud to be British?” she asked in a 2006 article. “Britain is the third most hated country in the world.” Now she traveled the world decrying the war on terror and extolling the “Islamic resistance.”
Ridley wrapped herself in turbans and long skirts and punctuated her sentences with invocations to Allah. She still described herself as a feminist, saying that the difference between Muslim and secular feminists was that “Muslim feminists are more radical.” But she had no time for Iranian women who complained about the Iranian regime’s treatment of females. “I know the hijab is a pain for them, but they will get no sympathy from me. It is clear that hijab is an obligation, not a choice.” Her speeches attracted thousands. IslamOnline, a Web site linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, had voted her the world’s most recognizable Muslim woman.
Ridley was also a patron of Cageprisoners, a slick British advocacy group, founded in 2003, for Muslim prisoners in the war on terror. Although Cageprisoners claimed to be a human rights organization, it seemed to regard any jihadi imprisoned in the West as unjustly im
prisoned, and some of its volunteers claimed that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was part of a Zionist plot. Since the Bush administration, however, still maintained that the war on terror existed in its own law-free universe, Cageprisoners’ demands for justice struck many observers as relatively reasonable. Western officials accused Ridley of being more of a propagandist than an investigator, but, thanks to her Islamist sources, she often scooped the Western media when it came to reporting on the war.
The show that Ridley had produced on Aafia for the Islam Channel was in honor of “Torture Week.” Making much of the repetitive reports in the Pakistani press that Aafia had been arrested in 2003, the show suggested that a bungling FBI had mistaken her for a terrorist and that either the U.S. or Pakistani government could be holding her and her children. Cageprisoners had sent a researcher named Asim Qureshi to Karachi to interview her family, but the family had refused to come to the door. Qureshi said on Ridley’s program that he had found a guard outside the gate. He concluded that Aafia’s mother was under house arrest, and he thought it likely that Aafia had died in “ghost detention.” “To be honest,” he told me when I called him later, “if the ISI pick you up, after this length of time, there’s not much chance of coming back.”
The star of “Torture Week” was Moazzam Begg, a British prisoner released from Guantánamo the year before and now the author, with a former editor of the Guardian, of a bestselling memoir, Enemy Combatant. Begg had written in his book that while he was a prisoner at Bagram, he had heard the screams of a woman he thought at first was his wife. He said his interrogators later suggested that the screams came from a tape recording designed to terrify him. But Ridley said the screams might be evidence that the CIA was holding women in its prisons.
Pale and freckled, she appeared at IslamExpo in a dark green suit with a long skirt and a pink blouse, a fashionably tied scarf on her head. She warmed up the mostly female crowd for her talk “A Woman’s Journey to Islam” by insisting that it was wrong for the British media to focus on such issues as honor killings and female genital mutilation. “These are issues that are not specific to Islam, that have nothing to do with Islam.” For her, as for many other Western women, the biggest obstacle to accepting Islam had been the “mantra” she’d heard all her life that the religion oppressed women. But as a Taliban prisoner she had promised her captors that, if they would only let her go, she would read the Quran and study Islam—and when she did, “I realized I had been lied to.” After that, Ridley said, “I embraced what I consider to be the biggest and the best family in the world.” Her audience liked it.
I went up afterward and introduced myself. Ridley brightened when she heard I was writing a book about Aafia. She said she had never had such a lively response to a program as the one she had gotten to her show on Aafia. Viewers had flooded her with calls and e-mails asking to know more. Clearly the story of the missing scientist and her three children had struck a chord that the stories of seemingly hardened male jihadis did not. Ridley wanted to do another program about Aafia. But with Aafia’s family refusing to talk and no new information available, she seemed as stymied as I was. She asked if I wanted to go on the show and talk about what I knew. I told her I doubted that there was much that I could add, but we agreed to stay in touch.
Chapter Twelve
America’s neocons turned out in force to welcome Ayaan to Washington in the fall of 2006. Her steely optimism reminded some of another conservative icon, Great Britain’s Margaret Thatcher. It wasn’t the best of times for Republicans; many were beginning to worry that their war on terror was being lost, first on the streets of Iraq and second in the U.S. courts. Ayaan’s fighting spirit felt like a tonic. And the fact she had nearly lost her Dutch citizenship didn’t bother them at all.
One of the favorite neoconservative maxims, as Robert Kagan wrote in his bestselling book Of Paradise and Power, was “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” In other words, Americans were manly and martial while Europeans were timid and effete. Viewing Dutch politics through this lens, the neocons were ready to interpret Ayaan’s disgrace as another case of the weak-kneed, left-leaning Europeans bowing to Muslim pressure. They accepted her explanation that left-wing Dutch political enemies had concocted the Zembla documentary as a way to get rid of her. It didn’t surprise them that this beautiful, threatened woman had turned to them for safety.
Actually, Ayaan was still being protected by Dutch diplomatic security, a situation that heightened her aura of danger and importance. American and British interviewers often wrote of the cloak-and-dagger security measures involved in meeting her: the coded telephone messages from Dutch security informing them, “I have a person to deliver to you”; the squealing tires of the bulletproof convoy that delivered her to restaurants and clubs; the hulking bodyguards who fanned out around her.
Just as in Holland, correspondents who did manage to talk with Ayaan were struck by the contrast between her vulnerable femininity and the ferocity she aroused and sometimes displayed. Numerous articles commented on how soft her voice was; how she liked to take off her shoes and tuck her feet up under her legs; how she would suddenly look away and then wrap herself closely in the shawls she often wore, as if startled by a chill premonition. She often told interviewers about the book she planned to write at AEI, Shortcut to Enlightenment. It was to feature the Prophet Muhammad waking up at the New York Public Library and debating three of her favorite Western philosophers, Friedrich Hayek, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Popper. White, conservative men were especially taken by the idea.
George Will dined with her in a Georgetown restaurant while her security detail prowled outside. She ate steak tartare. Bowled over by what he saw as Ayaan’s courage and the breadth of her intellectual ambitions, Will could not condemn the Dutch strongly enough. He wrote in a column that “the recoil of many Dutch people from Hirsi Ali suggests that the tolerance about which Holland preens is a compound of intellectual sloth and moral timidity.” Ayaan told Will that the problem with the Europeans was that, after two generations without war, they had become prissy invertebrates who “have no idea what an enemy is.” “I can hardly tell it without laughing,” she said of the belief that some Dutch held that, with patience and understanding, their government would eventually bring their Muslim population into the mainstream.
Ayaan’s most influential American fans, the neoconservatives, probably acted more like a Somali clan than the Dutch Liberal Party she had once criticized for its clannishness. Many neoconservatives were Jewish intellectuals who had shifted rightward after an earlier background in Marxism or mainstream American liberalism. Some of their leading families had married and socialized with one another in the Washington suburbs, and they had raised their children to assume important positions in their own small but distinctive political movement. Prominent neocons were often literally related, and they made it their fiercely partisan duty to defend one another, whether on the op-ed pages or in backroom politics.
They combined internationalism and a fascination with military power, and they considered the United States a global force for good. They wanted it to act unilaterally if need be. They had no patience for international law or the United Nations, and they despised “multiculturalism,” which they saw as anti-Western, shallow, hypocritical, and worse. While the Cold War lasted, many neocons still belonged to the Democratic Party. Yet even then they felt deeply at odds with various Democratic currents and politicians, and they exhorted their fellows to support President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup against the Soviet Union. When the Cold War ended, many prominent neocons switched to the Republicans.
They saw a powerful new threat in the Middle East, arguing tirelessly that the United States needed to dominate the region to protect Israel, Western oil supplies, democracy, and even Western civilization. In the late 1990s William Kristol and Robert Kagan established the Project for the New American Century—again at the American Enterprise Institute—to champion a secon
d war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The neocons developed strong ties to the Israeli Right, as well as to evangelical Christians in the Republican Party, both of which factions saw modern Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Some neocons also took pleasure in their image as the inner circle of Republican power, at least on foreign policy.
Many of Ayaan’s old friends couldn’t imagine her in this new environment. How would their atheist fit into an American party that made the defense of religious values one of its planks? How could she cozy up to Christian and Jewish defenders of beliefs that could be as patriarchal and millenarian as the Muslim doctrines she denounced? Ayaan was determined, though, to make it work. She told De Volkskrant that she had learned from her mistakes in the Netherlands. She said she planned to be more restrained and “careful about what I say. I will have to be smarter, more strategic, more tactical.”
Chapter Thirteen
Five years had passed since Vice President Dick Cheney had proposed conducting a war against al-Qaeda on “the dark side.” But the Bush administration was learning how costly this darkness could be. In the summer of 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court halted the administration’s effort to remove its war on terror from the reach of law and public scrutiny when it ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that both the U.S. prison at Guantánamo and the U.S. president remained subject to domestic and international law. Never sure of the legality of various practices that Bush’s team had authorized, the CIA informed the administration that it would no longer be responsible for Washington’s system of “black sites” for holding prisoners.
The CIA hurriedly released dozens of kidnapped and secretly held prisoners into the custody of their own governments. Only in the cases of a few prisoners deemed most culpable for 9/11 and other attacks on the United States were Bush officials willing, reluctantly, to account for their own actions.
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