Hitchens on the persecution of Ayaan Hirsi Ali:
The Hague is a much less surreal place than Prague, but there are elements of this proceeding that might have made Franz Kafka smile. Unlike Joseph K, Hirsi Ali is very well aware of the evidence against her; indeed, she is the author of it. She has several times explained, in public and in print, that, among other things, she changed her name to get political asylum in the Netherlands. This was partly to prevent her family—her father being a well-known Somali politician—from discovering her whereabouts after she had fled an arranged marriage to a distant relative. The minister in the present case—a former prison warden named Rita Verdonk—comes off less as a Kafka figure than as a cross between Nurse Ratched and Capt. Renault in Casablanca, who was “shocked, shocked” to find out what was going on at Rick’s Cafe. A prisoner of her own rectitude, she has decided that now is the time to display zero tolerance for refugees who falsify their biographies. She has also decided that someone who was quietly leaving anyway must also be kicked out. It reminds me of those cults and sects from which it is impossible to resign, because if you say you want to quit, you will instead be expelled. […]
It will be delightful to have Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Washington. But the American Enterprise Institute, which has offered her a perch, is not the place where she is most needed. In Holland, every day, extremist imams preach intolerance and cruelty, and, when they are criticized, invoke the help of foreign embassies to bring pressure on the Dutch authorities. They face no risk of expulsion. In my youth, the action of lighting one person’s cigarette with another was called—don’t ask me why—a “Dutch f***.” I once heard a young lady, offered a light in those terms, respond loftily by saying, “Doesn’t say much for the Low Countries, does it?” No, it didn’t, and neither does this mean and petty harassment of a woman who has also redefined that old expression “Dutch courage.”
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