Ayaan Hirsi Ali - The Ultimate 21Century Golddigger

"Be more cynical, people like it", to quote a swindler character from a very popular Russian novel of the 1920s. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not just cynical, she's brash and bold and has no scruples.

While en route from her resident Kenia to Canada to marry her boyfriend, she saw her chance and defected in Germany faking a hard-done-by story of a fugitive from Muslim torturers in Sudan. Granted Dutch citizenship, she became elected to the Dutch Parliament and gained notoriety for energetic Islam-bashing. At the time when it had become fashionable in Dutch politics, she was just what needed - an inspired dissenter from the enemy's camp, a sort of Cold War Soviet defector. Trying to gain political weight - that in our age basically equals media coverage, she would start testing the ground by showing up in as many TV talk shows as she only could and calling Prophet Muhammed a paedophile along with other highly inspired statements. Her own party PvdA (leftist Labour Party) declined to provide here with protection and Ali switched allegiance to a party with completely opposite views - the VVD (right-wingers with a relaxed stance on gays, drugs and abortion).


She was routinely coming up minor anti-Muslim factoids, trying to propel herself into the mainstream of Dutch politics, but that alone would not satisfy her. When she felt that her media exposure was not enough, she teamed up with a documentary-maker Theo van Gogh, who apparently was in the game for the same reason. Together they made an inflammatory anti-Islam movie where they used such sterling arguments as writing Koran verses on a naked female body and van Gogh's claims that all Moroccans engage in sexual activities with goats. Full of MTV-style powerful imagery yet devoid of any reasonable argument, the film did manage to spark controversy. It all ended up in van Gogh's murder at the hands of an angry Moroccan youth and Ali's sky-rocketing to prominence. Her calculation that the Dutch public would traditionally side with the underdog proved correct - a poor ethnic girl fleeing her oppressors and suffering for her flamboyant ultra-liberal views. She was given 24-hour bodyguard protection at the Dutch taxpayer's expense.

When the truth about her fake asylum application came to light, she did manage to retain her Dutch passport and simply jumped ships joining a US-based neoconservative (sic!) think-tank as a Islam affairs advisor.

But of course Ali would not be happy with her status in the US as a minor European celebrity of little interest to the American public. Also with her departure to the US, interest towards her in Europe greatly subsided - there came much smarter and shameless media manipulators after here. So she requests and is subsequently denied a French citizenship to gain better protection - since the Dutch government would not pay for her bodyguards in the US. However, she does not fail to cook up a highly publicised press conference enlisting support from the likes of Henry Levy.

Apparently, her withdrawal to the US was a wrong move - she was of little interest there and she lost her momentum on the other side of Atlantic. But I believe that as the legendary phoenix Ayaan Hirsi Ali would come up with another publicity stunt that will bring her back in her beloved limelight.