Intolerant Netherlands
Is it possible to condemn Muslim extremism and still live among the Dutch? Maybe not.
Thursday, May 18, 2006; Page A22


AYAAN HIRSI ALI is a Somali-born Muslim woman who sought asylum in the Netherlands and then became one of its foremost critics of Muslim intolerance. Elected to parliament, she assailed Dutch Muslims for their repression of women and Dutch liberals for their willingness to accept it. On occasion, she also criticized the growing anti-immigrant prejudice in the Netherlands. For her pains, she has now been driven out of a country that likes to think of itself as a liberal democracy.

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Ms. Hirsi Ali will now come to Washington, where she has been offered a fellowship by the American Enterprise Institute and where, we hope, she will feel free to speak her mind. She leaves behind a country where a large Muslim minority lives isolated from mainstream society, in part because of social prejudice. In that isolation, extremist Islamic ideology is flourishing but goes largely unaddressed because those who seek to combat it are threatened or shunned. As long as such conditions persist in Europe, the war on terrorism cannot be won.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/17/AR2006051701903.html