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Ayaan Hirsi Ali had a hypnotic effect on her audience. Her beauty and eloquence, her bravery and intellect, the sheer extraordinariness of her life, she is simply an incredible person. A perfect embodiment for this audience of secular rationalists of all the possibility in the triumph of reason over tribalism and superstition. They loved her. I loved her. She was fantastic.
Her open rejection of, and stand against Islam has led to death threats and disgusting fatwas. Her friend and collaborator the Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh has already died terribly at the hands of an islamofascist who pinned to the artists body with a knife a letter threatening Hirsi Ali .
Her latest book Infidel has caused more controversy and sadly she must have body guards at all times even in America.
Clearly she is amazingly strong willed and defiant but she also has a wonderful modesty and gentleness about her as she speaks from the rostrum and with her admirers afterwards.
Truly an extraordinary person.
Cheers Jez XX
Below copied from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AyaanHirsiAli
Hirsi Ali is very critical of the position of women in Islamic societies and the punishments demanded by Islamic scholars for homosexuality and adultery. She considered herself a Muslim until 28 May 2002, when she became an atheist.[48] In an interview with the Swiss magazine Das Magazin in September 2006, she said she lost her faith while sitting in an Italian restaurant in May 2002, drinking a glass of wine: "...I asked myself: Why should I burn in hell just because I'm drinking this? But what prompted me even more was the fact that the killers of 9/11 all believed in the same God I believed in."[49] Despite that, in the television program Rondom Tien of 12 September 2002 she called it "my religion". She has described Islam as a "backward religion", incompatible with democracy. In one segment on the Dutch current affairs program Nova, she challenged pupils of an Islamic primary school to choose between the Qu'ran and the Dutch constitution.[citation needed]
In a "no-holds-barred polemic" interview in the London Evening Standard,[50] Hirsi Ali characterises Islam as "the new fascism". "Just like Nazism started with Hitler's vision, the Islamic vision is a caliphate—a society ruled by Sharia law—in which women who have sex before marriage are stoned to death, homosexuals are beaten, and apostates like me are killed. Sharia law is as inimical to liberal democracy as Nazism." In this interview, she also made it clear that in her opinion it is not "a fringe group of radical Muslims who've hijacked Islam and that the majority of Muslims are moderate. [...] Violence is inherent in Islam—it's a destructive, nihilistic cult of death. It legitimates murder."
At the Sydney Writers' Festival in June 2007, she balanced her arguments, saying "I am a Muslim" because she understood why Muslims were silent when the Qur'an was "invoked to behead captured aid workers, journalists and other Western wanderers," as silence is "better than an argument with the author of the Holy Book who has given the command to behead infidels." Hirsi Ali stated that she was also "not a Muslim" as she had lost the fear of the Qur'an and of Hell and lost respect for "its author" and messenger; and that she felt a "common humanity" with those she once "shunned", such as Jews, Christians, atheists, gays, and sinners "of all stripes and colours."[51]
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