THE HUFFINGTON POST: Ayaan Hirsi Ali was stabbed into the world's consciousness four years ago. One wet afternoon in November 2004, her friend Theo Van Gogh - descendant of Vincent - left his house and was about to start cycling down the streets of Amsterdam. But a young Dutch-born Muslim called Mohammed Bouyeri was waiting for him - with a handgun and two sharpened butcher knives. Wordlessly, he shot Van Gogh twice in the chest. Van Gogh howled, "Can't we talk about this?" Bouyeri ignored his pleas and fired four more times. Then he pulled out a butcher's knife and slit Van Gogh's throat with such strength his head was almost severed from his body. He used the other knife to stab a five-page letter into Van Gogh's haemorrhaging corpse. Ayaan explains, "The letter was addressed to me."
It said Van Gogh had been "executed" for making a film with her that exposed the widespread abuse of Muslim women. Now she would be "executed" too, for being an apostate. Even now, "Every time I close my eyes, I see the murder, and I hear Theo pleading for his life," she says. "'Can't we talk about this?' he asked his killer. It was so Dutch, so sweet and innocent." At the trial, Bouyeri spat at Van Gogh's mother: "I don't feel your pain. I don't have any sympathy for you. I can't feel for you because I think you're a non-believer."
This is the story of how a 25 year-old bogus asylum seeker from Africa came to Europe in search of freedom - only to be nearly murdered here by a Dutchman, on the streets of Amsterdam, for speaking out against religion. It opens in the blood-strewn streets of Somalia, and it closes in the shiny white marble of Washington D.C - yet it also ends where it began: with Ayaan's life in imminent, immediate danger. This is the story of the refugee who rocked Islam.
Her light, slight figure walks into the room so quietly that I would not have noticed her. But then the bodyguards follow: big and tall, with their eyes darting into every corner in search of the long-awaited assassin, and you realise - yes, she is here. The internet is littered with pledges to torture and slay Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Yet just a few weeks before we meet in London, the Dutch government has stripped away her security detail. She is paying for her own bodyguards now - and she could soon run out of cash. So how did this soft-voiced woman come to be so hated - and to be abandoned by the country that gave her sanctuary? >>> By Johann Hari | November 30, 2008
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