It brings me great schadenfreunde to report some right-wing infighting: Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been stripped of her Dutch citizenship.

Ali made her name in the liberal Dutch VVD, leading their campaign to crack down on Muslim culture. According to Hirsi Ali, multiculturalism leads to immigrants preserving "the culture of their homelands, prevents immigrants from integrating and gives tacit approval to the most violent and oppressive aspects of religious cultures."

This is shooting the messenger. 'We' can march into Iraq and slaughter 100,000+ people; impose corrupt governments in the middle-east, and dictate the displacement of an entire people from Palestine - and that's just fine. But as soon as Muslims get angry about it, then it's 'fundamentalist', a 'cultural problem', "violent and oppressive."

A dangerous game - Ayaan Hirsi Ali

This isn't about secularism, the enlightenment, or 'integration': it's about our policies, and how they feed Islamophobia. As Deepa Kumar writes,

when you take the actions of a few people and generalize it to an entire group - all Muslims, all Arabs - that's racism. When a whole group of people are discriminated against and demonized because of their religion or regional origin - that's racism....

if Islam has come under fire in European nations and the United States it is because the political elite in these countries have found it useful to whip up anti-Muslim hysteria.

And whip it up they have - so much so that Hirsi Ali found herself the target of extremist threats. This is absolutely to be condemned, and begs the question: why do those threats exist? Tariq Ali suggests,

Hirsi Ali and people like her in the United States and in Europe make a profession out of attacking Islam. There are other important questions in the world.

Why do these people concentrate endlessly on Islam? In the way that they attack Islam, they go along with existing prejudices. And for that they are hated. There is no excuse or justification for acts of violence against these people. It is necessary to discuss with them. But these acts are a sign of despair: people are so much at the end of their tether that they have recourse to violence.

What's that called again?... oh yeah, racism - firebombed Edinburgh mosque

Which is why I don't buy the 'poor brave woman, standing up to the bigots' line. Hirst Ali's policies led to misery for thousands of immigrants, including Taida Pasic,

a straight-A high-school student who had become a star of her community after arriving as a refugee from Kosovo at age 12. On the grounds that she had applied using the wrong procedure, Ms. Verdonk [the immigration minister] ordered the girl expelled. Immigration officials handcuffed her in front of her classmates and deported her, two months before her final exams.

Hirst Ali, as the black face of white racism, got hoisted on her own petard.

Now there's a hue and cry from the Dutch parliament. Perhaps the racists realize what a service she's done for them, and want her back. Perhaps the whole incident will make her think twice about being a useful idiot for the right. But I doubt it. There's no better proof of the service she's provided for imperialism than her new job: an analyst for the American Enterprise Institute. They happen to be the authors of Project for a New American Century, the neo-con manifesto that blue-skied the war in Iraq.

Nice friends you got there - American soldiers in Fallujah, November 2004

Fanon says something about the colonized trying to speak the language of the colonizer, yet always failing. If someone has the quote, please add it to the comment box.