Her bestselling book chronicles her upbringing in a fundamentalist Muslim household and her escape from forced marriage to become one of the most influential voices against Islam.
Hirsi Ali has spent most of her life being threatened by hardcore Islamists as well as, more recently, the left.
YouTube, which is owned by Google, is using the left-extremist organisation, the Southern Poverty Law Center, to police content on its video-sharing website.
Google has also been accused of creating a seemingly partisan “fact-checker” function for its search engine that almost exclusively targeted conservative media outlets.
“The left-wing nonprofit [SPLC] – which has more recently come under fire for labeling legitimate conservative organizations as ‘hate groups’ – is one of the more than 100 nongovernment organizations … and government agencies in YouTube’s ‘Trusted Flaggers’ program,” according to US online outlet, The Daily Caller.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is regarded as an “authoritative” source on what can be defined as “hate groups” according to a variety of mainstream media outlets such as CNN and ABC.
But the SPLC is tarring all conservative organisations as “hate groups”, “Nazis” or “white supremacists”.
Leftists have even warned that the Southern Poverty Law Center may now be overstepping its bounds by trying to smear all conservatives while promoting questionable ideologies.
The SPLC recently released a report on “male supremacy,” which “misrepresents all women as genetically inferior, manipulative, and stupid, and reduces them to their reproductive or sexual function”.
Their strange report listed the organisations it considers “male supremacy hate groups,” which included American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, because she had questioned modern feminist orthodoxy on its factual inconsistencies regarding the alleged gender wage gap.
In an interview with The Weekly Standard, Sommers commented on her listing by the SPLC: “I completely reject that. This is a group I used to admire. They once went after Klan members and Nazis and now … [they go after] people like Ben Carson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. It’s absurd.”
“They’re blacklisting in place of engaging with arguments. They blacklist you, rather than try to refute you,” Sommers said.
Mainstream conservatives who have found themselves on a Southern Poverty Law Center hate list, have had to face dangerous consequences, as the list often discloses their location, making them targets for leftist hate attacks.
Casey Mattox, a former senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal defense organisation that supports social conservative values, described how a gunman targeted the office he was working in because it shared space with the Family Research Council.
The gunman, who was convicted for domestic terrorism, said he attacked the Family Research Council – a mainstream social conservative organisation – because it was on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate list” for opposing gay marriage.
“Both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the media who copy and paste its ‘hate group’ list might want to consider whether they want to inspire another [gunman] to commit an act of violence,” Mattox remarked.
GuideStar, an aggregator of tax data on charities, has since stopped including the Southern Poverty Law Center after a backlash from conservatives. Yet despite moderate groups stepping away from the extremist Southern Poverty Law Center, YouTube continues to treat it as a go-to source on “hate groups”.
Hirsi Ali, 47, an asylum seeker from Somalia who was raised a Muslim, and once the Netherlands’ most strident opponent of Islam, has become a prime target for radical Islamists.
When the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh — a fierce critic of Islam and with whom Hirsi Ali made a provocative film called “Submission” about the oppression of Muslim women — was murdered in November 2004, a note pinned to the body by the killer Mohammed Bouyeri warned Hirsi Ali that she was also on the kill list. She says it is not a question of “if” but “when” they come for her.
She has been under 24-hour protection since, similarly to her former colleague Geert Wilders, outspoken Islam critic.
Hirsi Ali has warned the EU establishment not to keep ignoring “the voice of the people” and “acknowledge the issue of Islam”.
“Countries in the Middle East, in Africa, Asia, they are falling apart. In those countries there are either crazy dictators or complete anarchy. They are failed states. And as long as this constant flow of human beings fleeing war exists, the European problem will too,” she told Politico.
In 2006, Hirsi Ali’s ascent in Dutch politics came to an abrupt end when it emerged that she had lied when seeking asylum. She lost her citizenship and the controversy brought down the government.
She then moved to the US and became an American citizen in 2013. In early 2014 Brandeis University in Massachusetts announced that Ali would be given an honorary degree but later rescinded its offer after protests by the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR).
They had accused Hirsi Ali of “hate speech”. University president Frederick M. Lawrence said that “certain of her past statements” were inconsistent with the university’s “core values” because they were “Islamophobic”.
She has described Islam as a “death cult” to the London Evening Standard in 2007: “Violence is inherent in Islam – it’s a destructive, nihilistic cult of death. It legitimates murder.”
