Critic of radical Islam exits an arena

BERLIN -- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch lawmaker and prominent critic of radical Islam, said yesterday she would resign her seat in Parliament and leave the Netherlands amid mounting criticisms she lied on her application for asylum in 1992.

Hirsi Ali, whose views on Islam had made her one of Europe's most controversial political figures and a target for terrorists, is expected to move to the United States.

At a news conference in the Hague, home to the Netherland's Parliament, Hirsi Ali said she feared that the government planned to ''strip me of my Dutch citizenship" and lift her police protection following news reports that she gave false information when she sought refugee status. She said Dutch Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk told her Monday that her status was being probed and that the government believed she had improperly won citizenship.

The government's sudden action reflects its hardline position on illegal immigration and refugees who have entered the country using false information, which have become hot political issues among the Dutch electorate. Hirsi Ali had made little effort to conceal that she falsified her original application in order to escape an arranged marriage -- she specifically admitted the lies, she said, when she underwent a background check by the Party for Freedom and Democracy, the conservative party for which she has held a seat in Parliament since 2002.

Hirsi Ali, 36, is a writer as well as a politician, the best-selling author of ''The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam," in which she revealed she was subjected to female circumcision as a girl in Somalia. She is also a notably enigmatic personality whose fierce criticisms of Islam have made her a darling of Dutch conservatives but whose embrace of feminism and homosexual causes has also made her popular with leftists.

Muslim fundamentalists have repeatedly threatened Hirsi Ali's life because of her strong denouncements of the mistreatment of women in strict Islamic societies, including her African homeland. She also has provoked outrage in Islamic lands and won an international reputation by insisting that Muslims who live in Europe and the United States should respect secular Western values, such as a strict separation of religion and state, equality for women, and free speech.

The soft-spoken but passionate politician has lived under continuous 24-hour protection, provided by the Dutch government, since the 2004 murder of film producer Theo van Gogh, with whom she collaborated on a documentary denouncing violence against Muslim women. Her life was specifically threatened in a note impaled on van Gogh's body with a knife.

More recently, she has had to move from apartment to apartment on a nightly basis after her neighbors in the Hague won a court decision that her security arrangements had become an intolerable nuisance and that their own lives were endangered by the presence of someone hiding from religious assassins.

The uprooted lifestyle coupled with the government's probe of her past prompted her decision to leave the Netherlands, Hirsi Ali told reporters yesterday.

''It is difficult to live with so many threats on your life and such a level of police protection," she told reporters. ''It is difficult to work as a parliamentarian if you have nowhere to live. [Now] it has become impossible."

Hirsi Ali was referring to a statement by the Dutch government this week that she had improperly won citizenship and that she faced possible loss of citizenship and even expulsion from the country.

According to Dutch news reports and her own recent comments, Hirsi Ali plans to move to the United States to take a job at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research center. Andrew Pappas, a spokesman for the Washington-based institute, declined to comment, citing ''blanket policy on personnel decisions."

Hirsi Ali's lies on her refugee application involved misrepresenting dates, falsifying her true name -- from Ayaan Hirsi Magan -- and indicating that she was fleeing war-ravaged Somalia out of fear for her life. In fact, she was trying to get out of an arranged marriage to a cousin in Canada. She also already had won refugee status in Kenya and had stayed in Germany. Her status in those countries meant that she was in no real danger -- a critical component for a legitimate refugee claim.

Hirsi Ali became a naturalized Dutch citizen in 1997.

''Yes, I did lie to get asylum in Holland," Hirsi Ali said over the weekend. ''This has been public knowledge since at least 2002."

But the falsehoods received fresh attention last week in a Dutch television report, one that touched off a clamor among political opponents as well as government leaders.

''If necessary, I can take the death threats, the eviction, the many attacks on my character," Hirsi Ali told Dutch journalists. ''But I cannot deal with the idea of losing my Dutch nationality."

The Netherlands has recently toughened its immigration laws and the conservative-leaning government has made widely-publicized moves to eject some of the tens of thousands of Africans, Middle Easterners, and Asians believed to have won refugee status by providing false information. Most refugees and recent immigrants to the country are Muslims from North Africa, Turkey, and Indonesia.

The crackdown on illegal immigrants and refugees has left the government in a position where it was politically difficult to ignore the claims against Hirsi Ali, despite her international reputation and popularity among voters who themselves favor taking a tougher line against Muslim newcomers.

Hirsi Ali's supporters seemed stunned by the swiftness of events. European Union Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, who is Dutch, told the Netherlands newspaper Algemeen Dagblad: ''I am ashamed of the Netherlands because a valuable person like Hirsi Ali is being shoved out of the country."