This fact put even more pressure on the few people who were not willing to play by the assassin’s rules. Among those willing to continue to defy the extremists was the young Dutch woman of Somali origin who had fled to Holland ten years before to escape a forced marriage. Hirsi Ali was in every way a model migrant. Having arrived in the country she claimed and was given asylum, and while working basic factory jobs she learned the Dutch language and was soon able to apply to university. She studied at the University of Leiden whilst working with other immigrants as a translator. Just over a decade after arriving in the Netherlands she received her MA in Political Science, worked as a researcher and entered the country’s Parliament as an MP for the Liberal Party. It was a meteoric immigrant success story. Her success was due to her intelligence, charisma, hard work and exceptional personal bravery. But the swiftness of her rise to prominence also occurred because Dutch society desperately needed immigrant success stories. Yet it seemed to come as a shock to some on the left in particular, that this immigrant refused to say the things they expected of her.

Hirsi Ali herself would later write that the 9/11 attacks caused her to ‘investigate whether the roots of evil can be traced to the faith I grew up with: was the aggression, the hatred inherent in Islam itself?’9 Six months later she read a book on atheism she had been given several years earlier and dared to admit that she was no longer a believer.10 In her own time she announced her evolving thoughts in public. But the Dutch media-class in particular seemed intent on pushing her – trying to make her say things they would not say. One interviewer pressed her to use that same crucial word Fortuyn had used, achterlijk. Was Islam backward compared to Dutch society? There seemed to be two movements pushing at Hirsi Ali. One, broadly coming from the political left, wanted her to say things for which they could then attack her. Another – coming from left and right – wanted her to say things in order to free things up for everybody else. It was harder to accuse a black woman of racism than it was a white man. Nevertheless the supporters of the status quo found a way around this by claiming that Hirsi Ali did not know what she was saying because she was ‘traumatised’ by her experiences – experiences they insisted were wholly uncommon.