Intolerant Netherlands

Is it possible to condemn Muslim extremism and still live among the Dutch? Maybe not.

AYAAN HIRSI ALI is a Somali-born Muslim woman who sought asylum in the Netherlands and then became one of its foremost critics of Muslim intolerance. Elected to parliament, she assailed Dutch Muslims for their repression of women and Dutch liberals for their willingness to accept it. On occasion, she also criticized the growing anti-immigrant prejudice in the Netherlands. For her pains, she has now been driven out of a country that likes to think of itself as a liberal democracy.

Ms. Hirsi Ali's story shows why the challenge of Muslim extremism is as serious in parts of Europe as it is in the Middle East. In the Netherlands now, public figures cannot criticize the oppression of women within the country's own Muslim community without risking assassination: Ms. Hirsi Ali has been in hiding since 2004, when a filmmaker she assisted in making a documentary about women and Islam was murdered. But such outspokenness also offends many native-born Dutch, either because they refuse to address the extremism in their midst or they hope to avoid a radical Muslim backlash.

That's why Ms. Hirsi Ali was evicted from her apartment by a Dutch court last month: Her neighbors brought a lawsuit against her on the grounds that her outspokenness was violating their "human rights" by exposing them to a terrorist attack. Ms. Hirsi Ali compared her adversaries to the Dutch citizens who refused to protect their Jewish neighbors from the Nazis. But that was probably unfair: After all, the Dutch under German occupation were in far more danger than those who refuse to live in the same building as Ms. Hirsi Ali.

In the end, it was not appeasement of extremism that triggered Ms. Hirsi Ali's announcement but appeasement of prejudice. The Dutch immigration minister, Rita Verdonk, hopes to become her party's candidate for prime minister; she has been appealing to anti-immigrant sentiment by posing as a tough enforcer of asylum laws. On Monday she told Ms. Hirsi Ali, a member of her own party, that her passport was being revoked because she gave false information about herself when she sought refuge in the Netherlands in 1992. Ms. Hirsi Ali publicly acknowledged the misinformation years ago; she said she gave it to prevent her family and tribe from tracking her down and forcing her into an arranged marriage.

Ms. Hirsi Ali will now come to Washington, where she has been offered a fellowship by the American Enterprise Institute and where, we hope, she will feel free to speak her mind. She leaves behind a country where a large Muslim minority lives isolated from mainstream society, in part because of social prejudice. In that isolation, extremist Islamic ideology is flourishing but goes largely unaddressed because those who seek to combat it are threatened or shunned. As long as such conditions persist in Europe, the war on terrorism cannot be won.