The plight of Somali-born Dutch legislator Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose citizenship may be revoked by weak-kneed Netherlanders, has become an international cause celebre. Hirsi Ali has been under government protection since 2002, due to her criticism of some of the more violent, paternalitic practices of some followers of Islam, and her collaboration with Theo van Gogh on a short film about Muslim violence against women resulted in the director’s murder in 2004. The killer pinned a note to van Gogh’s body, saying she would be next.

I met Ayaan quite by chance last summer. She was in Manhattan, working on her book and appeared, unannounced, at a reading by a mutual acquaintance of ours in Chelsea. She was flanked by her Dutch bodyguards (the Netherlands has since concluded she can keep the protection, for now) and blended in down in uber gay Chelsea like a giraffe at a zebra party. (Her bodyguards, on the other hand, with their military haircuts, tight pants and suit jackets concealing their sidearms, could have passed for a local.) She was soft spoken and polite, and though she has recently been embraced by the right, she was happy to have found a book on Marx in the Chelsea Barnes & Noble.

Her disdain for religion — all religion in as much as it is used as an instrument of censorship and brutality — will probably keep her from getting invited to speak at Liberty University. But the fact that she is being lauded by neocons as evidence of the evils of Islamic fundamentalists does not mean they’re wrong. The Dutch are clearly afraid of a Denmark situation — days of riots and burnings and a number of deaths (all in the middle east) in reaction to the Mohammed cartoons — and are reacting in a somewhat craven fashion. Don’t want to provoke anyone! But Ayaan does want to provoke people, provoke the citizens of western countries out of their slumber. The threat to her is like the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a sign of things to come. It is quite literally a threat to us all.