The Hirsi Ali Case: Not: "Voltaire and Erasmus Are Spinning" but the topspinners of the neocon AEI

Spiegel Online's Henryk Broder: The Hirsi Ali Case: "Voltaire and Erasmus Are Spinning in their Graves" - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News. The lamentable Dutch handing of the newest Hirsi "Ali" sensation hasn't helped to prevent the neoconservative project with her: As a collaborator of the AEI, she will be a witness for the proposition, that Islam creates terrorism. All by itself.

During the 1.300 years that Islam exists, there have been, at given points in time, interesting precursors of the AEI's newest proposition. The Crusaders (Century XII) were awed by the "Assassins", whom they killed indiscriminately, the Spanish Inquisition (Century XVI) condemned muslims (and jews) to be burned at the stake (Erasmus was the foremost protester against it in his time) and Serbs and Croats roughly did the same during the nineties of Century XX to Bosnian Muslims.

Voltaire, another supposed "spinner" in his "grave", makes his "Candide" (XVIII Century) finally find rest and civilisation in Muslim Constantinople, after having visited all the horrors of Christian fundamentalism of his time.

Neither Erasmus, nor Voltaire would have felt much intellectual kinship with this modern "passionaria".

In spite of the fact that she was born in a well-to-do powerful family-clan, with a liberal attitude to religion (her brother was educated at a christian school in Nairobi), that she got a good education herself from age 12 to 22, paid for by the UN refugee fund, at a girls' college in Nairobi, organized as a British boarding school, she managed to make believe European authorities and public, that she is a victim of radical Islam who saved herself from an awful forced marriage. Too many of the stories she told, are frauds.

The AEI people know that, as well as her former patrons from the Dutch Conservative party did, when they engaged her to catch some of the xenophobic vote at the elections, three years ago.

A second aspect of the neoconservative projects is the contribution they hope to get from her in presenting the weak old European ruling elites as "appeasement"-prone-, also unreliable allies in the struggle for a new American century. A forerunner for that was to be found in the "Wall Street Journal" of Monday 5/15, where Ajaan is cited as condemning the "social-democrat" European authorities for their misunderstanding of the dangers of the muslim religion and their "appeasement", where an all-out Inquisition were needed.

Hirsi Ali is wicked enough, not to repeat such statements in her declarations in Holland. With tears in her eyes, she thanked her colleagues-parliamentarian deputies for their "understanding" and their fair ways of debating, only hours after the publication of her opinion in the WSJ!

Her arrangement with the AEI includes apparently also a clause, that she stops pleading for womens rights, for free marriage and freethinking. Her press representative in The Hague released: "Ms. Hirsi Magan is going to work on terrorism. Subjects like headscarves will not be discussed by her in the U.S." So much for the "Caged Virgin"'s attachment to women's liberation.

All this is spin. But in Erasmus, Voltaire's and other great humanists' graves, no spinning is observed.

Someone else is spinning.