Here are your alternatives in the “tolerant” Netherlands after you speak out too forcefully against radical Islam: a) Get murdered in broad daylight, like filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in 2004 for daring to make a movie about the abuse of women in non-democratic Muslim societies; or b) get stripped of your Dutch citizenship when you happen to be the screenwriter for said film. That’s what’s happened to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the brave Somali-born Dutch immigrant who fled to the Netherlands in 1992 to escape a forced marriage and rose to become a member of the Dutch parliament.


Of course, Ali’s current plight beats the alternative:


“After the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, she was given round-the-clock bodyguard protection. Ali wrote the screenplay for a film, ‘Submission,’ which van Gogh directed. In a note they left behind at the scene of van Gogh’s murder, his killers wrote that ‘she deserves death just as much as he does.'”


The grounds for the sanctions, were these, the German newspaper Der Spiegel reports:


“Holland’s most famous immigrant — Ayaan Hirsi Ali — has been stripped of her citizenship overnight following television revelations about news that’s long been public: she lied a little on her application for asylum years ago. The controversial decision by the country’s immigration minister has sparked outrage, and many are calling it a dark day for Dutch democracy.”


No kidding. So that her family could not locate her, she had dropped her family surname, “Madan,” on her application and used another family name, “Ali.”


The good news is that Ali will be moving to the United States, where she will become a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Welcome to a real democracy, Ayaan!


Meanwhile, in another travesty of justice in the weenie Low Countries, Belgian blogger Paul Belien faces criminal charges for daring to speak out against Islamic extremism in his own country (by the way, his blog, Brussels Journal, has become a must-read for those who track terrorism in Western Europe). Comments U.S. blogster and Dallas Morning News opinion editor Rod Dreher:


“This is an outrage, and beyond chilling. As I understand it, Belien could go to jail for his words. What we’re seeing here is the same thing as in Holland: cowed, simpering societies who are so unwilling to defend their own freedom in the face of radical Islamist assault that they punish the messengers — Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Paul Belien — who are trying to warn them what’s at stake. You don’t have to agree with Hirsi Ali or Belien at all to be shocked by what’s happening to them.”