I don’t know if you have heard of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but she is a Somali-born Dutch American public intellectual, a former member of the Dutch Parliament, and a research fellow at institutions like the Harvard Kennedy School. She has spent much of her adult life doing something that is both rare and dangerous: criticizing radical Islamist ideology from the inside, using facts, personal experience, and a fair amount of courage.
Her credibility on the subject isn’t academic in the abstract. It’s personal. In 2004, her collaborator, Theo van Gogh, was murdered in Amsterdam by an Islamist extremist. A death threat was pinned to his body – addressed to her. She has lived under armed protection ever since.
In 2016, the SPLC placed her on a list of “anti-Muslim extremists.”
Think about the timing. ISIS was still active. Terror attacks had hit Paris, Brussels, and elsewhere. Writers and cartoonists were being targeted. And in that environment, the SPLC chose to publicly categorize a woman under constant threat from jihadists as part of the problem.
No apology was issued to her.
If you want a single example that captures how far the organization may have drifted from its original purpose, it’s hard to do better than that one.
