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Early in her public career a friend had asked Hirsi Ali, ‘Don’t you realise how small this country is, and how explosive it is, what you’re saying?’ As she recounted her response in her autobiography, ‘Explosive? In a country where prostitution and soft drugs are licit, where euthanasia and abortion are practised, where men cry on TV and naked people walk on the beach and the pope is joked about on national TV? Where the famous author Gerard Reve is renowned for having fantasized about making love with a donkey, an animal he used as a metaphor for God? Surely nothing I could say would be seen as anything close to “explosive” in such a context.
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