I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.

I grew up in Somalia, in Saudi Arabia, in Ethiopia, and in Kenya. I came to Europe in 1992, when I was 22, and became a member of Parliament in Holland.

There is a huge difference between being tolerant and tolerating intolerance

My friend, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered in 2004 for having been insufficiently reverent toward Islam.

My conscience is informed by reason. It's like Kant's categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.

The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex.

Reality is not easy, but all this make-believe doesn't make it easier.