A former Muslim refugee is asking her fellow American citizens to think “rationally” about the dangers of radical Islam.

“I know what it’s like to fear rejection, deportation and the dangers that await you back home,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim of Somali origin, writes in the Huffington Post.

Ali writes that she became an American citizen after escaping an arranged marriage and working in the Netherlands at a factory and as an interpreter for abused Muslim women. Overtime, she says she made the decision to leave the religion of Islam because it was “too intolerant of free thought.”

She was “excited” when she heard Trump’s August 2016 speech about combatting the underlying ideology of radical Islam which oppresses women, the LGBT community and other religions. She was also encouraged by his promise to help moderate Muslims who strove to combat radicalism.  

Four Types of Muslim Immigrants

“In the course of working with Muslim communities over the past two decades, I have come to distinguish between four types of Muslim immigrants: adapters, menaces, coasters and fanatics,” Ali says.

The adapters are those who adapt to the customs and embrace the freedoms of Western civilization; menaces are often young men who are subject to and then commit crimes of domestic violence; coasters are those who want to take advantage of welfare without working; and fanatics “use the freedoms of the countries that gave them sanctuary to spread an uncompromising practice of Islam.”

Ali writes that some people move from one category to the other over time, which makes it more difficult to distinguish between adapters and troublemakers.

“[T]he problem of Islamist terrorism will not be solved by immigration controls and extreme vetting alone,” she writes. “That’s because the problem is already inside our borders.”

Ali cites surveys which reveal majorities of Sharia-supporting Muslims in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Iraq — whence most Muslim immigrants are expected to come to the U.S. in the coming decades — agree with the death penalty for those who leave Islam.

Ali cites surveys which reveal majorities of Sharia-supporting Muslims in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Iraq — whence most Muslim immigrants are expected to come to the U.S. in the coming decades — agree with the death penalty for those who leave Islam. 

Ali writes:

Such attitudes imply a readiness to turn a blind eye to the use of violence and intimidation tactics against, say, apostates and dissidents — and a clear aversion to the hard-won achievements of Western feminists and campaigners for minority rights. Admitting individuals with such views is not in the American national interest.

While Ali says she was disappointed in the clumsy implementation of Trump’s temporary travel ban, she still supports the president’s longterm plan of rejecting any would-be immigrants who support terrorist groups or believe in Sharia law over the Constitution. 

“American citizens — including immigrants — must be protected from that ideology and the violence that it promotes,” she writes. “But the threat is too multifaceted to be dealt with by executive orders. That is why Trump was right to argue in August for a commission of some kind — I would favor congressional hearings — to establish the full magnitude and nature of the threat.”

“Until we recognize that this ideology is already in our midst, we shall expend all our energies in feverish debates about executive orders, when what is needed is cool, comprehensive legislation,” Ali writes.

Read Ali’s full article.