April 10, 2006 – New York – Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch legislator who lives under constant death threats by Islamic radicals, will receive the American Jewish Committee’s Moral Courage Award at the organization’s 100th Annual Meeting in May.

“Ayaan Hirsi Ali has literally put her life on the line for her beliefs,” says AJC Executive Director David A. Harris. “She is indefatigable in her efforts to wake us up to the dangers that threaten our value system, indeed our very way of life.”

Since arriving in the Netherlands as a refugee in 1992, Hirsi Ali has been an outspoken advocate for the rights of Muslim women, especially after she found Muslim women in immigrant communities in the Western world subjected to abuses and discrimination commonplace in Islamic countries. She also has criticized Western governments for allowing such practices to persist in violation of Western societal norms and laws.

She received political asylum after fleeing from her own family which had arranged a marriage for her in Canada. In eleven years. Hirsi Ali worked her way up from cleaning woman to graduating from the University of Leiden with a political science degree to winning election in 2003 to the Dutch Parliament as a member of the Liberal Party.

“Submission,” the short film by Theo Van Gogh about the treatment of Muslim women by male relatives, was written by Hirsi Ali. Van Gogh was murdered two years ago by a Moroccan immigrant, who also left pinned to the filmmaker's body a note threatening the life of Hirsi Ali. She has since lived under 24-hour police protection, an extraordinary condition for an elected official in a European democracy.

In addition to defending women’s rights, Hirsi Ali is outspoken on virulent anti-Semitism that pervades much of the Islamic world. She condemns those in the West who allow Muslim immigrant communities to wallow in second or third class status.

“She is determined to confront the Islamic world with the long overdue challenge of adapting to modernity, and she believes that examination must start with Muslims living in the West, as only they have the liberty in which to operate and to bring about change,” says Harris.

Hirsi Ali will be the second recipient of the Moral Courage Award. Last year AJC honored an Iraqi politician, Mithal Alusi, who has relentlessly advocated for a democratic, secular, Western-oriented nation, and traveled to Israel to show his desire to establish ties between Iraq and Israel. Due to his views, Alusi was targeted for assassination, and in one attempt both of his sons were killed. He was elected to the Iraqi National Assembly in December.

Founded in 1906, AJC is celebrating at its Annual Meeting one hundred years of fighting for human freedom, human dignity and human rights. The Moral Courage Award will be presented to Hirsi Ali on May 4 in Washington, D.C.