AMSTERDAM, 16/03/10 - Geert Wilders is no racist and also no fascist. He is a boon for the Netherlands, Ayaan Hirsi Ali believes.

Hirsi Ali, who works at the American Enterprise Institute, says she is often asked in the US whether Wilders is a racist or a fascist. In an opinion piece in NRC Handelsblad, she writes that he is neither, though his solutions are "unfeasible in practice."

"He is good for the Netherlands, because people who are angry about the systematically wrong approach by the established parties to questions such as immigration and Islam can funnel their anger by voting for him, instead of rebelling or, worse still, entering into a violent confrontation with radical Islamic groupings."

Wilders' popularity is the result of the "persistent and vicious campaign of the elite to demonise any one who questions Islam as a worrying source of departure from Dutch values by many Islamic minorities." It would be better for the three classic power parties, Labour (PvdA), Christian democrats (CDA) and conservatives (VVD), to demand of Muslims that they give up "values based on the Islamic or tribal code of their country of origin," according to Hirsi Ali.

Hirsi Ali, who came to the Netherlands a young Somali woman seeking asylum, was a darling of the media when she became active for the PvdA. When she discovered that the left wing did not want to discuss integration, she switched to the VVD, where her Islam criticism was however also quickly no longer tolerated. In 2006, she exchanged the Netherlands for the US, where she is widely seen as a courageous intellectual.