The Netherlands appears to be in the throes of a pathological moral convulsion. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the immensely courageous Dutch MP of Somalian origin who is guarded day and night because of the threat to her life from Islamist terrorists, is being hounded out of the country – by the hostility of the Dutch, who far from protecting her have now turned against her. Tomorrow, she is due to hold a press conference at which she will announce her resignation from the Dutch parliament and her intention to leave the country (although stories circulating today about a move to the US would appear to be premature).

Ms Hirsi Ali has lived with this threat to her life ever since, on a TV programme after 9/11, she announced that she was no longer a Muslim. Subsequently, this threat worsened after she helped write the script for the film Submission, a protest against the treatment of women under Islam, which led in turn to the murder of the film-maker Theo van Gogh. In all the years in which she has been living under sentence of murder, Ms Hirsi Ali has not flinched from continuing to fight for the rights of women and others against the horrors of Islamofascism. And yet now she has finally been broken, in a development that shames the Dutch people and should strike a chill throughout the rest of dhimmi Europe.

Two blows have felled her. The first was the ruling by a Dutch court which upheld a complaint by her neighbours that her presence in her apartment was putting them in danger, and which gave her four months to leave her home. This was the first victory for terror, inflicted by a Dutch court. The second came last week, when a Dutch TV programme broadcast as a ‘revelation’ the fact that Ms Hirsi Ali had told lies when she had applied for asylum back in 1992.

Ms Hirsi Ali has never denied that she told lies on her application for asylum. The lies involved a false surname, a false age, and saying that she had fled from Somalia. This was in itself true, but omitted the fact -- which is salient to an asylum claim -- that she had landed up in various other countries before coming to the Netherlands. Of course, this was wrong, and she shouldn’t have done it. However, the fact that she was a refugee from Islamist oppression was true. More pertinently, she has frequently acknowledged that she told these lies and even informed the leadership of her party, the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy, when she first stood for parliament. At no stage, however, did the Dutch authorities which knew about this ever take any action against her. Now, however, a TV program has strangely broadcast the story of her asylum application as if it were a new and shocking development.

What is shocking has been the response. Instead of people saying that this was already well known, the ‘revelation’ has been treated as a major scandal. The Dutch media has been engulfed by a feeding frenzy of outrage against Ms Hirsi Ali. The Dutch immigration minister is now ‘investigating’ the legality of her status. To say it again: her behaviour at the time was wrong. But the fact is that the vast majority of Dutch asylum claims, it is said, are made on the basis of falsehoods of one kind or another; yet it is only Ms Hirsi Ali who is being singled out for this treatment.

Moreover, it is oppressive to haul up someone in this way years after she has settled as a citizen; any action against her by the authorities should have been taken at the time, because it is invidious to start questioning someone’s bona fides if they have been settled into a country for many years. How much more so when that person has displayed the kind of conspicuous courage in defence of that country’s values as Ms Hirsi Ali has done. Yet instead of being cherished as a national heroine, she is being broken and bullied out of the country by an unholy alliance of venomous leftists, spineless public servants -- including those of a highly conservative disposition -- and radical Islamists, all giving a victory to the forces of evil.

Yet that surely gets to the nub of what is happening here. A country which until now has displayed total indifference to Ms Hirsi Ali’s immigration status has seized on this ‘revelation’ as a golden opportunity to turn a heroine into a pariah and thus rid itself of the danger that it thinks she represents. Never mind that she is defending the country’s integrity against the forces of barbarism; they’d rather surrender to them. The word for this is indeed submission.

So she is being used as the classic scapegoat. Drive out Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and they will drive out (or so they think) the threat of the jihad. Thus the authentic voice of appeasement; thus courage is punished and resistance abandoned; thus the murdered Theo van Gogh is doubly betrayed. A shocked friend of Ms Hirsi Ali says that the mood in the Netherlands today reflects a thirst for a public hanging. But this public anger is being funnelled not at the clerical fascism that has caused Dutch public figures to be guarded day and night against the threat of murder, but at one of those very figures. Thus the victim of violence is turned into its cause, and her institutionalised lynching will purge the terror from the people.

It is a mindset as medieval as it is misguided. Shame on them.