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WHEN you get a written death threat pinned to the body of an assassination victim, you tend to take notice.
"In the letter addressed to me, the killer wrote I 'have to be destroyed like the enemy,' " Miss Ayaan Hirsi Ali was saying.
The letter was found Nov. 2, 2004, on the body of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh, who produced a film written by Miss Ayaan criticizing the treatment of Muslim women at the hands of Muslim men.
Flanked by two Dutch government bodyguards, Miss Ayaan has been giving lectures throughout the East Coast to promote her book, "The Caged Virgin," a damning indictment on extremist jihadists.
Miss Ayaan, 36, born in Somalia, became a Dutch citizen and was elected to a member of the Dutch parliament after 9/11.
At the time when Vice President Dick Cheney is being slammed for his ambitious security plans, critics should listen to Miss Ayaan, who says she's still under a serious cloud of death threats by madmen who want to become martyrs.
"It is in the West I found my enlightenment, but I have also found the West is as complacent about the jihadists as the jihadists are getting more on the offensive," she was telling me in New York last week.
"And Europe has become increasingly decadent.
"Throughout the democratic world, we are seeing an ideology, especially among the liberals, that we always should talk, talk and talk, even when your enemy says, 'We don't want to talk - we want to destroy you.' "
Miss Ayaan, born a Muslim, escaped from an arranged marriage in her homeland. She says she's at a loss on how the West ignored the early signs in the 1970s of the start of Muslim extremism.
"There was plenty written at the time about the export of militant Islamic clergy to the West, and nobody took notice," she said.
"It was after 9/11 that I turned my back on all of this extremism, and now all of us can look back and can see these jihadists as a huge force to be reckoned with.
"Of course, so much has to do with the ignorance that brings about these suicide bombers. These so-called martyrs are products of their mothers, whose husbands inflict ignorance on them as they simply become baby manufacturers.
"It's not amazing that the sons seek martyrdom, because the ignorance is passed on to them, and they have no set of values. We [Muslims] have only ourselves to blame.
"The man who killed Theo, Mohammed Bouyeri, in his death threat to me wrote that he was willing to die for his beliefs, was I willing to die for mine.
"When he was captured by Dutch police after a gunfight, he really wanted to be killed. That is what the West is dealing with now."
Meanwhile, the liberals want to talk, talk, talk as the enemy wants to destroy, destroy, destroy.
steve.dunleavy@nypost.com
Copyright 2004 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.
