Excerpt:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the Somali-born author and activist best known for her outspoken and sometimes-incendiary critique of Islam.
Throughout four books, she has compared Islam with Nazism, described it as a "destructive, nihilistic cult of death," and suggested that well-meaning Muslims "pick another God."
Her overblown rhetoric has gotten her into trouble on more than one occasion — but that was before overblown rhetoric could pave a path to the White House. Based on her statements, Hirsi Ali could easily fit in with the next administration's anti-Islamist foreign policy. But at age 47, she's recently begun softening her critique, publicly distinguishing Islamic culture, with its 1,400 years of tradition, from political Islam, the fuel of extremists.