Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a brave and impressive woman. Yet she’s also a crashing bore and a bully. Here she is today, fulminating again against feeble Europe for not standing up to the Islamic menace.

Most of the article is, as you might expect, standard beware-the-Muslim-in-your-midst stuff. We should loathe multi-culturalism and remember that Islam is antithetical to abortion rights and gay pride. And on and on.

Nothing new there. Her opening, however, struck me as astonishing.

In 2006, I had a debate with Tariq Ramadan, the author of Western Muslims and the future of Islam. In the hypothetical event of a war between Egypt and Switzerland, for which community would he be prepared to die, I asked him.

Mr Ramadan has dual citizenship. He’s an Egyptian by birth and a Swiss by naturalisation. His response was one of rage on different levels. Above all I think he was outraged that one should ask such a question. He refused to answer.

In this way, they evade one of the chief criteria of citizenship. Political allegiance to the constitution of your country is the minimum requirement. It is this state of affairs that makes Christopher Caldwell’s book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration and the West (Allen Lane, £17.99), which opens with the sentence, “Western Europe became a multi-ethnic society in a fit of absence of mind,” a chilling read.

This absence of mind, which Caldwell lays bare, is reflected in Europe’s immigration policies and especially in its response to Islam. No debate today is more explosive, more sensitive, more confusing and more frightening than the debate on the future of Islam in Europe.

In March this year, the French intellectual Pascal Bruckner and I spoke about Caldwell’s book. Bruckner said, “Americans [like Caldwell] do not understand Europe. There are many Muslims who, in their daily lives, are more agnostic and in their practices even atheist, but are just Muslim in name.”

This seems to be reassuring. But would these agnostic and unpracticing Muslims, if push came to shove, die for Islam or for France? My guess is they would, most likely, die for Islam.

This is crazy nonsense. Who would you rather die for? What if you don’t want to die at all? Does belief in secular liberalism now demand a death pledge?

Imagine if Miss Ali started asking Americans whom they would rather be slain for: America or Jesus Christ? She would be reviled, and rightly so. Ramadan was quite justified in taking offense; Ali’s question was rude and wrong — she demanded what the new president would call “a false choice.”

Besides, when was the last time anybody ever died for Switzerland? Answer here.

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”