If there was ever any doubt the Somali-born, Dutch-American anti-Islam activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali has become a global brand, the hype around her speaking tour of Australia and New Zealand next week settles the question. Her handsome face adorns trams, her upcoming Melbourne appearance at Festival Hall billed as a "show". She is dubbed the "Hero of Heresy".

No longer the property of the writers festival crowd, the former Dutch parliamentarian, author of four books, campaigner for women's rights, survivor of female genital mutilation and butcher of political orthodoxies has gone mainstream. It is where she deserves to be. And by far the most compelling moral justification for Ali's celebrity, the reason I keep writing about her, is the illiberal impulses of the two groups united in hating her: the jihadists and the regressive leftists.

Anti-Islam activist and former Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Credit:Elisabetta Villa

Let's dispel some of the white noise you'll hear around her visit. "White" being a good hook for the accusation that she's traded on a personal story, key elements of which have been thrown into doubt and exposed her to scrutiny by Dutch immigration authorities. Fascinating how in this pious era of identity politics Ali's critics aren't moved to check their privilege when insisting she's not really the victim her potted bio might suggest.

The US Southern Poverty Law Centre canvassed the controversy about Ali's past when it branded her an "anti-Muslim extremist". That she wasn't really a refugee from Somalia because while her family had fled to Kenya, she hadn't witnessed the civil war of the 1990s. That she wasn't really fleeing an arranged marriage because attendees said she was at her wedding despite her claims to the contrary, and her husband paid her way to Europe and granted her a divorce. That her family wasn't really poor and not really that devout. No one has yet suggested her genitals weren't really mutilated, although one of her more enthusiastic detractors, Linda Sarsour, the hijab-clad organiser of the anti-Trump Women's March on Washington, insinuated the procedure did not go far enough, tweeting in 2011 that she wished she could remove Ali's vagina as the Somali was "not a real woman". Go the sisterhood.