A surprisingly balanced profile of Ayan Hirsi Ali was front page on “Style” today. I say surprisingly because she has rattled the cages of our native intellectual caste. Christopher Hitchens attacks the claim, made or implied in several reviews of her book Infidel, that she is “an Enlightenment fundamentalist,” whatever that is:
“Accompanying the article is a typically superficial Newsweek Q&A sidebar, which is almost unbelievably headed: ‘A Bombthrower’s Life.’ The subject of this absurd headline is a woman who has been threatened with horrific violence, by Muslims varying from moderate to extreme, ever since she was a little girl. She has more recently had to see a Dutch friend butchered in the street, been told that she is next, and now has to live with bodyguards in Washington, D.C. She has never used or advocated violence. Yet to whom does Newsweek refer as the ‘Bombthrower’? It’s always the same with these bogus equivalences: They start by pretending loftily to find no difference between aggressor and victim, and they end up by saying that it’s the victim of violence who is ‘really’ inciting it.”