Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Infidel.
Free Press, 368 pages, $26
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has attracted many notable enemies in her life: not only the Muslim terrorists and wannabe-terrorists who threaten to kill her and who did kill her collaborator on the film Submission, Theo van Gogh, but also a strange band of pundits and politicians whom she has provoked and irritated out of their ideological comfort-zones. Struggling to come to terms with the current world situation, such people opt to attack the person who has identified the problem rather than deal with the problem itself.
In Murder in Amsterdam, Ian Buruma sneered at Hirsi Ali’s “zealousness” in defending the values of the enlightenment. This condescending jibe caught on. In reviewing Buruma’s book for The New York Review of Books, Timothy Garton Ash described Hirsi Ali as a “slightly simplistic enlightenment fundamentalist.” From such nudging it was only a small leap to the suggestion expressed by Rageh Omar (formerly of the BBC, now, seamlessly, of Al Jazeera) in his memoir Only Half of Me: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the ex-Beeb man declared, is morally equivalent to Yasin Hassan Omar, currently on trial for trying to blow up the people of London on the morning of July 21, 2005. Fundamentalists the lot of them. Each is as bad as the rest. That’s the gist of it, and for this to be an acceptable, indeed “sophisticated,” line among Western intellectuals today says much about the degradation of
