Mick Hartley

Another Hitchens link – and why not? This time, with the publication of Paul Berman's "Flight of the Intellectuals", and Ayaan Hirsi Ali's "Nomad", he compares reactions to Hirsi Ali and to Tariq Ramadan, the subject of Berman's book:

“Look here upon this picture, and on this …” In the left frame, a privileged young Swiss-Egyptian academic, whose father and grandfather were pillars of the Muslim Brotherhood and who has expressed strong sympathy for the jihadist preachings—and social and moral precepts—of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, purveyor of fatwas and self-described “Mufti of martyrdom operations.” In the right frame, a young woman from Somalia who has endured genital mutilation and forced marriage, made her escape to Europe, spoken out for the rights of women, seen a colleague of hers murdered for the same advocacy, abandoned religion for the values of the European enlightenment, and now conducts her life under permanent police protection.

Which of these two individuals garners the most respectful attention from our liberal intellectuals?  […]

“Look here upon this picture, and on this …” Which one needs police protection and which one is the darling of the PEN petitioners and the liberal academy? Which one is opposed to theocracy—the original form of totalitarianism—and which one is a stealth apologist for it? Most of all, perhaps, which one deserves the vague yet never quite neutral title of “fundamentalist”? The answers to these questions will help us to understand the impasse of cultural masochism to which we have brought ourselves, and perhaps also point the way out of it.