JOLLY DAYS

Hitchens and Hirsi Ali

Christopher Hitchens here replies to those who are attacking Ayaan Hirsi Ali. This woman, who at great risk is fighting for better treatment for women and a reformative process in the religion of her birth is portrayed as absolutist. It is no surprise that Newsweek would get it wrong. But there is a true despair in the tortured reasoning of those who should know better, like Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma.

Much of what Hitchens has to say has general application. About moral equivalence:

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.

About the grotesque logic of political correctness, which in this case allows a false deference to religion to trump human rights and a call for positive change:

This is a very complex question, which will require a lot of ingenuity in its handling. The pathetic oversimplification, which describes skepticism, agnosticism, and atheism as equally “fundamentalist,” is of no help here. And notice what happens when Newsweek takes up the cry: The enemy of fundamentalism is defined as someone on the fringe while, before you have had time to notice the sleight of hand, the aggrieved, self-pitying Muslim has become the uncontested tenant of the middle ground.

Hitchens' devastating sign-off:

To flirt with this equivalence is to give in to the demagogues…Perhaps, though, if I said that my principles were a matter of unalterable divine revelation and that I was prepared to use random violence in order to get “respect” for them, I could hope for a more sympathetic audience from some of our intellectuals.