Who is the bomb thrower again?

I've been in Mexico the past several days with only sporadic Internet access, which is fine as far as I'm concerned because I don't know what to make of the summit on Iraq yet, the US meeting with Iran, or the renewed efforts to forge peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

But I have to put up with the hassles of posting from this location to alert you to Christopher Hitchen's must-read in the latest issue of Slate. He writes about the left-leaning media's reaction to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's recently released and bestselling book Infidel.

Recall that Ayaan Hirsi Ali was the Somali Muslim who eventually became a Dutch parliamentarian. She ended up fleeing Holland in fear for her life after an Islamist extremist gunned down her partner, the producer of a screenplay she had written which was critical of the way the Islamic world treats women. Ali had some idea of what she was talking about in the movie as she herself had been raised in this world and considered herself to be one of its victims in that she had been forced to undergo both genital mutilation and marriage to a relative she wasn't interested in.

Ali came to believe her life was in danger in the Netherlands after she learned that her partner's murderer, a Dutch Muslim, had left behind a note, a note that he pinned to her partner's corpse using the same knife with which he had tried to behead him.

In this note, her partner's murderer threatened Ali (and, of course, Western governments and Jews). Ali received other threats as well from those purporting to be her former coreligionists resident in Holland, but nevertheless, in 2006, a Dutch judge ordered that she had to abandon the secure location in which she was living because some of her neighbors had complained that her presence there was disrupting their otherwise calm lives.

This led to Ali resigning from her parliament post and accepting a job at a conservative think tank in the United States.

With this background, now I can quote Hitchens:

In her book, Ayaan Hirsi Ali says the following: "I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and forced marriage for the world of reason and sexual emancipation. After making this voyage I know that one of these two worlds is simply better than the other. Not for its gaudy gadgetry, but for its fundamental values." This is a fairly representative quotation. She has her criticisms of the West, but she prefers it to a society where women are subordinate, censorship is pervasive, and violence is officially preached against unbelievers.

At this point Hitchens quotes Lorraine Ali of Newsweek who had written of Ali's book: "It's ironic that this would-be 'infidel' often sounds as single-minded and reactionary as the zealots she's worked so hard to oppose."

Hitchens then launches his assault against those members of the media who - reading between the lines a bit here - can't it would seem bring themselves to support anyone who would find safe haven at the American Enterprise Institute (a conservative think tank in Washington):

I would challenge the author to give her definition of irony and also to produce a single statement from Hirsi Ali that would come close to materializing that claim. 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.

Hitchens on Iraq

Christopher Hitchens essay in Slate Magazine entitled "The Real Sunni Triangle," published Dec. 18 is still worth reading in case you missed it. Money quotes:

"Many people write as if the sectarian warfare in Iraq was caused by coalition intervention. But it is surely obvious that the struggle for mastery has been going on for some time and was only masked by the apparently iron unity imposed under Baathist rule. That rule was itself the dictatorship of a tribal Tikriti minority of the Sunni minority and constituted a veneer over the divisions beneath, as well as an incitement to their perpetuation. The Kurds had already withdrawn themselves from this divide-and-rule system by the time the coalition forces arrived, while Shiite grievances against the state were decades old and had been hugely intensified by Saddam's cruelty. Nothing was going to stop their explosion, and if Saddam Hussein's regime had been permitted to run its course and to devolve (if one can use such a mild expression) into the successorship of Udai and Qusai, the resulting detonation would have been even more vicious."

"Iraq has only three alternatives before it. The first is dictatorship by one faction or sect over all the others: a solution that has been exhausted by horrific failure. The second is partition, which would certainly involve direct intervention by all its neighbors to secure privileges for their own proxies and would therefore run the permanent risk of civil war. And the third is federalism, where each group would admit that it was not strong enough to dictate terms to the others and would agree to settle differences by democratic means. Quixotic though the third solution may seem, it is the only alternative to the most gruesome mayhem—more gruesome than anything we have seen so far. It is to the credit of the United States that it has at least continued to hold up this outcome as a possibility—a possibility that would not be thinkable if the field were left to the rival influences of Tehran and Riyadh."