By Richard Norman
Last weekend I was in New York sitting around and reading in American newspapers and magazines the first reviews of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book Infidel. (For background on Hirsi Ali, former Dutch parliamentarian and colleague of Theo Van Gogh, click here). Each of the major reviews–Ian Buruma in the New York Times Book Review, John Leonard in Harper’s, and Lorraine Ali in Newsweek –were notable for their remarkably patronizing tone. While each reviewer applauded Hirsi Ali’s journey from the miserable margins of the world and her story of spectacular self-creation, each came to a screeching halt before her praise of reason, secularism, and Western values, and the pleasure she seems to take (after a life of extraordinary difficulties) in the ease and freedom of a new American life. Hirsi Ali’s view of the West has "an idealized, almost comic-book quality that sounds as naïve as those romantic novels she consumed as a young girl," (Buruma) her views on Islam are as "single-minded and reactionary as the zealots she’s worked so hard to oppose," (Lorraine Ali) are the conclusions reached in two representative reviews she received this week in the American press.
Or take this flippant review from today’s Washington Post: "somewhere in the chord of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, there is a note as discordant and troubling as it is compelling . . .
You know, you have to wonder how idealized a concept she has of this country. You wonder what she’ll make of the cultural incoherency: 50 Cent, Rosie O’Donnell, Jerry Falwell, Don DeLillo, the death penalty, the state of Idaho, college football, the gun lobby. She seems as if she’d be perfectly at home at a Georgetown reception as the only black person in the room and perfectly lost at a Harlem dinner party.
Yes, after genital mutilation, the murder of Van Gogh, and constant death threats, I’m sure Hirsi Ali has been deeply disturbed by the Anna Nicole Smith saga. While other countries live through genocides, earthquakes, and death squads, the American media looks towards celebrity hijinxs and asks, plaintively–a cry from the soul–look how scarred and warped and suffering we are too! Look how we secretly suffer too! What a cruel and unfortunate country America is–if only Hirsi Ali were here long enough to realize that America has the death penalty!–it has the NRA! As if after what she has suffered she would care about these minor imperfections. Another important question (often asked of Barack Obama) raised in the above, truly stupid paragraph: is Hirsi Ali black enough? God forbid an African or African-American should not fit into the traditional media narrative–that would require the journalist to do a twenty minutes rewrite.
Joke or not, this bizarre equivocation is commonplace and is a symptom of a very unfortunate political dissonance amongst American (and Western) liberals these days. A dissonance taken to task by Christopher Hitchens in his response to Hirsi Ali’s reviewers.
Whether it is politically beneficial to have Hitchens come galloping to your defense is an open question. Nevertheless, as a masterful rhetorician and staunch opponent of religious ideology, he manages an excellent broadside against the bow of those who believe Hirsi Ali to be an "enlightenment fundamentalist" (!), naively under the sway of the Evil Empire, aka the United States (as it is increasingly seen by Western intellectuals).
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. As an African victim of, and escapee from, this system, she feels she has acquired the right to say so. What is "fundamentalist" about that?The Feb. 26 edition of Newsweek takes up where Garton Ash and Buruma leave off and says, in an article by Lorraine Ali, that, "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." 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.