Christopher Hitchens and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Christopher Hitchens was a pretty reasonable dude - definitely no shill for either side of the aisle. Check it out if you like; this essay about Ayaan Hirsi Ali is particularly relevant today. Hitchens agrees with the same 95% of Hirsi Ali's rhetoric that I do, particularly regarding freedom of expression and human rights. But there's more - her stance on Islam is at times reactionary and frankly a bit paranoid, and she espouses some scary infringements on the rights of Muslims in the Netherlands and the US. It's rare to disagree so strongly with someone I consider this brilliant.

Then again, there's her observation that here in the west, we tend to project our liberal values where they don't necessarily belong. Is the following position worth considering, at least, before we dismiss it as racist?

"But I don’t even think that the trouble is Islam. The trouble is the West, because in the West there’s this notion that we are invincible and that everyone will modernize anyway, and that what we are seeing now in Muslim countries is a craving for respect. Or it’s poverty, or it’s caused by colonization.

The Western mind-set—that if we respect them, they’re going to respect us, that if we indulge and appease and condone and so on, the problem will go away—is delusional."