Yet Another Horrible New Atheist: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

[Donald Ian Rankin]

17. I'm afraid I think Hirsi Ali is one of the few high-profile New Atheists who really is a bigot.

I agree with a lot of what she has said. But she has also written

"Violence is inherent in Islam – it's a destructive, nihilistic cult of death. It legitimates murder."

and a bunch of other stuff in a similar vein.

I think it's hard to skin that as anything other than simple bigotry - she's not added any qualifiers; she's made no attempt to suggest that she doesn't mean "all Islam, anywhere, as practised by all Muslims", and I think that it's probably that that's because that's what she did mean.

I think that we could do with more, more uncompromising, ruder liberal criticism of Islam *as practiced by most Muslims*, often of kinds that will *offend* all Muslims (it makes me wince when liberals talk respectfully about Mohammed or the Qu'ran). But two things we absolutely *don't* need are

:- Any criticism that state that all Muslims, rather than just a significant majority, hold illiberal and repressive views.
:- Any criticism that hints, even if it doesn't outright imply, that the majority of Muslims are Out To Get Us.