This time it is Hitchens who takes on Buruma and Garton Ash who have relegated our good Dutch-Somali heroine to the absolutist corner and questioned her ‘enlightenment-fundamentalism’.

As you may recall Buruma is one of the more nuanced writer-historians who was vilified for taking a seemingly neutral stance in his excellent Murder in Amsterdam. His crime? He was insufficiently clear in taking Theo van Gogh’s side and failed to denounce Muslim fundamentalism in an unequivocal manner. Yes, ‘fundamentalism’ has become a very fashionable term and given our inherent suspicion of the extreme we should, I think, be thankful that writers like Buruma try to take a step back and paint a more dispassionate picture of the news.

Personally I do not think that Hirsi Ali can credibly be pictured as a fundamentalist. However one can understand Buruma’s point that her training in the Muslim Brotherhood perhaps has exposed her to a certain kind of zealousness. And that she is now applying in defending western freedoms with sometimes mixed results. Most Dutchmen will recall her visit to a local Muslim school where she tried to argue her point by asking twelve year old pupils to make a choice between the constitution and the Koran. Actions like that can be interpreted as waging a personal secular war against anything that would remind Hirsi Ali of her own religious upbringing. Getting schoolchilden into the debate in this manner is of course fodder for her critics who have qualified this sort of behaviour as utterly reckless and in that they have a point. And it is precisely this approach that irks measured intellectuals like Buruma and Garton Ash, but I do agree with Hitchens that does not make one a fundamentalist. At the same time I sense that Hitch’s diatribe against these two writers is not just about Hirsi Ali, but probably about something that runs quite a bit deeper.

NOTE: Our good friend Myrtus whose own biography is very similar to that of Hirsi Ali (Muslim from Africa → Holland → USA) has a few critical thoughts too.

By the way if you haven’t already, buy 'Infidel' here.

And here is round-up of some of Peaktalk's key posts on Hirsi Ali.

MORE: Laura Ingraham interviews Ayaan.