It is infuriating and saddening to witness the constant vilification of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She, being a living, walking falsification of the Islam/race card, requires other lines of attack by those who do not want their simple dichotomy refuted.

Posted by: anti-uffe at February 27, 2007 7:24 AM

Lorraine "Ali". Doesn't the name say it all?

Posted by: Alert at February 27, 2007 7:29 AM

"at one point she characterizes "every devout Muslim who aspires to practice genuine Islam" as a follower of the Muslim Brotherhood. That may have been true in Hirsi Ali's experience, but it hardly speaks for the globe's 1.3 billion other followers. 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 suppose Lorraine Ali has some insight as to what 1.3 billion Muslims think.....

.....Lorraine Ali is a closet terrorist slug....

Posted by: exsgtbrown at February 27, 2007 8:08 AM

My!

For a moment you had me worried there, I thought it had to be the Mohammed Atta-look-alike Islamo-agent Fareed Zakaria who is alway's so 'concerned' that America remains democratic enough for Islam to spread unhindered....

Newsweep is truly 'Jewish'-mass-media, unfortunately firmly in the hands of the Islamo-fascists...

Posted by: sheik yer'mami at February 27, 2007 8:37 AM

Hirsi Ali is maligned by Muslims because she has dared to speak against Islam. Indeed, her latest book is titled "Infidel."

She is a courageous woman, worthy of all the world's admiration. Too bad she has to have bodyguards to protect her from her own people.

Posted by: darcy at February 27, 2007 8:58 AM

From the linked article:

"many modern female followers are wondering how to embrace their religion without succumbing to its more sexist demands. And they're coming up with answers that don't require them to abandon either their religion or their culture. In the Middle East and South Asia, a strong majority of Muslim women recently polled by Gallup believed they should have the right to work outside the home and serve in the highest levels of government..."

Sure, they believe that. But do they have those rights? Will they have them in 10 years? Stay tuned.

"Here in the United States, dozens of scholars like Ithaca College's Asma Barlas, Harvard's Leila Ahmed and Notre Dame's Asma Afsaruddin have challenged widely accepted interpretations of the Qur'an."

Notice how all these ladies live in the West?

Posted by: freedomschool at February 27, 2007 10:38 AM

First villification, then death threats, then perhaps death itself? She's going to get the full Salman Rushdie treatment with this book she wrote.

Posted by: wrathofasma at February 27, 2007 11:24 AM

Lorraine Ali's use of the bombthrower metaphor is beyond ironic, it's self-satire worthy of The Onion. It also reveals the author's personal shallowness. Apparently, she and Newsweek can't see that her freedom to write a gutless, insipid hatchet job (bombthrowing hatchet job?) depends on her victim's tolerance. Maybe she'd figure it out if she was given a sabbatical at Al Jezeera.

And, what's the deal with the three pictures of beautiful British Arab women in Islamic dress at the top of the article? Could it be that Lorraine and/or the editors were trying to draw attention from Hirsi Ali's beauty, whose small picture was shoved to the lower right corner of a two-page spread? Or, was it to bolster a shoddy op ed masquerading as a book review? Or, was it to disguise the gravity of the book and deny its author's credibility?

Hirsi Ali deserves, if nothing else, respect. The article was condescending. The author should go back to writing about things within her experience and writing style, like "music and pop culture trends" in LA as her bio reveals.

Lorraine Ali is not worthy to untie Hirsi Ali's shoes.

Posted by: bobnoxious at February 27, 2007 1:12 PM

Lorraine Ali’s preposterous hatchet job on Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book, Infidel, is less a book review than an ad hominem attack, and yet another example of the convergence of Islamist apologia and Orwellian doublethink. Ayaan’s courageous and storied struggle for personal freedom and dignity against the degrading dictates of a barbaric, violent and misogynistic ideology has inspired millions. She barely escaped with her life, and to this day lives under the specter of a death sentence levied upon her by Muslim clerics for daring to speak the truth. The reviewer’s description of her as an “infamous” “bomb-thrower” is dishonest, defamatory and despicable. Nevertheless, it does serve to illuminate the topsy-turvy psychopathology of the Islamists in which black is white, up is down, right is left, and good is evil. The history of Islamism is littered with the bodies of the murdered millions who would not submit; it is inescapably linked to the enslavement and oppression of those it vanquished, to the brutal suppression of its women, and to the barbaric cruelty of Shari’a law. Yet today, nearly six years after the murder of thousands of innocents on September 11, 2001 by Islamist terrorists, in a world horrified by the daily murders of yet more innocents by Islamist terrorists who actually throw real bombs, Lorraine Ali apparently believes Newsweek’s readers are as oblivious to the ugly realities of the Religion of Peace as she is.

This so-called book review does little to inform readers of the quality and worthiness of Infidel, but serves well to illuminate the apparently limitless capacity of Islamism’s apologists for dishonesty and dissemination. It is ironic that the Muslim women portrayed in the picture accompanying the review would be placing their own lives in jeopardy if they appeared in public, dressed as they are, in most of the Muslim dominated parts of the world. That Newsweek’s editors chose to dignify this malicious tripe by publication speaks volumes on their thought processes as well.

Posted by: novaculus at February 27, 2007 1:44 PM

It is interesting that Lorraine Ali did not touch on Ayaan Hirsi Ali's chapters about her time in Saudi Arabia listening every night to shrieks of neighbor women as their husbands beat them. Perhaps Lorraine Ali would like to take the place of one those poor women in Mecca.

Posted by: FirePig at February 27, 2007 2:14 PM

I read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book in two days. It was great.

What always surprises me about the women defenders of islam is that they live in the West and they point to the accomplishments of muslim women in the West as proof of that the quran can be interpreted for a modern existence.

Why aren't muslim women achieving these same levels of success in the same numbers in the islamic world as they are in the West?

Posted by: 3812Michelle at February 27, 2007 6:57 PM

Boy! Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I wonder how much money the Arabs have invested in the US' major media corporations. (Probably plenty judging from this).

Posted by: pythagoras at February 27, 2007 10:18 PM

Boy! Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I wonder how much money the Arabs have invested in the US' major media corporations. (Probably plenty judging from this).

Posted by: pythagoras at February 27, 2007 10:18 PM

This "review" of the book amounts to commentary and had no business being published in Newsweek.
I'm very surprised that the editors let it through. Very unprofessional.

Islamic-facist propaganda continues to leak into our mainstream publications.

Posted by: Bingo at February 28, 2007 3:12 AM

Bombthrower? Hardly. Sh!t-disturber? Definitely!

Western women who staunchly defend Islam should be clinically examined for mental illness or psychosis. They are Islam's first and foremost victims as it has been throughout history. Symptomatic of such gender-treason is avowed feminist Germaine Greer's attempted defense of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as "an attack on cultural identity". (Cite from the Journal of Medical Ethics.)

(Link: http://jme.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/27/3/203)

"Feminist writer Germaine Greer's comments that attempts to outlaw the practice were "an attack on cultural identity" have been strongly criticised as ignoring the purposes of mutilation and the lack of choice for those upon whom it is inflicted."

This is just one manifestation of how the liberal left has come full circle to defend the rights of those who would kill them first of all. The hypocrisy and self-hatred embodied by such nihilistic thinking would be hilarious if it did not pose such a egregious threat to America's security and Constitutional liberties. Instead, it may well become necessary to begin outlawing such oblique assaults upon our nation's body politic.

Posted by: Zenster at February 28, 2007 4:23 PM