I hear you Jim but the said fact is that Hitchens (a great writer) allowed his school boy approach to religion to lead him into playing poster child for a theoretical war that sadly had little in common with the actual war that was waged in Iraq. While I always respected his support of the Kurds, he was never-the-less a dupe for an exchange that would eventually lead to the so-called American liberation, a human rights disaster that ended as toss up in its competition with the Baath for most civilians killed and most civil society destroyed. Never mind the absolute betrayal of the American soldiers used up in that conflict.
Hitchens has sadly passed and Harris and Ali are hardly bringing anything new or growing to the table, though at least Ali can claim the right to criticize from the inside. Ali is largely seen as compromised by many feminist Islamic voices that I have run across. I don't claim that as a final verdict by I think the exchange between them (which is public and readily available online) is important to look into. She certainly has allowed some unsavory voices in Western politics to use her without, IMO, putting very much distance between them and herself. That said, I respect her story and her experiences which are moving. Personally I think Harris is an irrelevant fool when it comes to describing the nuances of the evolution of human spirituality. But, to each her own.
That certain forms of Islam and certain cultural certainties of Islamic society are pretty foul is, I think, obvious. What isn't obvious is whether people outside that society are better suited to engage those problems with rhetoric and demands that are usually built on deep misunderstandings at best, if not less than noble ulterior motives. That we have just offered more weapons and support to one of the most brutal regimes in the Islam in Saudi Arabia should be the clue that all of this smoke about women's rights and free society is cover for something else entirely. That Hitchens et al. refused to see how deeply that smoke compromised the use their rhetoric was put to, remains to this day unfathomable to me. And I liked the guy.
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