Must-Read Alert: Andrew Roberts in demolition mode

Which would you prefer: a female al-Qaeda terrorist? Or a Somali refugee who has dedicated her life to combatting religious oppression and fighting for women’s rights? You might think it a no-brainer: the Somali refugee, right? Not if you are Deborah Scroggins, who shows that the question really is a no-brainer, but in a sense different from what is usually meant.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there was an embittered Muslim terrorist called Aafia Siddiqui, Pakistani-born but educated in the U.S.  In September 2010, she was  convicted of assault with intent to murder and was sentenced to 88 years in prison.

Once upon another time. in another land far, far away, there was an oppressed but courageous woman called Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Somali-born but who fled the mephitic swamps of Islamic oppression for the Netherlands in 1992. In 2003 she was elected to the Dutch parliament, but took refuge in the United States when her life was threatened by Muslims in the Netherlands — the same chaps who murdered her firend, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. (“The killer shot van Gogh eight times with an HS 2000 handgun, and Van Gogh died on the spot. The killer also tried to decapitate van Gogh with one knife, and stabbed him in the chest with another. The two knives were left implanted; one attached a five-page note to his body. The note (Text) threatened Western countries, Jews and Ayaan Hirsi Ali . . .”)

Now imagine you are are a left-wing American journalist with the Dickensian name of Scroggins. You write a book about the al-Qaeda terrorist Siddiqui and Ayaan Hirsi Ali called Wanted Woman, whose burden is to show, to the consistent detriment of Hirsi Ali, how the two are “mirror images” of each other. Moral: Siddiqui is a brave warrior, oppressed by the West, while Hirsi Ali is a “lying” tool of decadent Westerners.

Amazing isn’t it?  Don’t read the repulsive book, but do read the historian Andrew Roberts’s brilliant  demolition of it at The Tablet. Cato the Elder (Carthago delenda est) would have been proud. Roberts treats this morally imbecilic book with the contempt it deserves.