While Hirsi Ali is claiming to be misrepresented by her critics, however, she is at the same time going ahead making similar arguments to the ones she made back in 2007. On April 10, 2014, The Wall Street Journal published, under the headline, “Here’s What I Would Have Said at Brandeis,” what it described as an abridged version of remarks she planned to deliver. “The connection between violence, particularly violence against women, and Islam is too clear to be ignored,” she wrote. Not radical Islam, not fundamentalist Islam, not Islamism, but simply Islam, a religion whose faithful adherents include some hundreds of millions of women.

“Both Christianity and Judaism have had their eras of reform. I would argue that the time has come for a Muslim Reformation,” she wrote.

What are non-reformed Christians, such as Catholics or adherents to the Greek Orthodox church, supposed to make of that? Or unreformed Jews, such as those of us who are of the Orthodox or Conservative varieties? It’s not as if Islam is the only violent religion. Humility recommends mentioning that even we Jews have had, within living memory, Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir, though, significantly, their deeds have been widely condemned by Jewish religious leaders rather than being celebrated. Nor is violence confined to religion; the atheistic Communists of the 20th Century Soviet Union and China surpassed, for sheer body count, anything the Muslims have perpetrated.