This is happening in the intellectual journals. And intellectuals are specialists in defamation, they're basically commissars – they're the ideological managers, so they are the ones who feel the most threatened by dissidence. The mass media don't care that much, they ignore it, or say it's crazy or something like that…sure, you'll get a throwaway line saying, “this guy's an apologist for this that and the other thing,” but that's just feeding off the intellectual culture. The place where it's really done is inside the intellectual journals – because that's their specialty. They're commissars; it's not fundamentally different from the Communist Party. And also, I'm a particular target for other reasons – a lot of what I write is a critique of the American liberal intellectual establishment, and they don't like that particularly.

Respect for the concrete detail of human experience, understanding that arises from viewing the Other compassionately, knowledge gained and diffused through moral and intellectual honesty: surely these are better, if not easier, goals at present than confrontation and reductive hostility. And if in the process we can dispose finally of both the residual hatred and the offensive generality of labels like “the Muslim,” “the Persian,” “the Turk,” “the Arab,” or “the Westerner,”then so much the better.