Feudalism's feminist

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Financial Times:

The problem with political Islam was something identified by Elias Canetti in his classic Crowds and Power. “Believers,” he says, “yearn for God’s force; His power alone does not satisfy them; it is too distant and leaves them too free. The state of continuous expectation of command, to which, early in life, they surrender themselves for good and all, marks them deeply and also has a momentous effect on their attitude to other people.”
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But is it realistic to have a leaderless revolution? In my view it is not. In the absence of leadership -- which means not just one man but a legitimate command structure, as well as some kind of explicit manifesto -- these protests will never achieve the truly revolutionary changes we saw in Europe in 1989.

Hirsi Ali is one of those commentators plucked from an oppressive feudal background whose career is secured in the West by selectively "speaking out" against the crimes committed by her host country's villain-du-jour: She attributes to "Islam" everything that is wrong with pre-capitalist or insufficiently capitalist regimes in the East, in order to promote the crimes of capitalism; even excusing them in places where the two clearly intersect, as with US aid to Mubarak and other Arab tyrants ("It is easy to blame the Zionists and America." Not for you, my dear; your paycheck would record the hardship!).

In this case, Hirsi Ali's utility as an apostate Muslim far exceeds her ability to produce an argument: She says the "Islamic world" harbors the "continuous expectation of command," only to reproach the Egyptians for rejecting "a legitimate command structure, as well as some kind of explicit manifesto" in favor of a leaderless uprising! Rather than ditching the whole pointless endeavor, she lets the very absence of authority prove her point that a much worse authority lies in wait -- if only because Muslims are involved.