From a
review of Hitchens' bookConsistency is foolish, as the man said. (Didn’t he?) Under the unwritten and somewhat eccentric rules of American public discourse, a statement that contradicts everything you have ever said before is considered for that reason to be especially sincere, courageous and dependable.
You can always find an apostate of an extreme social, political, or religious movement who's willing and eager to dish about his former beliefs and the people who shared them. Taken with a grain of salt and in a larger context, it can be useful.
However, these people don't have any special authority just because they got suckered into it in the first place. If anything, it would suggest that person has some pretty poor judgment.
This guy reads a lot like David Horowitz. Someone who was on a radical fringe, left it, then started telling everyone who would listen not just how awful that fringe was, but that the fringe was actually representative of the principles of a much broader, mainstream movement.
Saying that the peaceful, mainstream movement bears responsibility for the fringe is ironic, since it's putting responsibility for the author's own fuckup on the people who weren't dumb enough to make his mistakes. People whose very existence serves to disprove the Islam = Jihad or Liberalism = The Weathermen conflation they try to push.
