In the New York Times last week, writing about the eruption of hatred for Muslims in the US, Frank Rich asked what seems an increasingly pertinent question: "How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?" Ameri cans who are shocked by what the columnist Maureen Dowd calls a "weird mass nervous breakdown" accuse the usual suspects – rightwingers whose "fear and disinformation" is "amplified by the poisonous echo chamber that is the modern media environment". But anti-Muslim toxins were injected into the mainstream well before August 2010, and not by rightwingers alone.

Bestselling authors like Ayaan Hirsi Ali may be the "new heroes", as the writer Peter Beinart puts it, of the Republican party's crusade against Muslims. But "professional" former Muslims have long provided respectable cover for the bigotry and, more often, plain ignorance of mainstream western commentators on Islam. This Monday Germany's Hirsi Ali, the Turkish writer Necla Kelek, stood shoulder to shoulder with the German central banker and Social Democratic party (SPD) member Thilo Sarrazin as he asserted that Muslims are out-breeding white, presumably "Aryan", Germans and that "all Jews share the same gene".

Most of these ex-Muslim "dissidents" lucratively raging against Islam in the west wouldn't be able to flourish without the imprimatur of influential institutions and individuals in the US and Europe. Hirsi Ali, who wishes to be the Voltaire of Islam, commands rapturous endorsements from not only rightwing crazies like Pamela Geller and Glenn Beck but also Tina Brown.

Certainly, the story of Hirsi Ali's life attests powerfully to the degradations suffered by many women in patriarchal cultures. There is no question that she should feel free to say that Muslims are programmed to kill infidels and mutilate female bodies, however much these opinions may offend some people. There is little reason, however, for most of her opinions to claim serious intellectual attention.

Declaring that the civilised west has no choice but to stamp out barbaric Islam in the clash of civilisations, Hirsi Ali seems useful only to her bellicose neoconservative employers in the US and their ideological kin in the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan. And her recent exhortations to Muslims to convert to Christianity make her sound more like Billy Graham than Voltaire.

Yet the mildest criticism of Hirsi Ali's naivety triggers a tsunami of vitriol from her army of prominent supporters. In recent months Clive James as well as Melanie Phillips have rebuked Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash for not joining the chorus of praise for Hirsi Ali, a defender of the western Enlightenment, and for being "soft" on apparently closeted jihadists like the Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan.

Those who tirelessly cheerlead Hirsi Ali's war on totalitarian Islam today did not have much, if anything at all, to say about the original despoiling, by western-backed Muslim fanatics, of Pakistan and Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet jihad in the 80s. The long-gathering backlash that finally arrived in the west on 9/11 sent them scampering to bone up about "Islam" – about as gainful a mode of knowing your enemy as Afghans sitting down to read Kant's essay What is Enlightenment? after a US drone has destroyed their village.

Many of these Islam watchers championed the misbegotten wars that have already killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims and ruined innumerable more lives. But they still present themselves as virtuous and lonely warriors, indefatigably rooting out the internal enemies of western civilisation, who tend to be either Muslims sinisterly reluctant to embrace the true American patriot's worldview, or politically correct liberal-lefties too scared to hear, let alone speak, the real truth about Islam.

Thus the writer Paul Berman, a self-described "laptop general" who first stalked Ramadan and hounded Buruma and Garton Ash in the New Republic – once the principal periodical of liberal America – and then expanded his 28,000-word indictment into a much-reviewed book, could recently lament in the Wall Street Journal, the Murdoch-owned US newspaper, that we are living in the "age of the zipped lip".

Oddly, this persecution complex afflicts people with the easiest access to mass media and the greatest influence on public opinion. Defending Martin Amis, who had fantasised in the Times about subjecting Muslims to multiple humiliations, Ian McEwan protested that leftwingers were closing down "debate" on Islam.

As it turns out, millions of angry Americans have opened up an equally unedifying "debate" on Islam. "You look them [Muslims] in the eye and flex your muscles," Hirsi Ali exhorted the west recently, "there comes a moment when you crush your enemy." Well, that much-awaited moment is here. Populist sentiment, which Democrats as well as Republicans clamour to represent, fully endorses the scapegoating of a religious minority for America's recent military and economic failures.

It remains to be seen how the previously besieged critics of Islam respond to the mob of Koran-immolators. Certainly their critiques of Islam, always redolent of tabloid wisdom, can no longer be passed off as acts of moral courage. And it may be too optimistic to expect them to go to Muslim countries, or befriend a few Muslims, and then discover, as EM Forster did, that: "Islam is more than a religion … it is an attitude towards life which has produced durable and exquisite civilisations."

Even a conservative figure like Henry James, while recoiling from Jewish immigrants in Manhattan, manifested a curiosity about America's new population that transcended the bigotries of his time. In comparison, the liberal assumptions of superiority today have seemed experience-proof. The mass anti-Muslim hysteria has now thrown them into crisis – finally, long after it has become clear that Hirsi Ali-style denunciations, vigorously amplified by mainstream intellectuals and politicians, have potentially terrible consequences for the millions of Muslims in the west.

Writing about another "foul, ignoble" episode in America's recent history – Joe McCarthy's witch-hunts against America's internal enemies – James Baldwin marvelled at the "ignorance and arrogance" of intellectuals who went on discussing the threat to the "free" world while "every hour brought more distress and confusion – and dishonour – to the country they claimed to love".

The stigmatisation of racial and religious bigotry counts as one of the very few instances of moral progress in the previous half-century. It's not, alas, an irreversible advance, and the witch-hunters of today can still occasionally have a field day. But it is their intellectual accomplices who will invite the severest contempt of posterity.

Guardian

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