IN THE years after 9/11, as liberal sympathy for the US wore thin, you heard a lot of this:

The West is in no position to judge less democratic parts of the world. Scolding the Middle East in particular risks looking anti-Muslim. Regimes aren’t bad, much less “evil”, just products of local cultures that untravelled Americans don’t understand. Even if things were so black and white, shame on us for courting Arab states in the past as oil suppliers or as Cold War chess pieces. Did you know, by the way, that Texas still puts people to death?

Such was this relativism, this refusal to speak ill of what is now the “Global South”, that Christopher Hitchens left the left. The estrangement had begun when his comrades equivocated over the Rushdie affair in 1989.