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Avi Lewis has built a reputation as a champion of marginalized voices, especially women and victims of oppression. But when faced with one of the world's most prominent critics of radical Islam, that commitment seemed to disappear.

In a resurfaced interview on On The Map from 2007, Lewis interviewed Somali-born author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a woman whose life story includes female genital mutilation, an arranged marriage, fleeing Somalia, and years under security protection after the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh following their collaboration criticizing the treatment of women under Islamist doctrine. Lewis himself laid out much of that background in his introduction.

Lewis introduced Hirsi Ali as a "controversial author" associated with an "arch-conservative" institution before framing her as someone benefiting from anti-Islam sentiment.

Then the interview quickly turned combative.

When Hirsi Ali argued that Islamic doctrines regarding women, obedience and violence required reform, Lewis pushed back by arguing she was portraying Islam as a monolith.

But Hirsi Ali pushed back forcefully.

When Lewis attempted to compare Islamic legal systems with social debates inside Western democracies, Hirsi Ali distinguished between individual violence and state-backed systems:

"When abortion doctors in the United States were shot, the federal government reacted to it by going after the perpetrators, putting them on trial and jailing them. When in Iran two men went after a woman and a man holding hands and shot them, they were acquitted by the Supreme Court. That is the core difference."

She also rejected Lewis' attempts to equate Islamist doctrines with fringe Christian extremism:

"Never confuse Islamic Sharia and the Muslims who really mean it with those extremist Christians who live in the United States."

When Lewis challenged her rejection of the term "Islamophobia," Hirsi Ali again distinguished between criticizing ideas and attacking people:

"Islam is simply a set of beliefs and it's not Islamophobic to say Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy."

"It's not Islamophobic to point to those people who use the Quran and the Hadith to conduct war and to say this is being done in the name of your religion, do something about it."

Yet Lewis continued escalating the exchange with sarcasm. After Hirsi Ali defended liberal democracy and praised the freedoms she found in the West, Lewis mocked her views:

"Tell me which Muslim country, is there a school where they teach you these American clichés?"

Moments earlier, he had described her faith in American democracy as "delightful."

Hirsi Ali's reply may have been the sharpest moment of the interview:

"You grew up in freedom and you can spit on freedom because you don't know what it is not to have freedom."

The exchange raises an uncomfortable question for Lewis and his NDP supporters: Would he speak this way to other victims describing the ideology they believe harmed them?

Disagreeing with someone is one thing. Mocking a survivor while minimizing the worldview she says victimized her is another.

For someone who presents himself as a defender of oppressed voices, Lewis seemed unusually willing to dismiss one when her politics did not fit the script.

Visit AviLewis.com to learn more about the new leader of Canada's New Democratic Party — and the most radical, most extreme, and most dangerous person ever to hold that office.