These critics therefore lionise the ex-Muslim atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali and support her calls for an Islamic equivalent to the Protestant Reformation. And here is where the New Atheist bad history comes in. Most atheist activists who venture opinions on history don’t even bother to argue that the Whig perspective is valid – they simply blithely assume it. Similarly, they also blithely assume its underlying premises, including that the Protestant Reformation was an unequivocally “good” thing. And these examples are just a sampler of the horrors, on all sides, that resulted from the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic backlash against it.