Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the brave Somali author who survived the brutal Muslim ritual of genital mutilation, escaped to the West to avoid a forced marriage, was elected to the Dutch Parliament, and became a powerful voice against the oppression of women in Muslim societies.Her books Infidel and The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam, and Nomad are the kind that, quite literally, change the world.
John Hinderaker over at Power Line wrote a good post recently in which he muses on the hypocrisy and unfairness which mark's the Left's treatment of Hirsi Ali.
It's entitled "Attacking the Heroine; Why?"
In particular, Hinderaker zooms in on Nick Kristof's New York Times review of Hirsi Ali's latest book, Nomad. Kristof really goes out of his way (and perhaps out of his head) to demean and dismiss her arguments. And his attacks are really mean-spirited and closed-minded, hardly the kind of thing you'd expect from a journalist who sees himself as human rights crusader.
Writes Hinderaker,
Kristof isn't the Times's worst columnist. On the contrary, he is quite rational compared to Paul Krugman and Frank Rich. But he is a liberal, and liberals apparently detest Muslim apostates. Don't ask me why. But Kristof, in his review of Nomad, places the blame for the fact that crazed Muslim extremists want to assassinate Hirsi Ali squarely on her: "She has managed to outrage more people -- in some cases to the point that they want to assassinate her -- in more languages in more countries on more continents than almost any writer in the world today."
That's only the beginning. Kristof goes on to write that Hirsi Ali "is working on antagonizing even more people," even though it "might seem presumptuous to write another memoir so soon." It is easy to see why so many want to kill her, Kristof says, since she is "by nature a provocateur, the type of person who rolls out verbal hand grenades by reflex." Bear in mind that in this case, the "provocateur's" "hand grenades" are arguments that little girls shouldn't have their clitorises cut out, be beaten for no particular reason, or be forced to marry men they haven't met. Is that provocative? To liberals like Kristof, apparently so.
Kristof continues that Hirsi Ali "denounces Islam with a ferocity that I find strident, potentially feeding religious bigotry." Given that Hirsi Ali had her clitoris cut out at age five, one can only ask, is this some kind of sick joke? Can Kristof and the New York Times possibly be serious? If a similar injury were inflicted on a Western woman -- by, let's let our imagination run wild, a Republican -- would their reaction be the same?...
In a recent post, I quoted a refrain from a country song that says, "people are crazy." But in fact, not all people are crazy. It is mostly liberals who are stark raving mad. All the liberals I know claim to be feminists, so how can they support those who mutilate little girls and sanction forced marriages and wife beating?
Beats me. The mind of the liberal is inscrutable. Which, I think, is a polite word for stupid.
