The Times Versus the Truth

Former Dutch parliament member Ayaan Hirsi Ali's brave story and trauma are well known. She's just published a third book, called Nomad, about immigrating to America. But Nick Kristof's review in the May 30th New York Times oozes condescension--it's even titled "The Gadfly"--and blames the victim for the misogamy and mass-murders of radical Islam. To top it off, Kristof calls her writing "overheated and overstated"--a critique better applied to Kristof's own paper.

Mark Steyn looks at "the left's strange hostility" to those who tell the truth about Islamofascists:

[T]he Western left’s hostility to Ayaan Hirsi Ali makes my point for me. In Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman wrote that suicide bombings "produced a philosophical crisis, among everyone around the world who wanted to believe that a rational logic governs the world." In other words, it has to be about "poverty" or "social justice" because the alternative--that they want to kill us merely because we are the other--undermines the hyper-rationalist’s entire world view. Thus, every pro-gay, pro-feminist, pro-black Western liberal’s determination to blame Ayaan Hirsi Ali for the fact that a large number of benighted thuggish halfwits want to kill her. Deploring what he regards as her simplistic view of Islam, Nicholas Kristof rhapsodizes about its many fine qualities--"There is also the warm hospitality toward guests, including Christians and Jews."

Oh, for crying out loud. In the Muslim world, Christians and Jews have been on the receiving end of a remorseless ethno-religious cleansing for decades. Christian churches get burned, along with their congregations, from Nigeria to Pakistan. Egypt is considering stripping men who marry Jewesses of their citizenship. Saudi Arabia won’t let ’em in the country. In the 1920s, Baghdad was 40 per cent Jewish. Gee, I wonder where they all went. Maybe that non-stop "warm hospitality" wears you down after a while . . .

As Paul Mirengoff of the Power Line blog observes, traditionally when useful idiots shill for illiberal ideologies it requires at least "the illusion of progressivism" to bring them on board. Islam can’t provide that, but that’s no obstacle to getting the bien pensants to sign up. As much as anyone, secular leftists want meaning in their lives. But Communism went belly up; the postwar welfare state is bankrupt; environmentalism has taken a hit in recent months; and Christianity gives them the vapours. Nicholas Kristof will not be the first great thinker to talk himself into a view of Islam as this season’s version of Richard Gere Buddhism.

Ed Driscoll is still more outraged:

[O]nce again, as Kate Macmillan has written, "scratch a progressive, and you’ll find a misogynist." And scratch a "liberal" feminist and you'll find someone remarkably unsympathetic to the plight of women in the Middle East.

Conclusion: Scorning religion would be bad enough. But Kristof and mainstream media in general are worse: they give a pass only to creeds beheading critics.

(via reader Marc)