NYT columnist dumps on Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book, of course

No, for true stridency one should instead read Kristof’s almost unhinged response to the book, in which along the disgraceful and untrue accusation of “feeding religious bigotry,” he states that Hirsi Ali “is working on antagonizing even more people in yet another memoir” (she’s written two), “she never quite outgrew her rebellious teenager phase” (she was an elected MP in Holland), “she is at her worst when excoriating a variegated faith” (she does not), and accusing her of “overheated and overstated rhetoric.”…

Truly stomach-churning is Kristof’s remark, “Perhaps Hirsi Ali’s family is dysfunctional because its members never learned to bite their tongues and just say to one another: ‘I love you.’” That might be the New York shrink’s answer to every problem, but does it really help at the moment when, as in Hirsi Ali’s case, her father ordered her to marry a stranger? That is the reality for much of Somali Muslim womanhood today, and Kristof’s answer to that nightmare—which he would not for one moment contemplate allowing in the United States—is for everyone to have a nice big group hug and say they love each other.

As for the sustained beating of children, Kristof laughs off this vicious abuse by writing: “Yes, corporal punishment is common in madrassas, as it was in the rural Oregon schools where I grew up … but they don’t turn children into terrorists.” Yet Hirsi Ali doesn’t argue anything so trite in Nomad, all she does is state that beatings coarsen children and accustom them to violence, which then spills over into society in a myriad of ways. The Middle East is not rural Oregon, as Mr. Kristof, who boasts of his wide travels in the region, must surely know.