A profile in courage

Tunku Varadarajan at the Daily Beast has written a fine article about Hirsi Ali and her new book, Nomad. From the article:

The author laments the self-censorship in the West, driven by a well-meaning, but ultimately corrosive and self-defeating politics of multicultural accommodation. There have been numerous honor killings in the United States, in which Muslim fathers or husbands kill daughters or wives who have “sullied” the family name in some way; and yet, Hirsi Ali observes, not once has the achingly non-judgmental American press used the phrase “honor killing” in its reports on the murders. Writing of Nidal Malik Hasan, the Islamist U.S. Army major who gunned down 13 people at Fort Hood last year, she finds it “astonishing” that the media regarded all explanations for the murders plausible “except the one explicitly stated by the killer, namely his religion.” (She will cease to be astonished, I reckon, once she spends a few more years on the East Coast.)