Ayaan Hirsi Ali, refugee from Islam, and from death threats in the Netherlands, was interviewed by Mona Charen in a piece titled Misplaced Sensitivity to Islam. Charen reports:
Like other major liberal outlets, the Times has been utterly derelict in reporting about another aspect of life among American Muslims — honor killing.
When it comes to the brutal slayings of young Muslim women by their fathers, brothers, or husbands, the Times gets squeamish.
As Ms. Hirsi Ali relates, this misplaced sensitivity arises from the cult of multiculturalism, which would rather tolerate egregious crimes against women than offend Third World sensibilities. When the Said sisters, 19-year-old Amina and 17-year-old Sarah, were shot and killed by their father, Yaser Said, in a suburb of Dallas in late 2007, the story was buried. Though the father had been enraged by his elder daughter’s refusal to submit to an arranged marriage and by news that both girls had been secretly dating non-Muslim boys, the few stories about the case were careful to dismiss suggestions of honor killing. The Times failed to cover the story. (It was mentioned, briefly, in an opinion piece.)
Hirsi Ali gives several more examples of honor killings in the U.S. that were neglected by the media. (See our posts on honor killing here.) She goes on to plead for western feminists to help
the hundreds of millions of women and girls who are abused, mutilated, sold, traded, beaten, and hidden away in the Muslim world. “But the more pressing business is what feminists can do now to prevent an alien culture of oppression from taking root in the West. . . . This is what Americans can learn from Europe’s experience with Muslim immigration: we simply cannot compromise our own principles by tolerating honor killing, female genital mutilation, and other such practices.”
Hear, hear.