New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has a bad habit of inappropriate flippancy, and it's on display in his review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's new memoir "Nomad," introduced with the headline "The Gadfly," that efficiently captures Kristof's condescending tone.

Hirsi Ali is a feminist intellectual born Muslim in Somalia, raised in Saudi Arabia, escaped an arranged marriage, fled to the Netherlands and began speaking out against Islam's treatment of women. She now lives in the United States and is a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which is perhaps why her story does not delight liberals like it should on the surface.

As historian Andrew Roberts wrote in an attack at The Daily Beast, Kristof sounded condescending. Hirsi Ali's brave fight for women's rights against fundamentalist religious bigotry certainly sounds like something to be admired without reservation by any sincere liberal. Yet liberals often seem too afraid of sounding like anti-Islamic conservatives to applaud Hirsi Ali without criticism. Kristof makes it sound as if Hirsi Ali shared the blame for the threats on her life because "she has managed to outrage more people...," as if her goal is to provoke anger, not to expand freedom for women under Islam.

If there were a "Ms. Globalization" title, it might well go to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali woman who wrote the best--selling memoir "Infidel." 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.