But the more pressing business is what feminists can do to prevent an alien culture of oppression from taking root in the West. - Ayaan Hirsi Ali

With our grandmother staying behind in Somalia, my mother had nobody with whom to share tasks and plans. She could do nothing on her own. She wasn't supposed to go out on the street without these new guardians of ours, our uncles, and neither were we. To phone them she had to scuttle down to the corner grocer, with my ten-year-old brother in tow acting as her protective male.

I believe the honor-and-shame culture can be discarded. To think otherwise is to define Muslims as as incapable of growth and adaptation, and I can’t think of anything more pejorative and racist.

The fact that honor killings can occur in Texas, New York, and Georgia makes the virtual silence of Western feminists on this subject all the more bizarre and deplorable.