It’s been said that familiarity breeds contempt. This is certainly true of how many on the left perceive Christianity – and conversely Islam. From “comedienne” Rosie O’Donnell’s famous statement that “radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam” to the tarring of the entire pro-life religious movement as dangerous because one nut goes and kills an abortionist (and despite the movements vehement and unreserved condemnation of the act), the left has no problem bashing Christianity.

Two incidents this week illustrate this reflex from the left-wing media, both centering around former Dutch MP and Islamic apostate Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

The first was during an interview with Ali by Tavis Smiley. In an effort to defend Islam’s from the acts of terrorists like Maj. Nidal Hassan and the failed Times Square bomber, Smiley alleged that “Christians do that every single day in this country.”

Smiley’s “evidence” was every disgruntled postal worker ever and the two punks at Columbine who murdered a dozen classmates and a teacher are somehow examples of Christian violence? Of course, facts don’t matter when a liberal’s trying to make a case, but Smiley seems to want to defend Islam at the expense of what he purports to be his own faith. Watch the video for yourself.

Smiley appears to be under the impression that cultural Christianity is real Christianity. I’m referring to cultural Christianity as the phenomenon in this nation where, when asked, people say they’re Christians even though they’re “not practicing” and haven’t been in a church for other than Christmas, Easter, a wedding or a funeral for more than a decade (and the two Columbine shooters weren’t even that).

So, every crime in America is done by a “Christian” because America is a “Christian nation.” (This is why I think Christians shouldn’t refer to the country as a “Christian nation.” Yes, it has a Christian religious heritage, but it’s not accurate and it creates opportunities like that pictured above for idiots to slander Christianity.)

The second example is New York Times columnist Nick Kristof’s “review” of Ali’s book, ably fisked by historian Andrew Roberts.

If one is looking for genuine stridency, don’t bother looking in Hirsi Ali’s calm, fact-based, even good-natured treatise about how changing Muslim education is the best way to defuse extremism, her criticisms of the savage beating of children, or her moving accounts of her family life before she somehow found the self-confidence to escape a corrosive and abusive world of pain, including a clitoridectomy imposed upon Ali at the age of 5 and finally an arranged marriage.

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.”

If one is looking for overheated and overstated rhetoric, consider Kristof’s assertion of modern Islam that the reason that it is “one of the fastest-growing religions in the world today” is not simply that Muslims statistically have more children than Christians and non-Orthodox Jews, but instead because of ‘the warm hospitality toward guests, including Christians and Jews” (tell that to the Christian and Jewish communities that have been expelled from all too many Middle Eastern countries over the past six decades), “charity for the poor” (easy enough in oil-rich plutocracies without social security), and "the sense of democratic unity as rich and poor pray shoulder to shoulder in the mosque” (but can’t vote shoulder to shoulder in the non-existent polling booths).

An honest psychiatrist could make a living off the moral equivalence (where there is none) and reflexive defensiveness of the liberal elite to any negative claims about Islam. America doesn’t need to worry about knuckling under to dhimmitude if sharia ever became the law of the land – the elite media has already had plenty of practice.