"Make Hirsi Ali Honorary French Citizen"

A group of French intellectuals are demanding that Ayaan Hirsi Ali be given honorary French citizenship and that the French government provide the Somali-Dutch moderate-conservative atheist feminist, vocal critic of Islam, and former Dutch parliamentarian with the protection that the Dutch government no longer wants to provide now that she has lived in the U.S. for over a year.

In a petition in Libération newspaper, the intellectuals express annoyance at the "unacceptable cowardice of a European government." The petition is signed by among others philosophers Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut and André Glucksmann. "Europe was the cradle of the Enlightenment tradition," says the declaration, "and Western values must guarantee freedom of expression."

My response: OK, I thought the French were actually displaying a rare level of common sense for once. However, these are French Jewish intellectuals, and thus they are more receptive to Ms. Hirsi Ali's message about Islamic extremism than your typical leftist, postmodernist, "we-shouldn't-judge-people's-culture-at-all-except-American-culture" French intellectual.