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the latest "power couple"
I haven't had time to comment on the latest Ayaan Hirsi Ali incident, although I don't really think it is that newsworthy, and was, in my view, pretty much predictable - at least in the attention-seeking aspect of it. Hirsi Ali has always seemed to find the limelight her favorite spot.
Ali is involved in a torrid affair with historian Niall Ferguson, who ditched his wife of sixteen years to link up with her. There is an article over at the British on-line magazine The Daily Mail, which humorously titles the piece: "The historian, his wife and a mistress living under a fatwa." Ali is standing next to Ferguson, held rather clumsily and defiantly by the adulterous husband. She is wearing a gaudy electric blue satin dress, looking both vapid and glitzy at the same time. The article calls them "a formidable couple," but I wonder how much Ali will ever get done now that she's officially entered the shimmering world of celebrities that the other Muslim who had a fatwa on his head - Salman Rushdie - belongs to. Rushdie keeps appearing at fashionable events, with a different woman at his arm every year or so. If I were Ali, I would be a little careful, since Ferguson apparently has had eight affairs in the past five years. But, that is irrelevant. Ali can also keep changing her own partners as many times as she wishes.
I believe Ali still works for the American Enterprise Institute in the United States. Her last published article at the AEI was in June 2009, which reprimanded Obama for not telling the "truth to Islam." But Ali has a bigger project than mere research fellow at the AEI, which I am sure is not a long-term (or indefinite) position. She has initiated a foundation called the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation whose aim is to: "defend and protect the rights of women in the West against fundamentalist Islam." The foundations has cleverly limited its mission to "women in the West." But I have never trusted Ali's statements as they stand, since I believe that she is an internationalist at heart, and cannot ignore for long all those abused Muslim women who are not living in the West. I suspect her next project will involve the migration to America, and the West in general, of Muslim women persecuted by Islam in non-Western countries, so they can live the free and safe lives that her AHA foundation would work hard to provide for them.
In any case, I wrote about her increasing detachment as a voice against Islam's presence in the West when she failed to materialize an ambitious book she had planned to write, Short Cuts to Enlightenment, which was supposed to have featured Mohammed being interrogated by Enlightenment-era philosophers. Her sequel to the film Submission also never came to fruition. Instead, she opted for another autobiography-style book, which is easy to write and probably more financially lucrative.
Her AHA foundation is true to her beliefs, at least. She is clearly a feminist at heart, and I've previously concluded that she's not a reliable spokesman for the West. Instead, she has decided to focus her attention on women just like her, Muslim or ex-Muslim women who are being "persecuted" by Islam. And like all social work-type activities, especially when dealing with "oppressed" or "victimized" minorities, I am sure this is a good career move and will provide her with financial stability, and respect by the liberals who love to sponsor such projects. And having her latest debaucheries written up in celebrity gossip magazines will not hurt.
