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no longer a "power couple"
Geert Wilders lives in effective house arrest in his country the Netherlands, and now is in court to defend, and save, his country and the West from encroaching Islamization.
Meanwhile, Hirsi Ali, his former countrywoman, former refugee asylum seeker to Holland from Somalia, former Dutch parliamentarian, and now an American citizen, is busy making illegitimate babies with her British boyfriend Niall Ferguson, according to the Britain's Daily Mail. Ali is pregnant by the British historian, who abandoned his wife and children to start a steamy affair with Ali after he met her at a New York event a few years ago. Ali came to New York to work with the American Enterprise Institute. She is now an American citizen, but everything about her, including her time in Holland, reeks of an opportunistic, global traveler - a nomad, as she correctly identifies herself in one of her books aptly titled Nomad - who will set up tent wherever it is most convenient.
In America, she started a non-profit organization to help Muslim-born women (whether believers in Islam or not) in the West, caught up in Islam's honor killings and other fierce misogynistic behaviors. As I wrote here, the plight of Muslim women is not our problem. The majority of Muslim women do not renounce Islam, but want the best of both worlds - a free life (possibly in the West) with the freedom to continue practicing the religion that has effectively persecuted them (how can we help people like this?). This is in some fashion how Ali is living her life. She hasn't renounced her "Muslimness" although she has a lot to say about reforming Islam to suit her feminist and Westernized lifestyle (see my blog posts here: 1, 2, 3).
Here is what I wrote on Ali in "Islam's Missionary Women":
Hirsi Ali insists that the West downplay one of its hallmarks, Christianity, in order to enter into a secularized unit to subjugate a totalitarian-inclined Islamic world, especially against its women. By declaring that only a West dependent on reason rather than religion can tackle this, she demands a solution that would throw out one of the prime Western traditions – that of Judeo-Christianity – which has historically been successful in defeating previous Islamic threats. Her Enlightenment-biased views allow her to boldly state “ The enemies of reason within the West are religion and the Romantic Movement”, as though Western tradition prior to the Enlightenment (which she gets chronologically wrong by putting the Romantics into the fray) is merely an amalgam of religious fanatics and sentimentalists.News about Ali is always strange. It looks like she's has been trying to have a child for a while. Here's what she wrote about wanting to have a child in her book Nomad (via the Daily Mail):
I have struggled whether to have you on my own or to marry your father . . . having a child is a personal choice. It’s not only a personal choice; it’s a very selfish choice. I want to have you for me, for my delight, to enrich my existence.The Daily Mail informs us that she had asked her doctor to have her eggs frozen in case she got too old to have children. So, I would conclude that her pregnancy was a priority in her torrid affair with Ferguson. (By the way, Ferguson, has previously cheated on his wife with eight affairs in five years, according to an earlier article in the often accurate Daily Mail, and I write here that there is no guarantee that he will change his ways with Ali.)
It is interesting that the Mail has posted a photo of Ali in her blue dress, which I also posted here, and which I described as "a gaudy electric blue satin dress, looking both vapid and glitzy at the same time." But it is probably the only one they have where she stands in amorous link with Ferguson.
Ali has become an inconsequential speaker for the West by a non-Westerner. Her articles for the American Enterprise Institute are infrequent, and I haven't heard of any important engagement or activity in which she's recently participated. Perhaps the media (and anti-Jihadists) have come to the conclusion that her role as a non-Western mouthpiece speaking up for the West was too much to hope for.
Ferguson dedicated his latest book Civilization: The West and the Rest to her, writing that she "understands better than anyone I know what Western civilisation really means – and what it still has to offer the world." He may have to reassess his view of her, and consequent admiration for her.