The Useless Ilana Mercer Is At It Again

Ilana Mercer, with whom I corresponded for a while until she cleverly called me an idiot without actually attaching the word to my name, is at it again. Here are some posts I did on Mercer's libertarianism (however much she denies it), her writing style, her recent book, and her support of Ron Paul.

I go to her site to see what libertarians are saying. We need all the information (and thought processes) we can get, so we don't get blind-sided like I did with her crass reaction to my positions.

Here's what she recently wrote about Ameerah Al-Taweel, Princess of Saudi Arabia:

Is Princess Ameerah Al-Taweel the most beautiful woman in the world? Indisputably. Her face is simply exquisite. Poise and manners are perfect too. Mrs. Al-Taweel’s simple, rich-girl solutions to endemic unemployment sound more left-liberal than classically liberal, but her heart is pure and she is bright. Married to “Buffett of Arabia,” Ameerah Al-Taweel is also terrifically wealthy. I hope she does not pick up any ho-like mannerisms while in America.

Since my blog is interested in, "how art, culture and society converge," and many of my posts discuss beauty, I simply cannot go without commenting on the so-called beauty of this princess as opined by Mercer. (Of course, Mercer is not only talking about the woman's physical beauty, but her beautifully decorous manners as well, with no sarcasm intended.) I often dislike commenting on innocent bystanders' uncontrollable features such as their looks, but this Saudi Princess is no innocent bystander, as I will show later in this post.

This Saudi royalty is no masterpiece. Her strangely compressed/elongated face doesn't have the delicacy or refinement of a true beauty. There is a fetishistic pull towards highly placed Third Worlders that some people in the West respond to. Ameerah Al-Taweel's large, darkly kohled eyes are her attractive features, and are part of her exoticism. Mercer could be reacting to that.

Princess Ameerah Al-Taweel as a: Western woman, a Muslim woman,
an Oriental Princess, a devout wife. How many hats (robes, dresses)
does she wear? Which one is the real her?

Al-Taweel is often photographed wearing chic, designer Western clothes, looking as smart and well-groomed as a Catherine Deneuve, yet she hails from a country which mandates that women cover up in dark, dreary robes. Al-Taweel does appear at times with black head-coverings, but her reasons are unclear. Is it is camaraderie with her Muslim sisters? Is it to please her husband? Is it her whim for the day?

As for Al-Taweel's non-physical attributes, I just cannot find it. She may be soft-spoken, but she clearly promotes the anti-female, sharia-based legal system in Saudi Arabia (with a different set of rules for herself, of course), advocates polygamy through her own marriage to bigamist Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal (who is also twice divorced - Muslims style?), agrees that women cover up Muslim style, as a physical manifestation of the restraints on women.

She prattles on about allowing women the vote by 2015 (four years from now, when anything could happen, including rescinding this "permission") and being an advocate for women driving despite this newspaper headline just today: Saudi woman to be lashed for driving car.

She is a hypocrite, but more precisely, she lives as an elitist Third World autocrat (or an autocrat's wife), with one set of rules for herself, and another set for the masses.

So this is the "beauty" that Mercer chimes about.

As Keats writes:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, --that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

A writer who cannot discern this is not to be trusted.