Originally a comment by newenlightenment on In a fair world he would get it.
They ruined her a while back: Kissinger was at Hirsi Ali and Niall Ferguson’s wedding. (Admittedly by his invitation, not hers.) Particularly galling when you consider that Christopher Hitchens was on his deathbed at the time, had been a close friend and defender of Hirsi Ali, and his greatest work was in exposing Kissinger’s war crimes to the world. Hirsi Ali’s actions are a total betrayal, not only of human rights, but of basic human decency.
Hirsi Ali also claimed that the welfare state was responsible for the murder of Theo Van Gogh, since ‘the killer was on welfare, if he had had to look for work to support himself, he would not have had the time to plan the murder’ – a statement so wingnut it makes James Delingpole look almost logical.
Hirsi Ali may have been just as bad before she joined AIE, in Infidel she claimed that as an MP she had advocated ‘dramatically cutting unemployment benefits and abolition of the minimum wage’ to eliminate a supposed poverty trap where Muslim migrants were able to earn more on benefits than by working, and thus could avoid mingling with unbelievers. Even if one accepts the facts of this claim, abolition of the minimum wage would make no sense, one does not ‘make work pay’ by cutting wages! If Hirsi Ali had argued for cutting unemployment benefits and raising the minimum wage she might at least have made sense on her own terms, but as it is, she merely exposed the right-wing agenda she determined to promote, under any rationale, no matter how flimsy.