The conservative establishment has blacked out Hirsi Ali by Lawrence Auster

The mystery deepens. Three days after a Dutch news source reported that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has returned to the Netherlands, because the Dutch government wouldn't continue paying for her security in the U.S. and the U.S. government had declined to assume the responsibility, and I linked and discussed the story here, Jihad Watch still has no mention of it, either by her champion Robert Spencer or by her champion Hugh Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald, as I pointed out yesterday, wrote an impassioned defense of her, but it was posted at New English Review in the form of a comment replying to Rebecca Bynum's blog entry, which in turn was based on my report. Why wouldn't Fitzgerald write about this at his own main website, Jihad Watch? The clear implication is that Spencer won't let him.

A correspondent suggested to me that because Ali in her Reason interview disagreed with Daniel Pipes by name, and Spencer is a friend of Pipes, Spencer has cut her off. But that seems impossible. For one thing, Spencer of course also disagrees with the Pipes position on moderate Islam, though he has never brought Pipes into the discussion by name. And Spencer, to repeat, has long been a booster of Ali's. It seems impossible that he would treat Ali as persona non grata simply for politely saying that she disagrees with Pipes's idea, as reported in Rod Dreher's excerpt of the Reason interview:

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