If you want to be braver than I am, you can listen to this podcast of all the anti-Godites like Hitchens and Dawkins and others talking among themselves about God and about how God is bad and how God doesn't exist, etc.
What I don't understand is, haven't we heard it all before? Yes, I know their arguments and agree with most of them; I've read and heard them all. But now we need to have a pow wow podcast with them all together? Why? Shouldn't their be a religious pow-wow standing next to them in order to counter their points? Or are we supposed to be just so fascinated by the views they've already stated in their books that we want to hear them over and over again?
It's not only Christopher who has gone all quiet on the continuing hell disaster that is Iraq, most of the mainstream media seem to think it is old news.
Indeed I found myself acting the same way this weekend. I was talking to a friend while BBC News 24 was in the background, when suddenly a "breaking news" announcement told us a car bomb had exploded with 30 dead. We both stopped talking until the newsreader informed us that the attack was in Baghdad. We both went on with our conversation.
Thats how desensitised I am to news of blood, death and destruction from the place now. 30 dead? well no biggie.
After a while listening to Christopher Hitchens can be mesmerizing—the voice, the arrogance, the self regard. It is only when you take a step back that some anomalies start to make you uncomfortable.
How is it that that he seems to stand up for the rights of oppressed Muslim women but in his writing they are mere sketches, without autonomy, individuality or character. Maybe a clue can be found on his home page—but no. Look at the hordes on each side, the good and the evil. Are there any female faces?
We have Ms Ali, her beautiful brown apostate face close to his and the craggy face of Teresa on the “bad’ side. Other than that there are few, (one down the back may be de Beavoir) add a couple of foppish looking males and it is easy to come to the conclusion that half the population doesn’t really rate a mention in Christopher’s cigar smoking world.
Perpetual victims if Muslim, enablers if a Clinton—there is no equal space for those of us without a Y chromosome.
One of the strongest arguments against fundamentalist religious societies is that they will never thrive because they deny the talents of 50% of the population, something no sane society can afford. It is not an argument of Hitch's because in his world view we are forever infantile. AHA is a strong woman and an object of Hitch’s admiration but her career is forged on defining herself as a victim first and an avenging angel second. She is no Marie Curie. Mother Teresa is an ogre but one pulled by the strings of the male religious patriarchy.
Even when evil we are the weaker sex, we are the Eleana Ceausescu to Nicolai, Imelda to Ferdinand Marcos. The dark lady of Shakespearean sonnets and not the author.
Our strength is always additional to our attractiveness, or not, and our weakness is always due to our ugliness. In writing about female comedians, Hitch says:
“In any case, my argument doesn't say that there are no decent women comedians. There are more terrible female comedians than there are terrible male comedians, but there are some impressive ladies out there. Most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three.”
In wanting to liberate the world from the demons of theology it would be nice if Hitch could free us from the assumptions of his misogyny. It’s a little rich being preached to about the ravages Islam places on women from a man that doesn’t quite see us as members of the same club.
Sonic adds
We always welcome guest contributions here at HTW, if you have anything you think is worth saying don't wait to be asked, email us and if it is any good we will post it.
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From Bento of the Baruch & Bento team at Ultimi Barbarorum, which bills itself as "the only live Spinozist blog on the internet we know of." Me too! Also, please check out the link for the full post and a lengthy response from Baruch that touches on Hitch's highly selective hanky blowing.
Baruch, we here on this blog make no secret of our fascination with Christopher Hitchens, whom we previously disinherited for his flawed casus belli re the Iraq war but admitted back into the fold on the literary qualities of his “God is not Great”.
Now Hitchens tries to come to terms with a rather harrowing affirmation of how words can have consequences. Read his article in Vanity Fair about how a young man, Mark Daily, was moved by Hitchens’s writings to enlist, and then to die in Iraq when an IED explode under his vehicle.
In the end, I think Hitchens comes out short. Like some of our friends, he still insist that he is disappointed by how the war was conducted, but does not admit that he was wrong in his initial argumentation for waging the war in the first place. I think I can speak for the both of us that Hitchens and our friends remain in denial.
Bento then makes the points that 1. The unintended consequences of war, good or bad, are invariable larger than the intended consequences; 2. The opportunity cost of a war is invariably wasteful; and 3. Even if the US’s intentions in Iraq are motivated by altruism, the broad perception of the US in the Middle East as a result of its historical actions makes it impossible for the US to fulfill its goals here simply because of whose goals they are. Then he concludes:
In the end, Hitchens doesn’t bring himself to admit that the writings that influenced Mark Daily were wrong. He was made blind to the opportunity cost of waging this war because he had Kurdish friends for whom the outcome of the removal of Saddam Hussein would undoubtedly be a good thing. Hitchens lost the big picture view.
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Hitchens "didn't have anything intelligent to say"
Charles Ferguson was on C-SPAN last night to discuss his fine documentary film "No End in Sight". The movie is largely a series of interviews conduced with insiders who explain how badly the war in Iraq was managed. With "absolutely incredible incompetence," concluded Ferguson. The primary criticism of the film is of the dissolution of the Iraqi army, which Ferguson and others argue convincingly to have been a terrible blunder.
Toward the end of the interview, Ferguson was asked if he interviewed anyone who still supports the war, "like Bill Kristol". He said that he had asked people like Kristol and even former and current administration officials such as Paul Bremer, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, but all of them declined.
All except Christopher Hitchens, who readily agreed to be interviewed. However, Feguson noted that he didn't include the Hitchens interview in the movie because Hitchens "didn't have anything intelligent to say". It came off as pretty rough knock, coming the mild-mannered Ferguson. Of course, Hitchens is probably the only person in the world who still imagines disolving the Iraqi armed forces to have been a wise choice...
You know him! You love him! You've heard him say all this before, but he he says it so charmingly because he has such a lovely speaking voice. It's Christopher Hitchens at the podium delivering a lecture on The Moral Necessity of Atheism at Sewanee University on February 23, 2004. The above link is the first of eight parts. (You can find the rest at YouTube.) But if you don't mind a smaller picture, the whole thing is available at the Sewanee website here.
There's a fair amount of controversial stuff in this lecture, although perhaps nothing more so than the title. We've just spent the best part of half a millenium trying to rid ourselves of the notion that we have a moral necessity to deny people who follow other creeds their freedom of religious conscience. And now that we've finally managed (at least in the West) to emasculate the religious know-it-alls who would, if they could, cajole us to adopting their particular faith, along comes Hitch in an attempt to lay his own version of the same guilt trip on us. What "moral imperative" is he talking about?
Hitch also says some nice things about Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand, repeats a cute joke about John Wayne playing the centurian in The Greatest Story Ever Told, and has a go at Mother Theresa, Princess Di, and Pope John Paul II, and he's well worth listening to on all these subjects.
What caught my attention was a claim about 25 minutes in where he says that "We have in us an innate appreciation of beauty, literature and irony." He also instructs us to satisfy our sense of awe and wonder by reading Stephen Hawking and getting into cosmology—one of my favorite subjects—and he waxes absolutely poetic over such natural wonders of the Universe as the event horizon of a black hole. Add all this to his claim that morality is inate and we can see a picture building up of the Hitchensian worldview. I'm not going to try to pick holes in this philsophy—not today at least! But I do think Hitch is on as shaky ground with his argument from innateness as a theist would be about esthetics and morals being created by God.
Also, about half way through he gets into the Israel-Palestine problem, explaining that the main thing blocking a solution to that mess is the presence of religion. I for one find this approach deceitful. Echoing what Chomsky said, Hitch can't possibly be serious about this idea. Isn't it obvious that the conflict between those two nations is a political struggle?
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Hitch's key aspects of fascism are much more consistent with religious fundamentalism than with fascism
At Hitchens Watch, as I'm sure you've noticed, we try to be educational and informative as well as entertaining, and so it is with considerable pleasure that I can now introduce you to an article that is all three. It's by Aaron over at The Stopped Clock, and it's an insightful analysis of why the term "Islamofascism" isn't descriptive of either Islam or fascism.
He starts by defining "fascism" and then taking a hard look at Jonah Goldberg's take on the phenomenon, pointing out along the way the faulty reasoning of trying to conflate two distinct things as if they were one on the basis that they have certain qualities in common. One way of illustrating this sort of logical error is to say something like:
Foxes have pointed ears, sharp teeth, four legs and big bushy tails. My cat has pointed ears, sharp teeth, four legs and big bushy tail. Therefore, my cat is a fox.
Goldberg, it would appear, has performed a similar exercise in conflating Islam and fascism.
Next, Aaron gets onto Hitch, who he thinks is guilty of similar errors, quoting that memorable Hitchensian paragraph:
The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.
And then, to tidy things up, he goes into some detail about the very real and major differences between common or garden "fascism" and that mythical beast "Islamofascism" that demolish Hitch's arguments and show him up for an intellectual bounder, before finishing by declaring:
In short, as defined by Hitchens, the religious aspects of "Islamofascism" can be found among extremists in any major religion. (I will grant that the numbers of such extremists vary significantly, and concede that Islam has a disproportionately high number of powerful extremists as compared to other major religions, but this phenomenon is simply not unique to Islam.) The political aspects of "Islamofascism" are not fascist, but are totalitarian. And so you are left with a term which isn't actually descriptive of either Islam or fascism. But it sounds scary so, if for no other reason but your deep respect for the work of George Orwell, ya gotta stick with it.
The picture above is of a manticore, a creature with the body of lion, the wings of a dragon and the head of a man that was recorded in ancient legends and has been represented thousands of times in the form of sketches, paintings, sculptures and models. But despite all the attention devoted to it down the millenia, there is no evidence that it has ever existed in the real world. Like the manticore, the exotic conception of Islamofascism incorporates elements taken from elsewhere, but such a concept has never been put into practic. If it ever was, the real incompatibilites between Islam and fascism would make it necessary to bend one or both of those ideologies well out of shape. It is doubtful whether such a beast could ever fly, and as we generally understand the two terms Islam and fascism today, fusing them strikes me as oxymoronic.
Hitch's pal David Horowitz's declaration of "Bomb the Muslims Back to the Stone...", sorry, "Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week," has gone down such a treat at campuses across the US that it is bound to spawn a host of immitators. This one from Margret Kimberly at Black Agenda Report, called "Christian/Jewish Fascism Awareness Week," is the first I've seen so far, but doubtless more are on the way. Well, you'd expect African Americans to be more aware of fascist undercurrents than their white breatheren, wouldn't you? After all, they know better than most what it's like to be on the receiving end of another group's thinly veiled racist, thuggish, and murderous socioeconomic policies.
It is manifestly unfair to label entire groups based on the behavior of a few. The Israeli lobby actively promotes war, but it can't be said that all American Jews are themselves pro-war. Around the world Bush is seen as the bogeyman representative of American Christianity. Many Christians may resent the verdict of guilt by association, but they would do well to remember that Muslims are also entitled to make their own pleas of individual innocence.
Instead Muslims are called upon to denounce any act of brutality committed by another Muslim, and to defend their religion from slanderous attacks. What is good for the Muslim goose, should also be good for the Christian and Jewish ganders.
Kimberly's article is off base in at least one major respect. " All of the neocons who spent years plotting the occupation of Iraq and now the destruction of Iran are Christians or Jews. None are Muslim, nor are they atheist, agnostic, Baha'i, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Hindu, or practitioners of Voodoo. All attend churches and synagogues and in fact brag about their religious piety." I haven't researched this claim myself, but I am sure there are a few atheists among the neocondom (that's a collective noun, and if you don't like it, I will happily tell you where you can stuff it), and I wouldn't be at all surprised if at least one or two practiced voodoo down at the Bohemian Grove.
So what's next? "Antitheistofascism Awarness Week"? "Fightingwordonazi Consciousness Day"? "Contrariomisogynistoathiochauvinist Pig Alert Month"? We look forward to your suggestions in the comments box.
Intriguingly, according to MEDIA TRANSPARENCY, Whorowitz, as his close friends call him, has had a lot of funding for his David Horowitz Freedom Center from the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Scaife Family Foundation, as well as from the ample tits of several other prominent right-wing foundations. The earliest of these donations dates back to 1989, so he must be doing something these people like. Scaife family don Richard Mellon Scaife (son of Sarah) is an interesting and complex character who was one of the most powerful movers behind the witchhunting of Bill Clinton, a caper in which, if I remember correctly, our Hitch played a rather prominent role. Scaife has also funded the American Enterprise Institute, which came to the aid of Ayaan Hirsi Ali by offering her a post when she arrived in the US as a refugee from the Netherlands last year. Small world, ain't it?
Scaife and Hitch may have no personal connection whatsoever, but they have collaborated at a distance in working on the same side on two major projects. And moreover, these are the two projects that have shown Hitch at his most rabid. All of which prompts us to ask, with "Target Islamofacism!", as with "Get Clinton!", is our boy really just following the dictates of his conscience, or is he hyping up his act as a high-class press whore? We may never know for sure, but we can sure as hell speculate.
Joey Kurtzman, the mentally imbalanced editor of Jewcy.com, writes us to say that something should be done about ME. Like, murder on the Pulaski Bridge. Well, I don't what, exactly, because Joey doesn't quite say. He just says that 'something should be done about Mark'. I'd post Joey's hideous picture if I could but...
I've been banned from Jewcy 6 times now and don't have access...that's gotta be a record, yo.
Here's Joey:
Hitchenswatchers, I just blocked Mark G's IP addy from Jewcy. We rarely block anyone over there, and certainly not for mere insults or neocon-bashing. I, in particular, am agonizingly slow to block anyone, adhering as I do to all sorts of impractical notions about the benefits of unconstrained debate and the worthlessness of comfy consensus. But I've got to say that Mark's behavior is, well...sort of creepy, even by the impossibly low standards of the internetz. Posturing and blustering over an internet connection about how ferociously you'll unman your antagonists should you ever see them in person...that's not even trolling. It's more like some kind of conspicuous demonstration of your own mental imbalance, like "who you trying to get crazy with esse, don't you know I'm loco?" I guess the whole House of Pain thing makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but on the internet it's just deeply weird. Even if only for the sake of your own anti-Hitchens political program, please do something about Mark. Cheers. Joey
"Too weird to live, too rare to die." - Hunter Thompson on Dr. Gonzo
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On Islamofascism, or why "Heil Allah!" doesn't sound at all right.
Hitch, doubtless as part of his contribution to Islamofacism Awareness Week (and kiddies, I hope you've all been looking under your beds!), did his best in his most recent Slate piece to defend (please excuse me while I half choke myself to death chuckling, giggling and guffawing) "Islamofascism" as a valid term.
According to Hitch:
The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.
As a try, I rate that as pathetic. The contrarian has grossly underperformed this time, by leaving out the most obvious difference between the Islamists and every bunch of fascists who've ever marched—their attitude to neatness. Fascists—real red-blooded, leader-loving, storm-trooping, butt-kicking, order-barking fascists—are unfailingly clean shaven and smartly dressed, even down to their freshly buffed shoes. It goes without saying. How would they be able to get ordinary people to take them seriously when they reeled off their favorite greeting of "your papers, please!" if they were scruffy, dishevelled and unkempt? Now, have you ever in your life seen a smart-looking Jihadist, or a snazzily dressed Islamist? QED.
To add a bit of historical background, modern fascism, as opposed to the classical Roman "heil Ceasar!" variety, was invented by Benito Mussolini, who was famous for making the trains run on time—something that seldom happens in lands governed by Islamists, if, indeed, Islamists can be said to be capable of governing at all. El Duce famously said that ""Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
Of course we can argue with Hitch about whether the use of fascism is appropriate or not until the cows come home. Or, like Groucho Marx, we may find it more productive to argue about this with the cows until Hitch comes home. But the more important point is that we already have a fairly well defined meaning for "fascism" and it doesn't stretch to where Hitch would have it stretch, and we already have some nice terms—like Jihadist, Islamist, Bin Ladenist, and Crazy God-lovin' Sand Nigger Bastard—that effectively describe the folks Hitch is trying to label as fascists. So what's his point?
Well, obviously, the term "fascist" packs a high negative emotional wallop in many circles, so it is tempting to make use of it in order to help focus a bit more disaprobation on the Islamist foe. Apparently, framing them for 9/11, while it worked for a while, is no longer having the desired effect. According to a poll carried out by Greywolf Associates*, a third of Americans (including the folks at the FBI) now believe Bin Laden had nothing to do with 9/11, another third believe that while he did the deed, it was justified by US agression in the Muslim world, and the other third—although they accept the Islamists did 9/11 with a bit of help from Saddam and the Iranians, and that they should be made to pay for it in principle—are beginning to wonder whether its really worth fighting a perpetual war against whichever bunch of Muslims are the enemy this week. This last lot, though, are natural isolationists. They didn't want to fight the Kaiser or Hitler either.
So for Hich, stressing the "fascist" connection is a tactic aimed at making us all feel that the Islamists are even worse than we are already prepared to believe they are, so that we will, if not join the cause of fighting them, at least shut the smeg up and let our brave boys and girls in uniform do it for us.
This latest column has attracted a fair bit of response from the blogosphere, most of it negative. It seems most of the people who agree with Hitch on this issue are either not concerned enough or not literate enough to be able to voice much coherent support. I'll finish by reproducing the Editor's Comment from the blog war in context, which I think is a valid criticism of Hitch's stance:
The word “Islamofascism,” is not a conceptual tool of discrimination. It does not circumscribe a phenomenon and thereby shine light upon and bring clarity to our understanding of the world. Hitchens implicity admits as much by focusing all his attention on what he sees as the suitability of the second half of the formulation — fascism — and nothing on how “Islamo” fits. Google, on the other hand, makes it perfectly clear how the prefix “Islamo” fits — almost exclusively as a lead in to fascism/ist. By this self-fulfilling coupling, the term Islamofascism displays itself as a purely political tool used to twist perceptions and bolster support for reckless policies.
When Hitchens speaks up in defense of the word Islamofascism, he should recognize that the use of this term has nothing to do with semantics and everything to do with the promotion of fear and hatred.
During my current trip to the UK, I met a young family from Syria. After their recent arrival and within a few hours of entering the country, a British child exclaimed in their direction, “I hate terrorists.” The object of this child’s hatred was the meekest looking couple cradling a bonneted six-month old baby. They had rudely been informed what it means to be visibly Muslim in a nation that has loudly and repeatedly been warned about the Islamofascist threat. Christopher Hitchens, Tony Blair, David Horowitz, Norman Podhoretz, and George Bush — these are among the prominent voices that have been watering the seeds of fear, suspicion and hatred inside those who see, in the Muslims they encounter, the face of terrorism.
“Islamofascism” is Islamophobia. It is the anti-Semiticism of our era.
(*This was a scientific poll conducted on a carefully selected sample of US citizens. A total of five people responded, but two of them gave extremely rude answers that were, accordingly, discqualified.)
I was going to do a post on Hitch's hour-long session at the AAI 07 conference in which he began by declaring his love for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, did his usual anti-theist routine, and then went on to foam at the mouth about Iraq and Iran during the Q&A. Unfortunately, however, the videos of the speech and the Q&A have been pulled from YouTube. And curiouser still, the video of Ayaan's own speech has also disappeared. Perhaps some copywright issue is involved, but whatever the reason, this is a shame. This was a happy occasion, a speech to a sympathetic audience, peppered with flashes of humor and moments of illuminating clarity, and I thought it was one of Hitch's best appearances ever. Let's hope these videos are reinstated soon.
Courtesy of Exhibit Z, here's the link to this week's Dinesh D’Souza & Christopher Hitchens Debate “Is Christianity the Problem?”at the King's College, NY.
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"They did this in Germany! They did this in Germany!"
Naomi Wolf on the End of America. Thngs are even worse than we thought. In this one-hour talk, Naomi confirms my worst suspicions and more about the current "fascist shift" and where it's heading. I recommend this video to anyone who really wants to know what's going on in the States and where the current regime gets its game plan from. As for the rest of you contemporary "good Germans," when the balloon goes up and the baby's been thrown out with the bathwater, please don't say you weren't warned.
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Hitch and Mad Mel on the same ideological tag team?
So thinks Steven Poole at Unspeak, who has pondered our hero's choice of words in that recent rooting for Al Gore piece in Slate.
Here's the whole piece:
In a peculiar column at Slate, Christopher Hitchens hopes that Al Gore will enter the Democratic nomination race. (Peculiar since, as Hitchens Watch reminds us, Hitchens thought in 2004 that Gore was “completely nuts”.) But it was an offhand aside that caught my eye:
George Bush at his worst is preferable to Gerhard Schröder or Jacques Chirac — politicians who put their own countries in pawn to Putin and the Chinese and the Saudis.
What can we make of this? Is there something about choosing to say “the Saudis” rather than “Saudi Arabia”, and “the Chinese” rather than “China”, which expresses a kind of emotional distaste for the foreigner, conceived as faceless collectivity? Well, perhaps. But the factual claim is intriguing too.
After all, it would seem, according to Hitchens’s contemptuous little side-spit about other countries’ apparent dependence on “the Chinese” and “the Saudis” (it must be just a coincidence that to symbolize Germany and France he specifies their ex-leaders who opposed the Iraq war, not their current leaders) — it would seem that Hitchens thinks the US itself does not in fact have a rather dependent relationship with Saudi Arabia in view of, er, its “energy” requirements. And that the US dollar, for example, is not in fact at the mercy of China’s enormous foreign reserves, not to speak of the US trade deficit. Thank God Dick Cheney, burps Hitchens in a parallel universe, that “George Bush at his worst” has not put his country “in pawn” to those filthy villains across the seas.
But what’s this? “Melanie Phillips”, Hitchens’s ideological tag-team partner in the mud-wrestling pit of bellicose xenophobia, takes exactly the opposite view: The Real Conspiracy, as she thrillingly calls it, is that America in particular and “the west” in general really is in the process of pawning itself to “Islamists” from Saudi Arabi and elsewhere: just look at all the Saudi petrodollars and endowments to US universities — even, shudder, “Saudi funding at Oxford” in England. Nearly as terrifying:
And now we also learn that the Islamic world (albeit a relatively less savage variety) has gained a majority control over the London Stock Exchange.
At least the UAE is relatively less savage than “the Saudis”. Phew! Of course, they’re still a bit savage, because after all the official state religion is a sky-god religion that differs from a couple of other sky-god religions. But let us be grateful for small mercies.
But now any connoisseur of the kind of throbbing alarmist bigotry practised by Hitchens and “Melanie” must be confused. Is there really a “strategy to take over the west” masterminded by Saudi Arabia and its “relatively less savage” counterparts that is succeeding to a horrifying extent in the US, as “Melanie” claims? Or, as Hitchens claims, is the US actually the only country with cojones enough to resist this evil scheme, in contrast to all those craven European surrender monkeys? Readers, the plot thickens.
A couple of posts back, Steven has also done a great job looking into Martin "I am serious" Amis's problems with rational thinking.
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The enemy of my enemy is often simply another enemy.
Norman Podhoretz, born 1930, leftist until his midlife crisis in the early seventies when he emerged as a neocon of the first water, so it could be said that he blazed the trail that Hitch followed twenty-odd years later. Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. One of the original signatories of the Statement of Principles of the Project for the New American Century. Currently serves as a senior foreign policy advisor to Rudy Giuliani in his presidential campaign.
Asserts that the War on Terror is a war against "Islamofascism" and advocates the bombing of Iran to pre-empt their acquisition of nuclear weapons. This ideology is close enough to what Hitch has been propagating of late that I would suppose either the two of them have been swapping notes or else they've both been working from the same set of talking points. On the other hand, they say great minds think alike.
The above 11-minute video shows Norm on the podium at Barnes & Noble in Manhattan on October 11 explaining confidently why he thinks we have to be patient and fight World War Four for the next generation or two, and then facing some tough questions from the audience including some folks from We Are Change NYC. This is lots of fun and informative too, whatever your political stripe.
Yesterday I made the error of speaking flippantly about the Hitchens supported launch of Islamo-Fascism awareness week
Like the unthinking fool I sometimes am, I expressed doubts that Muslimo-Nazis have inflitrated America's universities and colleges from which the set-out to silence and intimidate their critics.
However the account of one Brave woman, Nonie Darwish ripped the scales from my eyes, I hope it does the same for you.
Last week, on October 18, 2007, our hero Darwish spoke at the all-female Wellesley College as the guest of Hillel on campus. She was not treated as a hero; then again, maybe she was, maybe her treatment is precisely how heroes are greeted on American campuses today."
It was during this inncocent event that the Muslim hordes showed just how much they have "perfected their intimidation and disruption techniques.”
"According to Darwish, the female students in head-scarves did the following: As she spoke, they made exaggerated, “mean girl” faces at her. They rolled their eyes, practiced “disbelieving” facial expressions—did everything but stick out their tongues."
I know, but it gets worse.
" one by one, at least four to five head-scarved girls, got up to leave the room during Darwish’s speech. This meant that each girl took two minutes to move to the end of her row, physically causing the other students to get up or twist aside, causing the entire room to look at the departing student, not at their invited guest—and then each girl did precisely the same thing when she returned two minutes later, presumably from a bathroom break......“They are Hamas-trained” says Darwish."
Darwish concludes: “Muslim girls like these are like gangsters. They know more about their rights in America than the Jewish girls do. The Muslim girls all have a chip on their shoulders.”
To think I tried to make jokes about this campaign, but how was I to know that "Mean-Girls" were being trained by HAMAS to go to the bathroom and hence (somehow) destroy freedom.
The ever darling Wonkette muses on a recent meeting between our hero and an unlikely new chum.
ostensible born-again Christian Tom DeLay and ostentatious, drunken God-hater Christopher Hitchens making nice with each other at the Hill’s book fair last week! Some puckish individual thought it would be funny to sit them next to each other and watch them squabble about religion or something. Little did they know that Hitch’s hatred of all gods would dovetail nicely with DeLay’s hatred of the Muslim god and they’d have a high old time together while hawking their lame books.
Flash-forward to the 2:30 mark on the video to see Hitchens call the Iranians “faith-based scumbags” who will “not take over Mesopotamia” (NOT ON HITCH’S WATCH!) while DeLay cackles appreciatively. Sadly, this video does not capture any of the reportedly multiple occasions in which Hitchens bellowed “These colors don’t run!”
New York Society for Ethical Culture, 64th Street on Central Park West
A debate hosted by The King’s College between Dinesh D’Souza and Christopher Hitchens
The question: Is Christianity the Problem?
By Mark Grueter, Hitchens Watch
The first thing I have to say is that Dinesh D’Souza’s wife is a really hot, young, blonde chick. Good for Dinesh! All that right-wing blowhardism is paying off! She marched right up to the front, just like I did, proclaiming her privileged status. At 6:45 pm, in preparation for the 7:30 pm scheduled debate, the line on 64th street was about 150 yards back. My photographer and I walked right past the line and into the hall as “media” - no questions asked. And we got to sit in the front row, right next to Hitchens. So basically, while all the suckers were waiting outside, I got in under the auspices of Hitchens Watch! Ha ha ha to the pacifists.
It was a crowded hall with a balcony, seating 800 in total. Just before showtime, Hitchens took the stage and noticed me. He walked over, I got up, we met, and he said, “I wanted to answer your question. I drink a glass of Johnny Walker Black before lunch. Then I drink a half a bottle of wine at night with dinner.” That’s not an exact quote, but I think it’s a fair facsimile of what he told me. He added that all of the coverage of his drinking is “overdone” because he wouldn’t be able to do all the reading and writing that he does if he were a lush. (He had been answering - strangely - a question I had asked him through email.) I surmised that this is his regular drinking routine, every day. The man is in control, as I’ve known and argued before.
Just as I was telling him that I’d bet he drank much more as youngster, he got whisked away by the moderator and some microphone-enabling people, and that was that.
So I’m literally sitting in the front row, and Dinesh D’Souza gets to speak first, for 10 minutes:
After making an embarrassing analogy about how ‘unicorns don’t exist, so why should we rail against unicorns?’, Dinesh got more intelligent and began his argument proper, first by saying that all of the atheist values that Hitchens and others espouse “came into the world through Christianity.” (Well, that’s not that much more intelligent, but it was better than the unicorn stuff.)
Dinesh then announced that he wanted to argue Hitchens on rational points, rather than trying to promote spiritual ideas or religious text.
He argued that slavery existed before Christianity and that Christianity was the first movement in history to oppose slavery. He then said that most scientists throughout history and continuing to this day were and are Christian and that modern science is actually based on three Christian principles.
1. That the universe as a whole is rational 2. That the universe obeys laws that are comprehensible in the language of mathematics. 3. That the laws of nature our understandable within our own minds (evidence of God).
Dinesh D’Souza then shifted gears and went on to say that religion hasn’t killed nearly as many people as atheism. He said that even during the Spanish Inquisition, which lasted 300 years, only 2,000 people were killed. He compared that to 20th century atheist regimes, during which he said that there were “over a 100 million casualties”. He counted Hitler, the Soviets, Pol Pot, Salazar, among others, in this calculation.
Christopher Hitchens for 10 minutes:
First Hitchens said that Christianity is a “loose plagiarism of Judaism” which met with silence among the crowd. But then he found an audience by countering Dinesh's arguments, saying that “morality pre-dates all forms of monotheism” and Hitch argued this point I think rather convincingly. What are the morals of modern-day religions based on, after all, merely the sudden intrusion of a God? Hitchens noted that life has existed for at least 100,000 years, so why out of nowhere does the Christian God appear only 2,000 years ago? Where was He for all those 98,000 years?
At this point, I noticed that Christopher was shaking or shivering a bit. But I suppose this is understandable given the pressure of the crowd and the event. He was fired up and he railed good and strong against Christianity. “It’s very fortunate that we don’t possess any evidence that Christianity is true.” He added that Christianity is an insult to us because it presumes that we wouldn’t be able to distinguish right from wrong without its existence. He thinks we’d be able to distinguish right from wrong because of who we are as an evolved species. Evolution is the key to morality, in Hitchens’ opinion.
Hitchens then berated Dinesh D’Souza for believing the laws of nature (which Dinesh had previously cited as proof of God) could be “suspended” (as a part of faith). Hitchens didn’t make the point entirely clear but he was trying to say that you cannot be a true Christian while also fully believing in the laws of nature, since Christianity necessitates a suspension of those laws in many circumstances (i.e. miracles).
Hitchens proceeded with a tirade against Christianity: He called it a “ghastly cult” and said that it’s “not moral to lie to children”. He then, I thought, persuasively ridiculed many of the various stated beliefs in Christian texts, such as the virgin birth and also the resurrection of Jesus, while referring to the crucifixion of Jesus as “a filthy human sacrifice” which I laughed at, as did the Fox News reporter sitting behind me. (It's especially funny if you know that Hitchens' doesn't even believe that Jesus existed.)
Hitchens asked in several ways, ‘how moral could it be for someone to tell you that if you don’t make the right “propitiations” to Jesus in life, that you’ll burn in a fire in death’?
He again stated the challenge or proposition: “Name a moral action or belief done or held by a believer that could not also be held or done by an unbeliever.” Along with the nuanced inverse corollary, if you can call it that: ‘name an evil act committed by an unbeliever that couldn’t also be committed by a believer’. I think these challenges were too weird for most people to fathom, but they had a certain effect.
Hitchens concluded his 10 minutes by saying that Christianity is incompatible with science and reason. After Hitchens was finished with his admittedly remarkable, eloquent, fiery speech, some guy yelled, “You Rock!” And this was King's College - perhaps the most religious college in New York.
It was time for Dinesh D’Souza to respond. He began by repeating a cliché “I feel somewhat like a mosquito in a nudist colony in that I’m trying to figure out where to begin.” The crowd laughed as if he had just made up the line on the spot. Dinesh then said that Hitchens didn’t bother to offer “a shred of evidence” for anything he said.
He then banally added that Christianity offers a person the choice to either accept or reject God, as a free choice (without, I have to add, bothering to mention that if you don’t accept God, then you go to hell).
Hitchens jumped in, suspecting a kill. He said that there is “no ontological proof of God or even the non-existence of God” but that the burden of proof was on those who claimed His existence, rather than on those who claimed nothing. (D’Souza later challenged this point rhetorically…though it’s hard to see why.)
Hitchens then, unfortunately, went off on a rant about Iran, just like he did at the atheist forum in Madison, Wisconsin. Mocking Islam, he said, “there are 12 imams, and one of them has gone missing, but promises to come back to save the world.”
The debate was supposed to be about Christianity, but that didn’t stop Hitchens from bashing Islam and the Iranian government (What a strange coincidence that he should be talking about Iran, specifically, now?). He said, “Shia Islam is a parody of Christianity” which is I guess his attempt to connect the themes.
He moved on and asked an apparently sound ethical question: “Are there any evils that religious people have not committed?” D’Souza had no response, and I think everybody in the audience was puzzled.
The two men clearly disagreed on Albert Einstein’s religiosity: D’Souza claimed the man to be a “theist” while Hitchens clamed Einstein to be a “deist” - and no resolution came about.
D’Souza then got his turn to ask Hitchens direct questions:
“Do you know of any scientific laws to which there are exceptions to?”
This was the first question. Hitchens’ answer was NO, but that didn’t stop D’Souza from banging on about how the laws of physics just can’t come from anywhere. They have to come from somewhere, he said.
Hitchens effectively mocked the notion of a Creator by saying that it’s “quite some design” you have going there, with only one planet in the whole universe that holds life (the other planets being either “too hot or too cold to hold life”).
More interestingly, I think, Hitchens, responding to D’Souza’s challenge about fascism in Europe, began an intense assault on the Catholic Church. He said that “there was nothing secular about the fascist right-wing” arguing that “up to 50% of Nazis were Catholics”. He said that characters like Mussolini and Salazar were Catholic right wingers and then, for good measure, Hitchens added that Adolf Hitler praised the Catholic Church in Mein Kampf.
D’Souza disagreed by asserting that “Hitler hated Christianity” and “surrounded himself with atheists.”
(I personally think the truth is somewhere in between.)
Things got decidedly tricky when Hitchens explained the Bolsheviks and atheism in Russia. He basically said that the Russian people were accustomed to having a divine figure as their leader (the Tsar) and that Lenin and Stalin, despite their supposedly atheist beliefs, merely took advantage of this divinely, autocratic fact. So, Hitchens said, Russian society fell into “horror” not because of atheism, but because of the tyrannical impulse inherent in Russian culture.
No society, he insisted, has ever come into “horror” by acting truly on atheist principles.
Of course, the Bolsheviks claimed they were acting on reason and science. So D’Souza was quick to state that “Hitchens refuses to take responsibility for the crimes committed by atheists. And instead, bizarrely, blames it all on religion.” This bit from Dinesh got thundering applause, according to my notes.
The Q and A session exposed D’Souza to some extent, I thought. He said that “a statement [of belief in religion] is not a statement of knowledge.” But then he tried to argue that a statement of belief in God is no less intellectual than a statement of unbelief in God (because both are “beliefs”). I think this played right into Hitchens’ position that the burden of proof lies with those who posit a belief in something, not with those who don’t. But this notion seems perpetually lost among the faithful.
The final question was a good one. It went sort of like this: ‘Hitchens, you’ve written about the transcendent and numinous before, what do you have to say to people who feel as though they’ve had a transcendent, awakening experience, don’t want to channel it into any religious vein in particular, but feel it spiritual nevertheless’.
Hitchens response was peculiar. First, he said that we all have transcendent experiences anyway (nothing special about it - i.e. the birth of a child), and then he told an anecdote about author Francis Collins. He said Collins told him that after looking at three icicles coming down from Niagra Falls, it made him a believer in Jesus Christ. Well, Hitchens cited this story simply to say that the connection Collins made between the icicles (the transcendent experience) and Jesus was nonsense or simply “white noise” as he called it.
Interesting story about Francis Collins, but it really didn’t have anything to do with the question. Which was, what about those people who have had odd spiritual, seemingly genuine transcendent experiences but don’t feel the urge to place them into any sort of “religious” belief or sect. What are they supposed to do in the Hitch universe? (And I pity you if you’ve never met any of these spiritual, yet not really religious types.) Well, Hitchens balked at all that. I’m not sure he even understood the question…
D’Souza got positively preachy toward the end and I almost felt like I was actually in church. And my normal response to church is a desperate urge to get the Hell out of it. Hitchens even started to gag when Dinesh started preaching about how Mother Teresa used to hug lepers. (It was a pathetic and nauseating little bit.) I was thankful to Hitchens for being short-winded in his final comments. I think he needed a drink even more than I did…
All in all, I’d give the debate to Hitchens, but that might be just my atheist bias talking. D’Souza was probably one of, if not, the toughest challenger Hitchens has yet faced…
(My photographer Dominic Bloome promises precious photos from the event within a day...)
Freedom hating haters of freedom and their dusky allies
I've always been a bit puzzled by the close and enduring friendship between our Christopher and David Horowitz, one is a washed out talentless hack who was briefly part of the far-left and has ever since used that to stab his old comrades in the back while beng cheered on by every right-wing bigot in the free world. The other is, in complete contrast, a..... oh hold on.
Given that then I suppose it is no surprise that Christpher is using his Slate bit this week not to leap to the defence of his beloved Kurdish allies, oh no a bigger game is afoot.
Do you worry that no-one is aware that Islamofascism may be, (despite it's attractive sounding title) a bad thing?
Do you keep meeting people that have never heard of Osama Bin Laden and have no idea that the World Trade Centre was attacked at some point, possibly by people of the Muslim faith?
Do attractive members of the opposite sex back away from you at parties when you try and explain how the moorish hordes are even now PLOTTING THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILISATION SO THEY CAN MURDER US ALL IN OUR BEDS?
Happens to me all the time.
So it's nice to know help is at hand, David and his chums will be touring the college campi of America making sure that the flower of our youth have their facts straight and their shirts brown.
Think I'm exagerating? well have a look at this promotional video that proves, well I'll leave it to you to make up your own mind over what is proves.
Whats also nice about these sort of events is to see the blogosphere rallying around to help.
Well known progressive writers like Michelle Malkin are behind the cause, screeching calmly pointing out that "The Left and the jihadi apologists are in a snit, of course, and you already know what the grievance hoaxers at GWU attempted to do in their effort to deflect attention away from our true enemies and smear the organizers and supporters of IFAW...."(cont on page 93) and quoting Mr Horivitz measured response to any those who question the wisdom of IFAW thus.
“The left has only one strategy when dealing with its opponents, and that’s to smear them,” Mr. Horowitz, 68, says in a telephone interview. “They learned from Stalin.”
Was Stalin a Muslim? I think someone should look into that.
I could go on getting cheap laughs over IFAW, with speakers such as Tammy Bruce and Anne Coulter (where is Mark Steyn, ill or something?) and support from that bastion of tolerence and fair play little green footballs, the stuff would just write itself.
However I'd like, for once, to try an make a more serious point.
In an outstanding piece today Uri Avnery explains how the whole concept of Islamofascism is used.
"THE ARCH-ENEMY, according to this theory, is Islam. Western Civilization, Judeo-Christian, liberal, democratic, tolerant, is under attacked from the Islamic monster, fanatical, terrorist, murderous.
Islam is murderous by nature. Actually, "Muslim" and "terrorist" are synonymous. Every Muslim is a terrorist, every terrorist a Muslim.
A sceptic might ask: How did it happen that the wonderful Western culture gave birth to the Inquisition, the pogroms, the burning of witches, the annihilation of the Native Americans, the Holocaust, the ethnic cleansings and other atrocities without number--but that was in the past. Now Western culture is the embodiment of freedom and progress.
Professor Huntington was not thinking about us in particular. His task was to satisfy a peculiar American craving: the American empire always needs a virtual, world-embracing enemy, a single enemy which includes all the opponents of the United States around the world. The Communists delivered the goods--the whole world was divided between Good Guys (the Americans and their supporters) and Bad Guys (the Commies). Everybody who opposed American interests was automatically a Communist--Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Salvador Allende in Chile, Fidel Castro in Cuba, while the masters of Apartheid, the death squads of Augusto Pinochet and the secret police of the Shah of Iran belonged, like us, to the Free World.
When the Communist empire collapsed, America was suddenly left without a world-wide enemy. This vacuum has now been filled by the Muslims-Terrorists. Not only Osama bin Laden, but also the Chechnyan freedom fighters, the angry North-African youth of the Paris banlieus, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the insurgents in the Philippines.
Thus the American world view rearranged itself: a good world (Western Civilization) and a bad world (Islamic civilization). Diplomats still take care to make a distinction between "radical Islamists" and "moderate Muslims", but that is only for appearances' sake. Between ourselves, we know of course that they are all Osama bin Ladens. They are all the same."
Our regular readers (Sid and Doris Bonkers) will no doubt recall our hero's crowing over America's arming and training of Islamic militia groups in Iraq to beat our real enemies, Islamic militia groups.
All jolly good stuff, however recent events in India show the potential pitfalls.
It appears that the Indian city of Dehli has a real problem with evil monkeys (their religious beliefs are not mentioned, but I think we all know what sort of Islamo-monkey fascists they must be eh readers) The "plague" of monkeys invade government complexes and temples, snatch food and scare passers-by.
The solution? Well in Hindu India mass killing of our monkey friends is rather frowned upon, so instead the city government decided to "train bands of larger, more ferocious langur monkeys to go after the smaller groups of Rhesus macaques."
Was it succesful? Well the latest reports are not encouraging.
"The deputy mayor of the Indian capital Delhi has died a day after being attacked by a horde of wild monkeys. SS Bajwa suffered serious head injuries when he fell from the first-floor terrace of his home on Saturday morning trying to fight off the monkeys."
According to our hero there are four conditions that lead to a state losing "its own sovereignty"
One of them was being "host to terrorrism"
Now I'm not one to be argumentative , but isn't it odd that a commentator who uses the Kurdish Liberation struggle as a justification for The US occupation of Iraq. and boasts of wearing a kurdish flag on his lapel, would, suddenly be AWOL just as Turkey gears up to attacke the PKK in Iraq?
After all Mr Hitchens is hardly short of outlets to comment from is he?
If anyone out there knows the location of Mr Hitchens, would they be kind enough to pass on the word? you see 20 million Kurds are wondering where he has gone, now the going has got a little tough, it would usually be time for the tough to get going.
