Since Hitch has done so much to popularize the term Islamofascist, I wanted to share this clip that demonstrates about how bigots attempt to inoculate themselves against charges of racism when using this term. Since they actually are racist, their overall racism typically comes oozing out even when they are distracted from the usual Arab-bashing. At the end of this clip, Ms. Coulter laments supposedly not being allowed to use the term in spite of the fact that she and her ideological soulmates use it on a constant basis and that she might be considered racist for saying it. What makes this even more bizarre is that she says this after claiming that Barack Obama was lucky to be born "half-black" and repeatedly mentioning that his middle name is Hussein!
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ALL of RON PAUL's replies @ 11-28-07 CNN Rep. debate
I don't have a particular dog in the US presidental election race, but as this guy's been gaining a lot of attention lately and even stirring up interest on this site, I thought it would be a good idea to post his recent debate performance for information purposes. And if you were to ask why I'm not posting any one else's responses, it's because personally, he's the only Republican candidate I can stand to listen too.
we find a pretty convincing technological explanation of why this war will always be a losing battle while attitudes in the White House stay the same. A networked war sounds like a clean war doesnt it?
"For nearly 200 years, the tools and tactics of how we fight have evolved," the pair wrote. "Now, fundamental changes are affecting the very character of war." Network-centric wars would be more moral, too. Cebrowski later argued that network-enabled armies kill more of the right people quicker. With fewer civilian casualties, warfare would be more ethical. And as a result, the US could use military might to create free societies without being accused of imperialist arrogance. It had a certain geek appeal, to which Wired was not immune. Futurist Alvin Toffler talked up similar ideas — before they even had a name — in the magazine's fifth issue, in 1993. And during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, my colleague Joshua Davis welcomed in a "new age of fighting that combined precision weapons, unprecedented surveillance of the enemy, agile ground forces, and — above all — a real-time communications network that kept the far-flung operation connected minute by minute." As a presidential candidate in 1999, George W. Bush embraced the philosophy, as did his eventual choice for defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld instituted a massive program to "transform" the armed services. Cebrowski was installed as the head of the newly created Office of Force Transformation. When the US went to war in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, its forces achieved apparent victory with lightning speed. Analysts inside and outside the Pentagon credited the network-centric approach for that success. "The successful campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq took far fewer troops and were executed quicker," Rumsfeld proclaimed, because of "advanced technology and skills." The Army committed more than $230 billion to a network-centric makeover, on top of the billions the military had already spent on surveillance, drone aircraft, spy satellites, and thousands of GPS transceivers. General Tommy Franks, leader of both invasions, was even more effusive than Rumsfeld. All the new tech, he wrote in his 2004 memoir, American Soldier, promised "today's commanders the kind of Olympian perspective that Homer had given his gods." And yet, here we are. The American military is still mired in Iraq. It's still stuck in Afghanistan, battling a resurgent Taliban. Rumsfeld has been forced out of the Pentagon. Dan Halutz, the Israeli Defense Forces chief of general staff and net-centric advocate who led the largely unsuccessful war in Lebanon in 2006, has been fired, too. In the past six years, the world's most technologically sophisticated militaries have gone up against three seemingly primitive foes — and haven't won once."
"Retired major general Robert Scales summed up the problem to Congress by way of a complaint from one division commander: "If I know where the enemy is, I can kill it. My problem is I can't connect with the local population."
"But Prior has just caught a break: Another several hundred soldiers, Special Forces operators, and Iraqi troops have descended on the city to kick in doors, drop bombs on extremist hideouts, and drive out the insurgents. Those men will leave eventually, though, and to sustain the gains they make, Prior is supposed to recruit civilians into a kind of neighborhood watch. The idea is to have as many eyes and ears on the streets, around the shops, and in the mosques as possible. In counterinsurgency, it's better to have a lot of nodes in your network, connecting to the population, than just a few. In fact, that's a key tenet of the new US strategy in Iraq — hiring watchmen who've come to be known in other towns as "alligators" for their light-blue Izod shirts. Prior hasn't had much luck in getting folks in Tarmiyah to sign up; even his own soldiers are reluctant to go out in the daytime."
"On Oct. 21, two days before that helicopter strike near Djila, American soldiers, again aided by helicopters, but this time in a heavily populated urban neighborhood, claimed to have killed 49 "armed men" in a "gun battle" in Sadr City, a sprawling Shiite neighborhood in eastern Baghdad. Then, too, the military initially insisted "no civilians were killed or injured." A Shiite citizens' council and other Shiite groups responded that many innocent bystanders had died. Among the 13 dead mentioned in initial reports by local Iraqi police were three children and a woman. Other Iraqi authorities announced that 69 people had been injured. The U.S. military had no explanation for the widely varying American and Iraqi tallies of casualties. "
It seems unlikely that the enthusiastic "aligators" of the right wing dream will ever put their hand up to serve while their relatives and families are not even counted as war dead.
Hitchens Watch is about to become a syndicated blog (more on this, and what it means, later), but I'm not sure if it's even worth it. Not if our sole act keeps on handing in performances like the one above. Lethargic, lackadaisical, boring are some words that come to mind to describe this interview.
It comes from "Notable Interviews: Interviews with a Punch" but the interview is neither notable nor punchy. It's almost as if Hitchens doesn't even realize it's a taped interview requiring, perhaps, that he show some personality or animation. He looks like he's about to fall asleep on that impressive paunch of his. Only three mildly interesting things happen: the door to the room keeps squeaking open, and Hitch becomes visibly distracted by this apparition. Second, Hitchens is wearing a yarmulke. The explanation for this is given:
This interview took place in a Shul (A place of prayer for Jews) and it is customary for even non-believers to wear a yarmulke on the premises.
Sounds nice, but apparently doesn't mean anything, since the interviewer is not even wearing a yarmulke himself.
Third, Hitch again reiterates his support for an attack on Iran in order to prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons. He says that "nothing" would be more dangerous than a nuclear-armed Iran. And he emphasizes 'nothing'. Just a thought: wouldn't a nuclear-armed al Qaeda be more dangerous?
Hitch has written a number of times on the foolish tenants of the Mormon faith. in his latest Slate piece http://www.slate.com/id/2178568/fr/flyout he attacks ROP candidate Mitt Romney for his faith in Mormonism. Where was Mitt when the Mormons were racist he asks? Why hasn't he publicly renounced his faith? Of course the Mormon faith has many logical and moral flaws, I would argue that no organised religion is not without either.
"So phooey, say I, to the false reticence of the press and to the bogus sensitivities that underlie it. This extends even to the less important matters. If candidates can be asked to declare their preference as between briefs and boxers, then we already have a precedent, and Romney can be asked whether, as a true believer should, he wears Mormon underwear. What's un-American about that? The bottom line is that Romney should expect to be asked these very important questions, and we should expect him not to obfuscate and whine anymore but to give clear and unambiguous answers to them."
Wow Mormon underwear is an important question but anything about yellowcake in Niger is just silly Liberal quibbling.
Moreover, I have yet to hear Hitch attacking his team Bush for his many, many statements of faith. This is from the same man who argues that to even question the war in Iraq is to want victory for Al Qaida. At least the "golden plates" have yet to lead us to war.
Well we know our chum is a hypocrite ('all religions are poison but some are more poison than others, oh is that the cheque') however I would be remiss not to point out that the should be careful about taking that job with Mitt's main rival after some of the things he is on record of saying about the Catholic church.
We wouldn't want you making a fool of yourself would we Christopher?
Hitch's latest Slate piece is an attack on Mitt Romney's Mormon beliefs. However, I think the article is little more than propaganda for the Rudy Giuliani campaign. Rudy is Hitch's man - that's been made clear. So, now Hitch will try to knock out Rudy's competitor's.
You'll notice that Hitchens apparently understands that the bulk of his audience is now conservative Republican, which is why he cites the National Review as an authority, twice.
I agree with Hitch that Mormonism is a bunch of silly nonsense and that Romney should be willing to answer questions about his religion, but does Hitchens or anyone really believe that Romney would be a threat to the country if elected president, because of his Mormon beliefs? No way in hell. Romney is a businessman and a consummate politician, first and foremost. His Mormon beliefs, while they no doubt have made him socially and culturally conservative, would have no more impact (and probably less so) on Romney's policies than Christian beliefs had on Bush's policies.
I'd like to contrast Hitch's fake criticism of Romney with some real criticism of Romney. Unlike Hitchens, Rolling Stone political reporter Matt Taibbi has been doing some real journalistic work this campaign season. In "Mitt Romney: The Huckster" from last month's Rolling Stone, Taibbi reports on Romney's stint as a venture capitalist and as head of Bain Capital:
Romney moved Bain away from boom-bust venture-capital investments and into the darker world of leveraged buyouts, where the firm borrowed money to make deals. A typical example of Bain's approach was its experience with another office-supply company called Ampad, which it acquired in 1992. In 1993, the company had $11 million in debt; by 1999, that number had grown to nearly $400 million, and the firm eventually declared bankruptcy. But despite Ampad's failure, Bain made a fortune, raking in more than $100 million while driving the company into the ground and destroying hundreds of jobs in places like New York (where 185 people were thrown out of work in a plant closing near Buffalo) and Indiana (where the firm fired 200 workers from a paper factory).
Even more telling was Romney's interest in a medical-testing firm called Damon Corp., which Bain bought in 1989. The company was eventually fined a record $119 million for defrauding the federal government out of $25 million, but Bain still tripled its investment on the Damon deal. And Romney, who was sitting on the Damon board at the time of the fraud (his claim that he was the one who called for an internal investigation has never been substantiated), made a personal profit of $473,000 on the deal.
In a delicious detail that says a lot about the nature of Romney's morality, the investor had no problem making piles of cash off companies that executed mass layoffs or defrauded the government, but he balked when asked to invest in a Bain deal to acquire a video distribution company called Artisan Entertainment. "I didn't want to profit from a studio that made R-rated movies," he huffed.
Romney's religion is probably the last thing we need to worry about. That he's a sleazy political salesman and robber barron capitalist (with perfect hair and teeth, I might add), should be of far greater concern.
Chris Morris takes Hitchens to task for his defence of Martin Amis (see below)
"Look, I'm busy. I'm writing a script and I won't be disturbed. Except that because I'm writing about terrorism and Islam, I keep being distracted by Martin Amis. He prowls the thickets of my research like a demented flasher. Sometimes Christopher Hitchens pops up, too, and flashes along with his friend. They rail against Muslims. They're obviously daft. But people take them seriously.
No matter that they act like senile 12-year-olds on the Today programme website - smoking illegal fags to look tough and cool. No matter that Amis coins truly abominable terms like 'the age of horrorism' and when criticised tells people to 'fuck off'. Surely we all chuckle at the strenuous ennui of his salon drawl. Didn't he once accidentally sneer his face off"
This "Kurdistan" footprint, this peanut of land, happens to be not just landlocked but dropped across the bloodiest borders in the world, the backwoods of the Fertile Crescent that people have been killing each other over since Sumerians started telling war stories with little bird-print writing on clay tablets. This is not Tahiti; it's Ground Zero. You want a country in these parts, you better be prepared to cross off most of your family tree in the process.
Brecher furthermore argues that Kurds have a "Rambo" tendency to not follow orders, which creates chaos and disunity for any military campaign and battle for independence:
The Kurds are willing to die, I'll give them that. Always have been. Good fighters; Saladin was a Kurd, after all. They just can't stay united for more than the time it takes to sign a manifesto. By the time they've got pen in hand to initial their latest United Front for Kurdistan memo, the Supreme Commander of the Kurdish Liberation Front has stabbed his imported Parker Pen into the throat of his ally of two minutes ago, the Generalissimo of the Free Kurdistan Army...
...Most of the time, you don't even need to use your own tribe's troops. Kurd-on-Kurd violence will do it. Which is why bravery isn't anywhere near as important as discipline in a military force. A force of 200 German clerks or Vietnamese insurance agents, no matter how many of them wear glasses and can't bench-press a Starbucks latte, will beat 200 Rambos every time on the battlefield, because 200 Rambos is pure chaos, nobody willing to obey orders. And Kurds, too bad for them, are a pretty Rambo-y group, all macho yelling, counting coup and strutting instead of sticking together...
When you compare the Turks and the Kurds, you see how important unity is, even when the way a tribe gets unified isn't pretty to look at. We think there's this fight between "the Kurds" and "Turkey" but both those words are temporary. The only reason there's a "Turkey" is one man: Kemal Mustafa aka Ataturk, a Turkish officer who made his bones killing Aussies at Gallipoli and went on to terrorize the Turks into becoming Turkey.
And also, Brecher tells us to recognize the cruel realities of history and geopolitics:
Let's get real: small nations have no rights. Nobody has any rights. People have the guts and the guns or they're nothing. So the central fact about Kurdistan is that it hasn't managed to claw its way to existing, which means it doesn't have any "right" to exist.
Implicit in this analysis is, I think, the idea that the United States, no matter what Christopher Hitchens says, will not be there for the Kurds in the end. Why? I would say the desire to avoid war with Turkey and possibly Iran would be reasons. Aside from that, well, the US government ultimately doesn't really give a shit about anyone but itself. Alliances are strategic, not based on any altruistic motives.
I'm tempted to quote more of Brecher's essay because it's loaded with info and entertainment. Just read the damn thing - it's worth it. I suppose it's "offensive" to some (this is the same guy, after all, who is openly rooting for Malibu and Fresno to burn), but it's an almost unbelievably unique spot of work, offering more new perspectives than I can count, and it reads with a certain amount of authority. The guy never ceases to surprise the hell out of me, and don't dismiss him as just some Internet hack: watch him take apart Stephen Hayes' hagiography of Cheney, in the pages of the American Conservative.
And, of course, this particular piece on Kurdistan is the rhetorical equivalent of a punch in the face to C. Hitchens, and we like that sort of thing around here.
Meanwhile, Justin Raimondo reminds us that Hitchens' beloved Kurds aren't the little darlings that Hitchens makes them out to be. I believe we've covered this territory before, so I'll just give one quote and then let Dariush and sHx fight it out again. Here's Justin:
I covered the horrific persecution of Kamal Said Qadir in this space over a year ago: Antiwar.com also published Dr. Qadir's piece on the rather interesting history of the ruling Barzani clan, as well as an article by Aaron Glantz on his case. Hitchens doesn't deign to mention Qadir, the suppression of the free media, or the thuggish kleptocrats who have seized control of Kurdistan, controlling both the economy and political life by the sheer threat of intimidation. Kurdistan is peaceful because the peshmerga, valorized by Hitchens, have kept the population in subjection with the threat of brutal force. Dissidents – and nosy journalists who stick their noses into the shady business dealings of the twobig Mafia-like families who control the region – are likely to find themselves in jail, beaten to a pulp, or forced to flee abroad.
Looks like Hitchens got kicked off of Neil Cavuto's Fox News television show. There's some question as to whether or not he was actually cut off from speaking or if it was just some freak, collosal error in the control room. But it looks like a definite spike to me. After the sudden break, Cavuto comes back on the air, minus Hitchens, and apologizes to the audience for the, um, mistake in losing Hitchens. He looks like such a disingenuous ass while saying this (he also looks nervous, as if he had just participated in a crime, which I suppose he did).
Anyway, Hitch may be running the risk of losing his all-important Fox News audience. These fallings out are causing some conservatives to question Hitchens' committment to their team. I very much doubt Sean Hannity will ever talk to Hitchens again (remember that hilarious fight the two got into over Jerry Falwell?). O'Reilly has never had Hitchens on - those two egos simply could not fit in the same room. And now this. Must feel odd to get dumped by a second stringer like this silly-billy Cavuto.
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Hitchens Savagely Attacks Old Friend Amis for his Racism...According to Hitchens.
Hitchens's latest 'defence' against what he terms a 'clumsy' attack on his best mate Marty Amis (once best known as a novelist and now best known as a man who provides tirades against Muslims in interviews) is, as one might expect, over-written, prolix, humourless, self-important, and (despite the ostensible subject matter) devotes more time to the Hitch than it does to Amis.
But it also contains one very obvious falsehood which we will come to at the very end. Anyway. To take the piece (apart) sentence by sentence......
To begin with, Hitchens begins with a statement that he simply can't possibly believe. After a long tedious sidetrack into the world of etymology, he claims: 'A racist is a racist precisely because he can't distinguish between a Jew and another Jew, or an Asian or West Indian or Chechen.'
But of course, this is blatantly and self-evidently false. Some racists are like this, sure. But it's unusual. Most racism, on the contrary, been about drawing subtle distinctions, and not so subtle ones. As the repulsive anti-semite Karl Lueger once stated: 'I decide who is a Jew!' Meaning of course: 'I know that all this 'scientific racism' is all nonsense! But it works for me!' Likewise many of the prominent Nazis claimed that they liked Jews on an individual basis (Eichmann insisted on this point) : it was their culture and general influence they disliked. The comparisons with our present situation should be obvious.
Likewise in South Africa 'they' were not 'all the same'. There were 'Indians' and 'coloureds' and 'Orientals' and 'half-castes'; and 'we' had to discriminate clearly between them. Moreover, there were also, as well as this, 'moderates' (who did what we wanted: e.g. in Namibia) and 'extremists' (who were, of course, 'Communists'...... 'Islamism' being the 'Communism' de nos jours).
Anyway one could continue like this for quite a while, stopping only to marvel that Hitchens seems to be proud that he is compared to Evelyn Waugh (yes Christopher but the difference is that Waugh was a great novelist and you aren't), and have one's mind quietly boggle at this sentence: 'Does he think that the forces of the Northern Alliance, or the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, who fight on "our" side against barbarism, are somehow inauthentic Muslims because they prefer Bush and Blair to Mullah Omar or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi'. [Cough cough...'Human Rights Watch (HRW), a US-based rights organisation with UN affiliation, warned in a report on 6 October that military support should not be provided to the Northern Alliance (NA), which was created in 1997....Factions engaged in Afghanistan's long civil war have committed human rights abuses and violated humanitarian law through killings, discriminate aerial bombardment, direct attacks on civilians and summary executions, Human Rights Watch said...If true, the alleged atrocities and abuses would make the NA little better than the Taleban...'...oh and 'The KDP and the PUK maintain large and heavily armed militia forces that exercise effective control over the Kurdish-populated region. ...US-backed Kurdish police and security units have kidnapped hundreds of minority Arabs and Turkmen in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, according to a confidential State Department cable leaked to the Washington Post. Quoting from the cable, the Post on Wednesday reported that the kidnappings, accompanied in some cases by torture and ransom demands, were part of a “concerted and widespread initiative” by the two leading Kurdish parties “to exercise authority in Kirkuk in an increasingly provocative manner.”
The cable, drafted by the US Embassy’s regional coordinator in the area and dated June 5, was addressed to the White House, the Pentagon and the US Embassy in Baghdad. It warned that the kidnappings—in which hundreds have been taken from Kirkuk to prisons in the Kurdish cities of Sulamaniyah and Irbil—“greatly exacerbated tensions along purely ethnic lines” and discredited the US government. “Turkmen in Kirkuk tell us they perceive a US tolerance for the practice while Arabs in Kirkuk believe Coalition Forces are directly responsible,” the cable said.'
But enough of this gay banter. Two main points.
'One would have to have a capacity for fantasy of something like that order to believe in the Ronan Bennett universe of modern persecution where "those who point to the illegality of Israeli occupation are anti-semites. Those who protest against the war in Iraq are al-Qaida sympathisers and moral relativists." In which known world is that happening?'
Er...well that would be the real world in which we all live, Mr Hitchens. Maybe it looks different from a Washington bar.
And finally: 'In fact, I am writing as a friend who also took issue with what he said, in unscripted conversation with a Times reporter, a short while after the ghastly assault by Muslim fanatics on our public transport system. (By the way, yes, I do think that the word "fanatic" requires that prefix in this case.) I wrote my article last autumn and it was published in the Manhattan City Journal last January, so Mr Bennett need not congratulate himself so warmly on being the only one apart from Eagleton with the nerve to raise the issue.'
So according to Mr Hitchens he personally took a principled moral stand against Mr Amis's blatant xenophobia and racism (incidentally have a look at Amis's original point. He goes out of his way not only to attack Muslims (as Hitchens insists) but Arabs. Amis is a racist, no 'ifs' 'ands' or 'buts').
Well! Easily checked. Here's a link. Readers can read for themselves how Hitchens turns his rhetorical guns on Amis and hauls him over the coals for his unpleasant views.
Hitch, as may be remembered, had a long involvment in the crafting of the media message on the Valerie Plame CIA leak case. Hardly a neutral observer, he took it upon himself to castigate Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, in a string of Slate columns, and to defend I. Lewis Libby by spinning and weaving a tangled web of arguments that taxed the patience and the attention spans of all but the most scholarly legal minds among his readers. For instance:
Then, last summer, after Libby was found guilty of perjury (despite having a Bush appointee as his judge, a Bush appointee as his prosecutor and the best defense team money could buy), Hitch did his best to argue that the case should never have been brought and that the convict should not be sent to jail:
Now, the latest development in the convoluted drama that has become known as Plamegate is unfolding, and it doesn't augur too well for the reputations of either Hitch or Libby. It comes in the shape of an advance release of three paragraphs of a forthcoming book by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan:
I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the seniormost aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. There was one problem. It was not true.
I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself.
The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Of course, this doesn't augur too well for the reputations of Bush, Cheney or Rove either. But for Hitchwatchers, the most important questions are, how is Hitch going to spin this and how many fingers is it going to take to do it?
The current strife in Afghanistan, Iran and other Muslim countries is usually portrayed as a battle between men with women and children as collateral damage. Let me tell you about three women who have become central players. All are brave, all are beautiful and all are threatened by vengeful men.
Our first is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, friend of Hitch and prominent atheists such as Sam Harris. Apostate atheist born in Somalia but educated in the world. Now a member of a right wing think tank the American Enterprise Institute. She has used her fame to campaign for the rights of women oppressed by Islamic tradition as well as to press for the closures of faith schools and denial of access of Islamic immigrants to western countries. A controversial character, each month seems to find her closer in philosophy to some rather nasty creatures.
The second is Nazanin Afshin-Jam, Iranian born, Canadian-based Catholic beauty queen. A women with a fist full of education who has used her fame to fight for the life of Iranian children sentenced to die under their archaic judicial system, case in which she has had considerable success. She also fights for the impaired rights of the women of Iran.
Finally, we have Malalai Joya, Afghanistan's most courageous female politician. A self professed secular Muslim, her fight against the war lords (funded by the US) in Afghanistan's parliament has nearly cost her her life repeatedly. Her cry against the Afghan "tradition" of selling young girls under nine, to pay family debt is equally repellent to the reactionary forces around her. As RAWA (Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan) says:
Joya is one of only a few people in Afghanistan who courageously touch on the core issues that are considered taboo in our society. Raising these issues is dangerous. Among them, the main and decisive one is the existence of brutal and criminal Jihardi fundamentalists; who only speak in the language of the gun and hold real power today. No one else has been so brave as to publicly call them criminals.
Three women, only one still in her own country but all threatened daily by men who want them dead. Three women but only one, for reasons of politics and religion, is sanctioned and supported by Hitch and the pro war hawks.
Three women that fill me with awe.
I'll leave the last quote to Joya:
I believe no nation can donate liberation to another nation. Democracy, human rights, women's rights are not something some one gives us. we must ourselves make sacrifices to achieve these values.
Society is like a bird, one wing female, the other male. If one wing is damaged how can the bird fly?
Dr. Martin would like it to be known that he's not looking for any bovver with the Muslim community, and anyone who takes umbrage at his words should leave him alone 'cause he was only adumbrating.
Here’s Martin Amis’s original interview with Ginny Dougary published in the Times On Line on September 9, 2006: The Voice of Experience. Intriguingly, the juicy bit about Muslims is bound up with another juicy bit about Jewishness.
“And now, for instance, it’s very important to me that my daughters are fully Jewish by Jewish law, which is matrimonial. So I’m pleased they’d be the first to be summoned.” That’s rather a peculiar thought, isn’t it? “It is, but let’s not mess about – that’s what they are. So there’d be no shilly shallying there. Especially since what we’re living through now, among other things, is a huge recrudescence of anti-Semitism. And, with my two daughters, it makes me feel great solidarity with them.”
He lays the blame for Israel’s plight (and there is, conspicuously, no mention of Palestine’s) firmly with the Brits: “For Nasrallah, it’s a power play; for Israel it’s survival. And they always have this hanging over them. It’s our fault because we put them in it. There couldn’t have been a worse place on earth than where they are. They should have been in Bavaria and then they would have had a couple of leather-shorted scoutmasters from the BLO throwing Molotov cocktails at them, from time to time… at least they wouldn’t have been surrounded by millions of people who thirst for their death. So I think you’ve got to bear that in mind.”
So here we have Amis expressing pleasure that his daughters are fully Jewish by Jewish law, worried about “is a huge recrudescence of anti-Semitism”, and blaming the British for Israel’s problems. It is also interesting in this context that his good friend and fellow Islamophobe Christopher Hitchens claims to be Jewish on the basis of a Jewish grandmother. So I have to ask the question, are these two men’s affection and respect for things Jewish and their fear and loathing of things Islamic two sides of the same coin?
In the next paragraph, Dougary continues:
He and The Hitch were in Las Vegas the previous week, and shared their grim premonition that this could be the beginning of the end for Israel. “You can’t put them anywhere else now. They can’t have another country, another Homeland. It’s a very chilling thought because the only thing the Islamists like about modernity is modern weapons. And they’re going to get better and better at that. They’re also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered.
Notice how Amis uses the word “Islamists”, which then morphs into “they”, and then “they” are gaining on “us” demographically. And finally, they are “a quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third”. So in the space of four sentences, “Islamists” has surreptitiously been converted into “Muslims”. Nice one, Martin! And of course, he doesn’t specify who the “we” is, but unless he’s talking about the Chinese, “we” are outnumbered already. So the thinking on view here is totally incoherent.
Moving on:
“The one built-in element that works in our favour is that it’s so vile and poisonous, so preposterously disgusting that it must burn itself out. They have managed to fix on a real paradigm shift – earlier, people would die for causes and for tiny religious reasons, but to convert it into this luscious, sensual paradise that you go straight to, while the rest of the poor sods have to moulder in the earth for centuries until they’re kicked awake by furious angels and interrogated about their sins. The suicide bomber doesn’t do any of that shit. He goes straight to the ripe wine and women.”
This is the central question Amis keeps coming back to in his writing: an extended and moving review of the film United 93; a short story, published in The New Yorker, The Last Days of Mohammad Atta (we talk about the haunting photograph of the 9/11 leader, with his hard black eyes “full of murder… as though he couldn’t contain it a second longer”); a new 12,000-word essay tackling the terrorists head-on. This last response is likely to be extremely hardline, inflamingly so, if Amis’s message to me is anything to go by.
Pardon me for mentioning this yet again, but from what has been established about 9/11, the Islamofascists COULDN’T have pulled off the caper. The Myth of “Bin Laden and the 19 Arab Hijackers” isn’t even a proper myth. It’s a wholesale fabrication with a few nuggets of fact embedded for effect—a fiction concocted for the purpose of covering up the truth of what happened. End of lecture.
What do the Muslims want with nuclear power? Haven't they got enough fast breeders already?
Next, we come to the juiciest bit of all:
What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There is a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order,’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs—well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people. It’s a huge dereliction on their part. I suppose they justify it on the grounds that they have suffered from state terrorism in the past, but I don’t think that’s wholly irrational. It’s their own past they’re pissed off about; their great decline. It’s also masculinity, isn’t it?”
I personally am free from the urge to make Muslims suffer, as well as the urge to stereotype over a million people in Britain or, alternately, a quarter of the world’s population by Amis’s reckoning, on the basis that a tiny minority of people from their communities engage in killing people. But that’s because I don’t see the world in the stark “us and them” terms that Amis seems to.
This last paragraph was the one that got a lot of people wondering if Amis was (a) racist, (b) drunk, or (c) totally off his rocker. So much so, that he felt compelled to defend himself by writing to Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, explaining that, “It was a thought experiment, or a mood experiment,” and adding that he had not “advocated" anti-Muslim measures, but “merely adumbrated” them.
A dumb bunny I may be, but “adumbrate” is a new word for me. Looking it up, I found it to come from the Latin adumbratus, past participle of adumbrare, from ad- + umbra shadow, and to mean (1) to foreshadow vaguely, (2) to suggest, disclose, or outline partially, and (3) to overshadow or obscure. So my best guess is that essentially, Martin wass using Grandad’s defense from Only Fools And Horses: “I was nothing to do with me, Del; I only suggested it!” Perhaps the Lyrical Terrorist should have tried that wheeze at her recent trial— "Those poems I wrote about decapitation and wanting to martyr myself were merely adumbrations, your honour! I'm a good girl really. Honest!"
To be continued….
For those who may way want to check out the Only Fools and Horses episode: Second Time Around
I'll say this for Hitch, he sure knows how to charm the chicks. Ayaan, Media Lizzy, the Screeching Harpie, and now the Amused Muse, who has taken a real shine to him after the way he dealt with Father Rutler.
Ooh! Torch 'em, Hitchie! This is the man who flipped off the audience on Bill Maher. And now he's being mean to the man who heard the confessions of firefighters dying on September 11!
(Heard the confessions. Holy crap, I need to repeat that. Heard the confessions! Confessions? From firefighters on 9/11? Holy fuck, firefighters have "sins" to "confess" after saving people's lives on 9/11? Like what? That one stole a piece of cheese from another's lunch box? That they may have had some mean thoughts about the totally fucked bastards who rammed planes into the World Trade Center towers? And believers wonder why religion sets off atheists! "Heard the confessions," good grief.)
My goodness, Hitchens is not out to convinced society that atheists are all nice, family-oriented (though he has a wife and kid), suburban, mainstream Americans. Hitchens is not the man to make that argument, and I am not the woman to make it, either.
I have disagreed with Hitchens' stance on the war but I love a good scrapper, I must admit. Certainly, I prefer him to a man who has no need of physical intimacy with any woman (or man/boy, although one never knows these days). Hitchens is the Earnest Hemingway of atheism. And yes, I met him - very charming he is, with a self-depreciating sense of humor (you know - humor?), even after having tied a few on. Yeah, I'd love to see Father Rutler after a few drinks.
Note to Amused Muse: Try not to be too disappointed, but you may find Hitch's charms fade rapidly. From what I've gleaned from your site, it's clear that what a girl like you needs is a man who knows his anthropology, paleontology and evolutionary biology. Hitch is a lot more at ease discussing gastronomy than astronomy, revolution than evolution, and the wine list than the geological time chart. Just try having a conversation with him about punctuated equilibrium and watch his eyes glaze over. He uses Darwin and Wallace, not to mention Dawkins and Hawking, as props to hide behind while bashing religion from a rationalist perspective, but underneath he's a total philistine in all matters scientific. You'd be far better off sticking with Dawkins, who dispite being a rogue at least knows his science, or how about David Bellamy?—mad English eccentric, global warming skeptic, and master botanist par excellance with a bushy beard big enough to house a pair of nesting swallows. A girl could do a lot worse.
A recent Google search revealed not a single webpage in which the terms "Christopher Hitchens" and "Lou Reed" appear in the same sentence. Yes, I know—it's shocking! So I thought I'd better rectify it quick. Lou has written some great, what might be called "anti-war" songs in his time, including Billy ("Then war broke out and he had to go/But not me, I was mentally unfit, or so they say so so", Kill Your Sons (the chorus anyway: "Don't you know they're gonna kill your sons/until theyy run run run run run run run away), and Christmas in February, which says it all:
Sam was lyin' in the jungle agent orange spread against the sky like marmalade Hendrix played on some foreign jukebox they were praying to be saved Those gooks were fierce and fearless that's the price you pay when you invade Xmas in February
Sam lost his arm in some border town his fingers are mixed with someone's crop If he didn't have that opium to smoke the pain would never ever stop Half his friends are stuffed into black body bags with their names printed at the top Xmas in February
Sammy was a short order cook in a short order black and blue collar town Everybody worked the steel mill but the steel mill got closed down He thought if he joined the Army he'd have a future that was sound Like no Xmas in February
Sam's staring at the Vietnam Wall it's been a while now that he's home His wife and kid have left, he's unemployed he's a reminder of the war that wasn't won He's the guy on the street with the sign that reads "Please help send this Vet home" But he is home and there's no Xmas in February no matter how much he saves
But I chose the above video because the song has even more ugency now than it did two decades ago when Lou recorded it, and because the video editors have done a creditable job too.
Hitch's latest Slate piece "Something to Give Thanks For" is another attempt to maintain his illusion that the invasion of Iraq was justified. He brags about the defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq without bothering to mention that al Qaeda never would've been in Iraq had the US not invaded. He also accuses iberals and Democrats of hoping for bad news in Iraq: "the dank and sinister impression they give that the worse the tidings, the better they would be pleased. The latter mentality isn't pardonable and ought not to be pardoned, either." Liberals who opposed the war never asked for all this violence and death in the first place, and have since called for a removal of troops in order to prevent continued death and violence. Hitch also of course brags about the 'less death tolls' reported of late even though 2007 has been the deadliest year of the war in Iraq yet.
Anyway, I'll let a poster on Slate's "The Fray" take it from here:
Oh yes, "bin ladenism has been dealt a stinging defeat."
Of course, what the fucktoad here fails to note is that "bin ladenism" only came to exist in Iraq when we destroyed their Baathist, virulently anti-fundamentalist gov't in the first place. So, of course it's been defeated-- it had no natural constituency of any note. It was our actions which allowed it to temporarily exist, and by existing, served our purposes by justifying the occupation. It will continue to do so, as even Hillary Clinton will maintain the occupation as long as there is a whiff of Al Qaeda somewhere in Iraq.
In the meantime, this and other assholes crow about reductions in violence. Naturally, with millions having fled their homes to become refugees and every mixed neighborhood now effectively ethnically cleansed, casualties and attacks are temporarily down. This won't last, because now the ethnically uniform communities will be fighting each other en masse over Iraq's water, oil and US aid resources. In addition, the Shia will continue to fight among themselves. If this is what the shithead thinks is good news, fuck him.
Here's some other news, which he doesn't seem to have much to say about:
CBS's Investigative Unit wanted to do a report on the number of suicides in the military and "submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Defense". After 4 months they received a document which showed--that between 1995 and 2007-- there were 2,200 suicides among "active duty" soldiers.
Baloney.
The Pentagon was covering up the real magnitude of the "suicide epidemic". Following an exhaustive investigation of veterans' suicide data collected from 45 states; CBS discovered that in 2005 alone "there were at least 6,256 among those who served in the armed forces. That's 120 each and every week in just one year."
Why, do you suppose, 120 combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are taking their own lives every week? I would suggest it is because they were well raised people with an inescapable sense of justice. These people, having been duped by the shit Hitchens and others into a mass criminal enterprise, could no longer fool themselves with propaganda and lies. Their consciences would not allow themselves to be fooled.
And when one is faced with having committed crimes of such magnitude-- the killing of innocents, the destruction of property, the trashing of human rights-- there is no escape. They imposed the only penalty on themselves that is commensurate with their self admitted crimes-- death.
I'm just waiting for some of them to do inflict some justice on the people who tricked them into committing such heinous acts first.
A beautiful piece was published by Luis Sinco in the Observer recently. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2212694,00.html .The piece entitled Am I'm To Blame For His Private War talks about a young American Vet of accidentially made a star during the battle of Falluja and his almost fatal struggles with life and PTSD upon his return to the states. Unlike Hitches hagiography published in Vanity Fair, the photo journalist here recognises a real responsibility for the young man that he inadvertently made a symbol and takes fairly extreme efforts to try and assist Miller with a recovery.
In January 2006, I was on assignment along the US-Mexico border when my wife called. 'Your boy is on TV. He has post-traumatic stress disorder,' she said. 'They kicked him out of the Marines.'..... As the third anniversary of the US-led invasion approached, my editors wanted another follow-up story. So in spring 2006, I drove to Miller's hometown of Jonancy, Kentucky, in the hollows of Appalachia. Mobile homes and battered cars dot the rugged ranges. Marijuana is a major cash crop. Addiction to methamphetamine and prescription drugs is rampant. Kids marry young and boys go to work mining the black seams of coal. Miller showed me around. At an abandoned mine, he picked up a chunk of coal. 'Around here, this is what it's all about,' he said. 'Nothing else. It was this or the Marines.' Often brooding and sullen, Miller joked about being '21 going on 70', the result, he said, of humping heavy armour and gear on a 6ft, 11½st frame. Before he was allowed to leave Iraq, he attended a mandatory 'warrior transitioning' session about PTSD and adjusting to home life. Each Marine received a questionnaire. Were they having trouble sleeping? Did they have thoughts of suicide? Everybody knew the drill. Answer yes and be evaluated further. Say no and go home. Miller said he didn't want to miss his flight. He answered no to every question. He returned to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. His high-school sweetheart, Jessica Holbrooks, joined him there and they were married in a civil ceremony. But he began to have nightmares and hallucinations. He imagined shadowy figures outside the windows. Faces of the dead haunted his sleep. Once, while cleaning a shotgun, he blacked out. He regained consciousness when Jessica screamed his name and realised he was pointing the gun at her. He reported the problems to superiors, who promised to get him help. Then came a single violent episode which put an end to his days as a Marine. It happened in the Gulf of Mexico in September 2005. His unit had been sent to New Orleans to assist with hurricane Katrina relief efforts. Now a second giant storm, Hurricane Rita, was moving in, and the Marines were ordered to seek safety out at sea. In the claustrophobic innards of a navy ship, someone whistled. The sound reminded Miller of a rocket-propelled grenade. He attacked the sailor who had whistled. He was medically discharged with a 'personality disorder' on 10 November 2005, one year after his picture made worldwide news.
Luis battles to get him appropriate treatment in a US system that does not appear to be very interested in wounded soldiers. In one sad section Miller talks to US senators trying to get support for other affected soldiers.
"That's how he found his new mission: to tell people what it was like to come home from war with a broken mind. Three days after their wedding, I tagged along as the young couple flew to the nation's capital. Easily distracted by the offer of free drinks for an all-American hero, Miller stayed out until 3am. He was hungover during his meeting with House members a few hours later and smoked and cursed while recounting his combat experiences. The politicians listened politely and thanked Miller for his service. One congressman sent an aide to tell Miller he was too busy to meet him. No one promised to take up his cause. After Miller picked up his award, he took a tour past the White House and Lincoln Memorial, but his mind was elsewhere. 'Let's get drunk,' he said."
In this piece I can see how much Hitch has lost. A talented writer he now cannot be honest even when writing about the soldiers of the "good". His work has become so tainted by dishonesty of purpose and fact, that a piece about responsibility we bear to the young men we send is in the end all about Hitch, waxed and beautiful. I dont think he even hears their voices anymore.
