He's said it before, but it's worth noting that Hitchens is still "obliquely" calling for military action against Iran. Given everything that has happened in these last eight years, what with the disastrous consequences of the glorious massacre of Mesopotamia and all, the fact that Hitchens can still with a straight face call for something as outlandish as bombing Iran is pretty remarkable. He seems to revel in belonging to a lunatic fringe of unabashed warmongers at the extreme Right who are keen on policies that would engulf the Middle East in a firestorm the likes of which we've never seen before. Fortunately Hitchens has pretty much lost all credibility on foreign policy due to his fanatic and stubborn embrace to the bitter end of something as senseless as the war in Iraq, a failure historic in its proportions, so not too many people take these jingoist rants too seriously anymore. Let him go pal around with his Christianist buddies on The Never-Ending Book Tour for god Is Not Great, as he's now discredited and has rendered himself completely irrelevant on questions of war and peace.
This is Part 4 which includes his clumsy call for mass murdering Iranians. Here are Parts 1, 2, 3, and 5.
— by Stabler, who offers some ruminations on Hitch's recent appearance on the O'Reilly Factor.
Look, if Hitchens wants to politely grovel at Fox News's feet it's alright as far as it goes. Where else can Our Boy's ever so humble argument against torture be played under clips from the season premiere of "24?" Also, while Hitchens now calls American invasion tactics "sadism", we should not forget that at the time he was an emphatic state propagandist, arguing the war was being waged with new standards in decency and humanity.
Yet we must ask "What the hell ever happened to The Noble Sir Christopher Hitchens, chivalrous protector of the Chaste Lady Monica, and defender against all ruffians of the Virtuous Dame Paula of The House Of Jones?" Now our lion hearted Knight takes his sword to the microphones of sleabo T.V. personalities, even ones who have had to pay whopping penalties to make their sexual harassment problems go away. Unlike the Lewinsky matter, the young woman O'Reilly asked to Lufta his falafel apparently did not initiate the exchange.
Hitchens has argued, dubiously, that journalists are not to be held to the same standards as politicos because they have no power over anyone. It's not easy to see how Hitchens could rap that shaky proposition around this contradiction; but I guess consistency is overrated.
Or maybe, just maybe, the set of standards Htichens still brings to the Clintons, while mercenary, are themselves debased, debauched, pious and hypocritical to a hopeless degree.
Barbara Lubin, a former President of the Bereley Board of Education and the Founder and Executive Director of MECA (the Middle East Children's Alliance, which lists Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Noam Chomsky, Maxine Water, Ramsey Clark and Pete Seeger among its founding advisors — I'm just telling you how classy they are), this month embarked on a humanitarian trip to help try to get necessary goods into Gaza for the needy kids there. She finally did get into Gaza, and this is the e-mail she wrote to supporters of MECA. She has a story she things the world needs to hear (see her third paragraph), and after hearing it, I can't help but agree.
Many people will find the comparison with the pivotal event in William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice chilling. The idea of forcing a mother to choose which of her children will be killed and which will be saved is an iconic example of Nazi sadism. It may not prove possible to verify that this particular incident actually happened in Gaza, and it will be easy for anybody who wants to deny it to do so. For all we know at the moment, the whole thing may even be a piece of propaganda dreamed up by Hamas to make the Israeli Stormtroopers look bad.
Oh, we already knew that the Israelis are not averse to assassinating their adversaries along with anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity from 10,000 feet, or to letting the sick and the pregnant die at checkpoints through lack of medical care, or to bombing buildings crowded with refugees, or to burning old ladies and babies with white phosporus, but surely, we surmised, there are limits to the depths of their cruelty. They wouldn't actually toss a baby up in the air and impale it on a bayonet, shoot old people in the head as they lay in bed, or kill children in front of their parents, would they? Well, nowadays, in all honesty we can no longer put such potential attrocities beyond the bounds of possibility.
For those loud-mouthed defenders of Israel's status as a paragon among us who thought that running over Rachel Corrie with a bulldozer was just a one-off, you've got a Complete-Works-of-Freud's worth of denial to work through and a subprime mortgage of bad karma to pay off. You can start by joining in with the vital effort of cataloging the crimes that are reported to have taken place during the Gaza offensive and making sure these suspected top-of-the-foodchain war criminals get a fair trial.
January 23, 2009 Dear Jerrold,
I entered the Gaza Strip on Wednesday night with my friend and fellow activist Sharon Wallace after waiting ten hours at the Egypt/Gaza. The destruction and trauma is even greater than I expected.
In just two short days I met with families who were given minutes to evacuate their homes and are now living in overcrowded UN schools; I saw the ruins of bombed greenhouses; I looked out the window at fields and roads torn up by the tread of Israeli tanks; and I visited two universities where MECA supports students with scholarships- severely damaged by Israeli bombs.
Out of all the devastation I have seen so far, there is one story in particular that I think the world needs to hear. I met a mother who was at home with her ten children when Israeli soldiers entered the house. The soldiers told her she had to choose five of her children to "give as a gift to Israel." As she screamed in horror they repeated the demand and told her she could choose or they would choose for her. Then these soldiers murdered five of her children in front of her. The concept of "Jewish morality" is truly dead. We can be fascists, terrorists, and Nazis just like everybody else.
I spent the first morning visiting Rafah then drove north to Nuseirat Refugee Camp where our partner organization Afaq Jadeeda Association is buying food a delivering cooked meal to displaced families with funds MECA provided. Then to Gaza City.
Today I visited Jabaliya Refugee Camp and the Zaytoun neighborhood of Gaza City, two of the areas hardest hit by Israel's brutal attacks. Pharmacies, schools, and homes were indiscriminately hit in Jabaliya. Mohammed, one of our volunteers in Gaza, and his family were forced to evacuate their home because of intense bombing in their area.
In Zaytoun, I saw families gathering wood from charred trees. The almost two-year blockade of Gaza has deprived people cooking gas, so these terrified families build fires to keep warm and cook the little food they can get.
I talked to people on the street who told stories of wild dogs coming to eat their dead neighbors, relatives bleeding to death because Israel would not allow emergency workers into the area, and Israeli soldiers entering homes to beat and kill.
But despite the immense mourning and devastation, people are starting to put their lives back together. Sabreen, a young woman from Rafah, told me, "We are a strong people. No matter how many times Israel bombs us we are not leaving. We will keep trying to live as normal a life as possible."
Sincerely,
Barbara Lubin Gaza City, Gaza, Palestine email: meca@mecaforpeace. org
UPDATE FROM MECA (JANUARY 26):
Barbara Lubin and all of us at the Middle East Children's Alliance believe that we should have confirmed the story about the Gaza woman who was told by an Israeli soldier to choose which five of her ten children should die, and then witnessed their murder. We are doing everything we can now to verify the story, but have been unable to do so. We ask that you do not publish or post this story on the Internet. If you have already done so, please post this statement, as well.
Barbara Lubin went to Gaza to deliver four tons of medicine and other aid to the people there. When she arrived in the immediate aftermath of the Israeli assault the scene she encountered was chaotic and the people traumatized. She heard and retold many horrifying accounts, and saw for herself the devastation to homes, schools, businesses, land and lives. In these catastrophic circumstances, it’s not difficult to see how Barbara would find this story credible. Unfortunately, we sent it out before taking the time to verify it.
We know that several hundred children lost their lives in the assault, and that some appear to have been shot at close range. There are reports of family members being shot in front of each other. Israeli forces entered Gaza homes and apparently used people as human shields. Israel is now being investigated for using unconventional weapons like white phosphorous and dense inert metal explosive (DIME).
All of us at MECA are committed to accuracy as we relate the stories of what we see when we travel to Palestine. We will keep you informed about what we learn.
Doctors at a hospital near Gaza are almost overwhelmed by the number of Palestinian children needing treatment for bullet wounds to their heads.
On January 26, well-known Christer Dinesh D'Souza and even-better-known Antichrister, Contrarian and Renaissance man Christopher Hitchens met in Boulder, Colorado, ostensibly to debate "Atheism vs. Reigion," and very probably bored most of their audience of 2,000 into a coma. We haven't picked up any reports of the outcome yet, but the Rocky Mountain News gave it a last-minute blast of pre-event publicity:
Earlier, D'Souza and Hitchens answered three questions posed by the Rocky. Their answers have been printed in full:
ROCKY: What's your opponent's best argument?
HITCHENS: The "fine tuning" of the universe, with its bias (at least in our infinitesimal locality) for human life. A useless argument but a memorable one, and of course impossible to disprove (another symptom of its weakness).
D'SOUZA: I think Christopher's best argument is that the world is so flawed in its design and with all the suffering in it that it doesn't look like there's an intelligent, all-powerful, compassionate designer behind it all.
ROCKY: How do you handle moments of doubt?
HITCHENS: Doubt is one of the foundations of our skeptical method to begin with, so only if I ceased to have moments of same would I feel any concern.
D'SOUZA: To me doubt is intrinsic to religious belief. "Belief" is not the same thing as "knowledge." If I knew for sure, I wouldn't have belief. Belief means trusting in God even when you have doubts. But this in no way shows that belief in unreasonable or irrational.
ROCKY: If your position "won" and became the world's gold standard of behavior, what would the world look like?
HITCHENS: Very much the way it does now, since the way humans behave is in fact determined by the laws of physics and biology and is only to a limited extent affected by theocratic exhortation. Life would and does improve of course, to the extent that theocratic exhortations are outgrown or ignored. In every country and society, the measure of freedom and education and prosperity can be directly correlated to the growth of secularization. (Tunisia vs. Libya, Ireland today vs. Ireland yesterday, Iran vs. Turkey, India vs. Pakistan, Italy and Spain and much of the rest of the Latin and Catholic world since the eclipse of the Vatican's alliance with fascism, the Jewish people once emancipated from the ghetto; numberless other examples.) The gold standard can already can be seen in operation, as can the opposite delights of religious rule and "faith-based" insurgency.
D'SOUZA: Imagine a Christian world in which everyone aspired to live by the commandments to love God and love their neighbor. Imagine a world in which people took seriously Christ's teachings and sought to apply them. Who can deny that such a world would be infinitely better than the one we have now?
If anyone was at the gig and can remember any salient details, please share them with us. And any criticism of Hitchensian determinism in the context of human behavior would also be welcome. From his response to the last question above, the Popinjay sounds like he may be an acolyte in the cult of B.F. Skinner, et. al. Please say it ain't so!
Stupid!? The Irish Setter is good natured, intelligent and very affectionate, as well as excellent around children and not aggressive towards other dogs. But like the Hitch, the Irish Setter tends to bloat if too well fed and needs to be brushed daily to prevent the hair from developing mats or tangles. Info from PetYourDog.com
On January 17, Christopher Hitchens took part in a special edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme Any Questions hosted by Jonathan Dimbleby The George Washington University in Washington, DC. The show went very well for Hitch, who managed to get in some interesting points about Israel, Palestine and Iran and also to make (as usual) a complete pratt of himself over (you guessed it) the Clintons.
Then, just when he ought to have been finishing on a song, he decided instead to tell an Irish joke, and not just any old Irish joke, but the kind that relies for its effect on the listeners' understanding that the Irish, as a race, are intellectually challenged and over-sensitive.
BETH BREEDING: On to one of the more pressing issues what kind of dog do you hope the Obama family brings to the White House?
JONATHAN DIMBLEBY: What kind of dog do you hope the Obama family brings to the White House? You must have very strong views about this I am quite certain Colonel
COLONEL LARRY WILKERSON: A chocolate lab so I can borrow it occasionally.
DIMBLEBY: Tom Mann
THOMAS E MANN: If the ugly truth be known I don’t care.
DIMBLEBY: Reneé
RENEÉ AMOORE: I want a pit bull.
DIMBLEBY: And Christopher Hitchens
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: There is a very old saying in Washington. A piece of local wisdom. If you want a friend in Washington get a dog. That would mean I would say an Irish setter.
DIMBLEBY: Because?
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Stupid, highly strung, but dead loyal. (LAUGH)
This incidence of schoolboy racist humor was picked up by Jack Grantham, who put together the YouTube clip above with some very familiar images and brought the offense to our attention. I must say it amazes me that the BBC can allow this sort of thing to pass with giggles of approval and no apologies by anyone involved, while at the same time they can't even bring themselves to carry an appeal for humanitarian aid for the Palestinian refugees in Gaza. More than this, the entire episode seems to have been scripted rather than spontaneous, as is often the case with radio broadcasts. If this is the case, it means that the scriptwriter, director, presenter, questioner and associated staff, as well as the Drink-Soaked One himself, were all perfectly happy to make a lame racist joke for the express purpose of rounding off a light-hearted radio show. What next for Hitch and the Beeb, one wonders? Jokes about cotton fields? Concentration camps? Dwellers of the jungles or deserts? Aids sufferers? The malnourished and starving? The visually, physically, mentally and chromosomally handicapped? People with slitty eyes? Or are the Irish now to be singled out for special treatment?
Hitch is a hopeless case, and If I may venture to guess at his response to being called on this, it would probably be somewhere along the lines of "Don't be such a Lesbian!" But we should demand higher standards of the BBC. Agreed?
In the Guardian last Friday, Hitch gave his recommendations as the best novels about warfare. Actually though, he's restricted himself to war novels by British (and as far as I can see, English) authors published in the mid-20th century, which narrows the field down quite a bit. He explains his reason as follows.
If one should decide to select only from British novels about 20th-century warfare, then the impulse to cheat, or to compress or otherwise to circumvent the rules, would still be an honourable one. And this would be because, as most historians are now beginning to agree, there were not two world wars but a single global war, which probably began with the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1905 (trigger of the first and best Russian revolution) and may not have ended until the reunification of Germany in 1989, only to start up again in the Balkans and the Caucasus in our own day.
Goodness, don't tell me Hitch is trying to lengthen Eric Hobsbawm's short twentieth century from 77 up to 84 years! Eric posited the period 1914 to 1991 and his idea was taken on board by Susan Sontag among other notables. Era-making is a game anyone can play by setting their goal posts and penalty box to whatever dimensions they like. But do we really have to put up with this flatulent schoolboy claptrap from a loafer at the back of the class? Most historians, it's fairly safe to say, agree on very little. But they do agree on history's conventions about demarkating one war from another and periods of war from periods of peace. Hence we have the the Greco-Persian Wars, the Punic Wars, the Wars of the Roses, the Napoleonic Wars, the Israeli-Arab Wars the Balkan Wars, etc., all of which contained several distinct wars bounded by several distinct periods of peace, although not necessarily of quiet or harmony.
Now anyone who wants to posit that the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and the Reunification of Germany in 1989 were part of the same conflict but the Balkan Wars that began in the early 1990s were not a part of that same conflict is clearly talking stuff and nonsense, bilge and piffle, tripe, twaddle, codswallop and gobbledegook. All Hitch had to do was bang out a thousand words pointing readers to a few potboilers set on the frontlines in wartime and preferably with a good plot and a bit of spice to keep the reader in suspense through 200 pages. Not much to ask, is it? —that he talk about the books without stamping his overweening ego over the exercise.
Noam Chomsky reminds us of the usefulness of the business press in this video snippet. While I tend to agree with him, I must make exceptions for two business publications: Investors Business Daily and Forbes. IBD once claimed that the fact that Rush Limbaugh's television show drew higher ratings in Yuba City (one of the smallest markets in the US) than Dan Rather's CBS Evening News was a sign that Dan's days were numbered. Limbaugh's show was canceled shortly thereafter. IBD also picked up the obnoxious reactionary racist cartoonist Michael Ramirez after he was dropped by the Los Angeles Times. Forbes is a family-run glossy joke currently controlled by pudgy failed presidential candidate and flat tax advocate Michael Forbes in the wake of the passing of his more flamboyant father (and also failed political candidate) Malcolm.
While particularly ridiculous examples from Forbes don't come as easily to mind as those from the truly wretched IBD, I have been blessed today with one that I will remember until I shuffle off this mortal coil. Ladies and gentlemen, Decents, Fascists, and Chaucerian Frauds, may I present Christopher Hitchens, the 14th most influential media liberal in these United States!
Vociferously atheistic, Hitchens, who styles himself a "radical," will likely be aghast to find himself on this list. This prolific, but never less than eye-catching, author has supported the war on terror as enthusiastically as he has excoriated Sarah Palin.
Tunku Varadarajan, who was part of the unholy triad who came up with this crap, was formerly the house Turk over at the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps he wants to brand Hitch a liberal over the Kurdish issue? Enquiring minds want to know!
—by Stabler, who takes note of that giant sucking sound Hitch has been making as he's sucked up to the Bushies these past eight years.
Now that the last sorry sand-pebbles have dripped out of the sad,terminal term of W's Presidency, it is time examine Hitchens in relation to the President whom, using his own work as a measure,he loved and served so well. As we saw in his exchange with Alterman, Hitchens has one thing going for him in these matters. His offenses are so numerous, his evasions so brazen and hypocritical that a proper cataloging would really require a thick book, maybe "Everyone Left to Lie To."
Brevity, in this case being the offspring of necessity, sends us first to the obvious: Christopher Hitchens did not carry water for The Republican Party in the Bush years so much as he entrenched the ground for a medium sized lake. Consider his recent displeasure with the Clinton appointee that had played a part in Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich; which, after tens of thousands of Iraqi dead, we are still supposed to regard as something along the lines of the Holocaust.
In all the time Hitchens was defending convicted felon Scooter Libby he somehow never managed to mention Libby's years as Rich's lawyer. It mattered little to Hitchens, who spoke up for Libby at every opportunity and was then silent on Bush's shockingly corrupt "fair and balanced" pardon of the criminal. In the Hitchens house of moral indignation, Republicans are always seated in the comfy chair. His defense of this can be truly comical: "I've been to Abu Ghraib" he snorts at Alterman. So? I believe Dick Cheney has been there too!
Here summary can hardly suffice: Hitchens gave his A. O.K. to Cheney's sickening "no bid" relationship to Haliburton, a major profit maker in his bloody war. "And if you say "Military Industrial Complex I'll laugh in your face" said Hitch in one of his great debates. A push for more executions from a freakishly corrupt Department Of Justice? Kissinger snuck up the back door to advise W on the war?
Silence, bloody silence from our gin-soaked demagogue, all this after years of hand wringing over Whitewater and the mistreatment of future Penthouse model Paula Jones.
Let us be clear now where Hitchens tries to blur: Hitchens did not "refuse to vote for Kerry/Edwards" in 2004, He endorsed George W Bush in the pages on the Nation. He strenuously argued that the Bush administration had brought Superior intellectual thinkers to the White House. Less than a year after his endorsement, he was on a debate stage defending the White House's performance in Katrina.
That, of course, is barely starters. His endorsement of Obama came after the Stock Market Crash, making Obama's election assured and the said endorsement opportunism of the cheapest sort.
His one real parting with Bush was over Terry Shivo, which was after all a bit of grandstanding to Bush's base that had no effect on anything at all. Saddest of all, perhaps, Hitchens's attempts to stick Clinton with blame on 9-11, and his participation in the attacks on Richard Clark when he came forward with stories of the Bush White House's malfeasance.
Such a double standard requires rather than invites speculation. With a lot of Washington, the Clintons were viewed as vulgar new money, misbehaving at Sally Quinn's tea parties and getting too friendly with the servants. Much as part of him might like to shake it off; Hitchens is a crude snob, and his heart will always be with those who carry their privilege well. His hatred of working class people, as seen in his overheated attacks on Michael Moore, will always outweigh any of his feigned interest in oppressed people like the Kurds.
Amnesty International, Harold Pinter, Studs Turkel. Who's your favorite on the long list of those slandered for the honor of Hitchens's favorite President?
With Barack Obama taking over at the White House, the good people over at Slate magazine have been saying farewell to George W. Bush, and for his part, Christopher Hitchens has decided to take advantage of the occasion to pay tribute to the outgoing president.
[O]n the last day of his presidency, I want to say why I still do not wish that Al Gore had beaten George W. Bush in 2000 or that John Kerry had emerged the victor in 2004.
This seems as good a time as any to remind ourselves that Gore and Kerry actually did both beat Bush under the quaint convention that all valid votes are counted, and that in 2000 it took weeks of banana republican shenanigans over absentee ballots and hanging chads in Florida culminating in a blatant intervention by the Supreme Court to throw the presidency Dubya's way. In 2004, the contest was closer, but the manipulation of electronic voting machines, most notably in Ohio, undoubtedly played a part in securing Bush's second term. The Republican operative Michael Connell, who was involved in the vote rigging and was due to testify in federal court about his role, was—very conveniently for the Bushies—killed in a plane crash just last month. So much for the wages of sin.
I hope I am not courting controversy in stating that Bush is leaving office with very few fans and even fewer positive achievements to his credit, and in this context we shouldn't overlook the mess in Afghanistan, the mess in Iraq and the train wreck that the global economy is beginning to resemble. So I would imagine that Hitch has got his work cut out if he's going to make the case that Gore and Kerry would have performed just as poorly, wouldn't you?
It is at times like this that Hitch's celebrated contrarian ingenuity comes in so handy. In this case, he traces everything back to 9/11, positing it as a sort of Big Bang or Year Zero event that demanded precisely the sort of response that Bush gave it.
I am reasonably certain, is that it is the events of Sept. 11, 2001, that explain the transformation of George Bush from a rather lazy small-government conservative into an interventionist, in almost every sense, politician.
No argument from me there. 9/11 was indeed a "transformative event", to borrow a phrase of Philip Zelikow's from his 1998 article Catastrophic Terrorism", in which he foresaw both 9/11 and its aftermath with uncanny, Nostradamus-like accuracy. And undoubtedly, without the attacks of September 11, George W.Bush's presidency would have proceeded very differently.
In 1998, Philip Zelikow co-authored an article published in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, entitled Catastrophic Terrorism and with a section entitled Imagining the Transforming Event. Nearly two years later, PNAC picked up the CFR-Zelikow language, saying that the desired transformation "is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor..."
Expanding on his theme, Hitch goes on to explore how things might have been had Al Gore's hanging chads been counted.
We are never invited to ask ourselves what would have happened if the Democrats had been in power that fall. But it might be worth speculating for a second.
You can read the details of Hitch's speculations in his article. For my part, there is no question that had Gore been in the White House, we would have been spared Dick Cheney as Vice President, Condi Rice as National Security Advisor and Don Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Then perhaps the numerous warnings that major attacks were impending might have been acted upon, or at least remembered:
Throughout that summer, we now well know, Tenet, Richard Clarke, and several other officials were running around with their "hair on fire," warning that al-Qaida was about to unleash a monumental attack. On Aug. 6, Bush was given the now-famous President's Daily Brief (by one of Tenet's underlings), warning that this attack might take place "inside the United States." For the previous few years—as Philip Zelikow, the commission's staff director, revealed this morning—the CIA had issued several warnings that terrorists might fly commercial airplanes into buildings or cities.[Fred Kaplan-SLATE]
Because, without going into too much gory detail and indulging in hypotheticals by assuming, for the sake of argument, that none of these senior administration officials were complicit in the plot, then if they had not all been on siesta, walkabout or vacation in the weeks and months prior to 9/11, then the attacks would have been thwarted. Our Hitch loves to disparage Messrs Tenet ( "a loser") and Clark (Hitch thought the description of him as "an egotistical pain in the ass" seemed fair), but while the Bushies slept, they did do their best to sound the alarm.
But what if, under a Democratic administration, 9/11 had happened anyway? Well, with Al Gore in the driving seat, at least we might had a president that followed these principles:
Let's just hope he doesn't turn out like this for the inauguration! — Hitch in his "Moor Mud Mask" at the Four Seasons.
Over the New Year break, Neil Scott of Glasgow came across Hitch's makeover in Vanity Fair and decided it was worth posting about. Although he starts out fairly mean, he has some words of praise later on for Hitch and a favorable comparison against his clean living younger sibling.
It is difficult to write about Christopher Hitchens without the piece becoming ad hominem. His bloated frame weighs on every word, his sneering personality is infused in every thought, and his drink-soaked belligerence adds sparkle to every column he writes.
Yesterday I stumbled across this series of articles by Hitchens describing the lengths his Vantiy Fair colleagues have gone to in order to keep him alive. Celebrated for his capacity to drink whilst staying productive, Hitchens has become a caricature drunkard in a country full of people obsessed with living forever. He has found his niche in opposition to such Americans and seems very happy there … well, except for the wheezing, the burst capillaries, and the obesity.
Hitchens has set his stall out as a contrarian and won’t be moved. Whatever it is, he’s against it. Think invading Iraq was a mistake, he doesn’t. Think smoking is bad for you, he thinks it’s great. Think going for a run gives you a burst of serotonin, well fuck you Hitchens is getting a taxi to the bar and is ordering pre-dinner cocktails. It must be pretty unsustainable in the long run, which is why, bankrolled by Condé Nast, he has quietly submitted to the full Hollywood rejuvenation treatment.
On the pretext of writing a book review, Hitch has used his perch at The Atlanticthis month to talk about Barack Obama, who will doubtless be pleased to learn that he has a charm that goes beyond the superficial and that he also has certain feline qualities. In short, Christopher wants to bring back the "cat" — although not as a new toy for the amusement of the boys in black against the boys in orange across the length and breadth of America's very own Gulag Archipelago, nor in the shape of the bog-standard four-legged moggie or even the celebrated Maine coon. No, this jive-assed honky is out hustling for a revival of that old mammalian stand in for a male human being that used to often be found in the company of adjectives like cool, hep, crazy, smart, fat and scaredy. From what little I hear of recent US street or movie conversation, the most popular synonyms these days are "mother-somethingorother-er" and "sonofa-whatsit," but I gotta admit to being so absolutely way uncool that you could boil a kettle on me.
Exploited perhaps to greatest effect by James Baldwin, the word I have in mind is cat. Some of you will be old enough to remember it in real time, before the lugubrious and nerve-racking days when people never knew from one moment to the next what expression would put them in the wrong: the days of Negro and colored and black and African American and people of color. After all of this strenuous and heated and boring discourse, does not the very mien of our new president suggest something lithe and laid-back, agile but rested, cool but not too cool? A “cat” also, in jazz vernacular, can be a white person, just as Obama, in some non–Plessy v. Ferguson ways, can be. I think it might be rather nice to have a feline for president, even if only after enduring so many dogs. (Think, for one thing, of the kitten-like grace of those daughters.) The metaphor also puts us in mind of a useful cliché, which is that cats have nine lives—and an ability to land noiselessly and painlessly on their feet.
On top of that, cats can also lick their own genitals, catch mice, and pop into and out of bags with more finesse than Olga Korbut in her prime. And when they're in heat, they jump around like they're standing on a hot tin roof. No, Hitch, this just will not do! Inviting us to look at Barak Obama as any kind of animal, no matter how furry, can only be interpreted as a sign of disrespect for the dude. And while stereotypes can be very useful, I think it's a bit too early yet to be shoe-horning the President-Elect into an image that's one part Louis Farrakhan, two parts Sammy Davis Junior and three parts Jerry Lewis. As for the kitten-like grace of "those" daughters, here's hoping most earnestly that Hitch isn't about to go the way of Garry Glitter. One doesn't like even to think such thoughts, but it's the times we live in. A parish priest can't even pat a choirboy on the head anymore.
Vernacular alternatives for "man" (as in the male of the human species) abound in English as in just about every major language. While the Mango Mango tribe of the upper Amazon may be able to get by with referring to their fellow Mango Mangos as plain "mango", the British are spoilt for choice with "fellow", "chap," "geezer," "bloke," "john," charlie," and even, in and around Mayfair and South Kensington, "gentleman." And for the most part, such words are neutral with respect to the speaker's opinion of their subject and merely reflect the ambience they choose to infuse into their own personality. The denizens of God's Country (the land of Oz) are also fond of "bloke" although they are even more fond of unflatteringly descriptive terms includng "bastard," "bludger," "galah," or "stickybeak" whenever they can get away with them. What Aussie jackaroo in his right mind would talk about two English men when he has "two pommie shitheads" at his disposal?
The Americans — at least the "square" Americans — are the poor cousins in this respect, preferring "guy" as a more casual form of "man" on most occasions, although in some strata of society the "mother" and "son" idioms mentioned above may be used either neutrally or with genuine affection. Like the equally jazzy, "dude", "cat" is, as Hitch implies, rather out of vogue these days, but it is still going strong in the music world, and can often be heard on the lips of the upstanding members of the jazz and blues and rock communities. However, like its fellow synonyms, "cat" doesn't attempt to describe a man; it merely identifies one while marking out the speaker as a certain kind of guy/chap/fellow himself. And Hitch, as we all know, just ain't a "cat" kinda cat. He's always been very much a "chap" sort of chap even if he suppresses this on the other side of the pond for the sake of Anglo-American relations. He may have hung out once or twice in the shadows at Ronnie Scott's back when the Kray twins were haunting Soho, but he never gave no one no jive, and he probably never even let it all hang out.
Hence, in proposing that we take the dust off "cat" in order to talk about Barack, Hitch is revealing more about himself than about his purported subject.
I'm well known for my pedantry scrupulous attention to detail, and in this review my antennae were set a-tingling by what they flagged up as two minor offenses. Firstly, the idea of Jewish as a skin color or racial designation:
It’s this same catlike lightness and gentle raillery that I believe communicated itself subliminally to many white and brown and Jewish voters, and even to those like myself who detest the idea of voting with the epidermis.
Of course, we all know what he means, or do we? And secondly, there's the matter of what Lloyd George said:
It was, I think, Lloyd George who said of Lord Derby that, like a cushion, he bore the imprint of whoever had last sat upon him.
Hitch got the two names right, although the words in question are also attributed to Lord Haig, but Hitch's mutated version departs from the original while remaining too close to it to form a decent paraphrase. The correct quotation is, "Like a cushion he always bore the impress of the last man who had sat on him." Hitch does, however, take pains to point out that the description does not apply to Obama, who he thinks, by contrast, " treads so lightly and deftly that all the impressions he has so far made are alarmingly slight." He needn't be so anxious. Most Americans have been burdened for long enough by bad dog presidents who leave a trail of dirty paw marks over everything they come into contact with. Right now, someone who can do the job while walking across rice paper and leaving no trace may be just the kind of cat they are looking for.
Thanks to O'Malley, Duchess, Scat Cat and the boys, and dear old Uncle Walt.
|
Gerald Kaufman condemns Israel in the UK House of Commons
British Labour Party MP Sir Gerald Kaufman has made an excellent speech in the House that covers the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, accuses the Israelis of acting like Nazis in Gaza, being not just war criminals but fools, and calls for a total arms ban on Israel. Unlike our Hitch, Sir Gerald is a real Jew who had a real orthodox Jewish upbringing and a real Yiddisha grandmother who was shot dead in her bed by a real Nazi stormtrooper in German-occupied Poland. It must have taken considerable courage for Sir Gerald to have used such strong language in condemning Israeli actions and especially to use the "Nazi" analogy. But lamentably the ongoing horror of Gaza, which can be compared without too much hyperbole to the Warsaw Ghetto under sunnier skies, has made such language apt.
There is something Biblically barbaric about keeping a civilian population under a long-term seige and then the assaulting the population with weapons of war. Bombing raids on urban areas tend either to be one-off affairs, or else, where the same place has been targeted repeatedly, the most vulnerable people have been able to evacuate. This has not been the case with Gaza, where 1.5 million people have been trapped on a narrow strip of land at a population density higher than in some US cities.
And finally, for those who can stomach it — and I know what weak stomachs some of our tough -as-nails Hitchhuggers have — here's a dose of unmitigated Galloway, who contrasts the British government's inaction on Gaza with the its active condemnation of the Ruskies over South Ossetia. The next time George debates Hitch, I fully expect it to be with knuckle-dusters and razorblades on both sides.
At about 10 minutes into this recent conversation between former Nation buddies Eric and Christopher, our Hitch makes a very curious argument about why Saddam couldn't be trusted back in 2003. He relies on Hillary Clinton's integrity.
On the floor of the Senate, she said that from her own experience of being in the White House, she could testify that Saddam Hussein was indeed a supporter and armer of Al Qaeda and similar groups, that he was someone who could never be trusted to have disarmed, and so forth. She put her whole reputation on this point. And, as you know, with very disasterous consequences for her standing among the party rank and file. But knowing that that was likely, it's very surprising — wouldn't it be surprising? — if she was doing or saying these thing insincerely.
Note the embedded question in that last sentence. It's a dead giveaway. And through it, Hitch is effectively saying, "Hey, come on, you don't really think I'm spraying out total bullshit in all directions, do ya? This is serious and sincere speculation here, honest!"
However, most readers are well aware that Hitch has for many many years made a veritable career out of rubbishing the very idea that Hillary had any integrity to begin with. Here's a choice example covering the same Iraq issue, as explained by Hitch in January 2008 in Slate:
During the Senate debate on the intervention in Iraq, Sen. Clinton made considerable use of her background and "experience" to argue that, yes, Saddam Hussein was indeed a threat. She did not argue so much from the position adopted by the Bush administration as she emphasized the stand taken, by both her husband and Al Gore, when they were in office, to the effect that another and final confrontation with the Baathist regime was more or less inevitable. Now, it does not especially matter whether you agree or agreed with her about this (as I, for once, do and did). What does matter is that she has since altered her position and attempted, with her husband's help, to make people forget that she ever held it. And this, on a grave matter of national honor and security, merely to influence her short-term standing in the Iowa caucuses. Surely that on its own should be sufficient to disqualify her from consideration? Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: The case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut.
Surely, if such behavior disqualified Hillary from consideration for public office, as Hitch insists, then it would equally disqualify her as a reliable or credible authority on the threat status of Saddam Hussein. I for one was surprised that a man who has been called to the bar as often as Chirstopher would rely upon such an easily discredited witness, and the whole fiasco invites speculation as to whether his star witness—that icon of integrity Ahmed Chalabi—is no longer willing to testify.
"It's a repeat." "A repeat of the Holocaust?" "Yeah." "How?" "Umm ... we're being persecuted ... again ... for like the trillionth time ever."
While our beloved Hitch remains mired in his obsession with Hillary, a few other other more conventional journalists are out pounding the streets engaging in actual journalism by chasing stories that really deserve to be seen and heard. Prominent among them is Max Blumenthal, who has just put together what I'm sure you'll agree is an amazing video of interviews with people attending the 10,000-strong pro-Israel rally in New York on the 11th of January. The video is called Bomb a Ghetto, Raise a Cheer.
No one I spoke to could seem to find any circumstance in which they would begin to question Israel’s war. No number of civilian deaths, no displays of extreme suffering -- nothing could deter their enthusiasm for attacking one of the most vulnerable populations in the world with the world’s most advanced weaponry. There are no limits, no matter what Israel does, no matter how it does it.
I must admit that I had been hoping for a more kinder, gentler Hitchens in 2009, what with his Obama vote and vocal opposition to waterboarding amongst other things of late, so it was disappointing to find him cravenly defending Israel's latest mass-murdering rampage against children and other civilians in occupied Gaza. In 2006, during Israel's 5th invasion of Lebanon in just the last few decades, Hitchens did manage to find it in himself to criticize "the extreme unwisdom of the Bush administration in having allowed if not encouraged the Olmert government to pursue a policy of wide retaliation across Lebanon" and "the incompetence and cruelty of Israel's highly visible actions," but sadly this time his response has been entirely devoid of any principled criticism of Israel's criminal and aggressive behaviour in this newest crisis. Once an admirable champion of the Palestinians and their struggle for self-determination, and co-author of a fine book with the late Edward Said highlighting these issues, it looks like Hitchens has now decided to throw the Palestinians under the bus and heartily join in with those who support their destruction and politicide.
HH: Is there a way out of this current battle, this current war that doesn’t involve the defeat of Hamas?
CH: No…oh no, just…sorry, I spoke too soon. Not that doesn’t involve the defeat of Hamas. No, that’s a separate imperative.
HH: Yup.
CH: Is there a way out in general? I think actually, I think no. I think the time when there could have been a settlement along the two state line, for example, is in the past. I think it died when Rabin was murdered by the Jewish right wing.
HH: So what does that mean?
CH: It means a very long and very bitter apocalyptic war. This is now I think the fifth generation of…
HH: Happy New Year to you as well. That’s a…
CH: No, no, and if you think this is bad, you haven’t seen anything yet. This is, I think, the fifth generation now of Palestinians who have known either dispossession or exile or occupation. And what they’re taught by their mullahs, and what a huge number of them appear now to believe is that there’s no need for a settlement, because demographically, they will outbreed the Israelis and in point of violence, they will outkill them. They’re more willing to die than Israelis are to kill.
So for Hitchens to claim that the only option now is an "apocalyptic war" to the finish is pretty twisted and disgusting. For shame Hitchens for abandoning and betraying the Palestinians with this fatuous and cruel drivel.
Patrick McGoohan, best known for his leading role in the sixties cult series The Prisoner, but who was also superb as the Warden in Escape from Alcatraz, has died at the age of 80. The Prisoner was definitely a subversive show, and anyone who has been engrossed in as opposed to being grossed out by it must surely have been inoculated against much of the propaganda put out by the Warriors on Terror. So on that account alone we owe a great debt to Mr. McGoohan for dreaming the whole thing up, as well as to Sir Lew Grade for providing the financing.
The video above is the first part of an interview in which McGoohan talks to Warner Troyer about the making of The Prisoner and how we are all (and this was back in from 1977) prisoners of society and its rules and norms. And when you think about it, this puts a whole new twist on HRC's idea that it takes a village to raise a child. Finally, one way in which Hitchwatching (or any other kind of political observation) resembles life in the Village is that, as Number Six would have put it, it's a matter of finding out "who are the prisoners and who are the wardens." That's something we can all contemplate as we get ready for the inauguration of YOUR new Number Two, YOUR duly and popularly elected representative who will take charge of YOUR Global Village after George the Global Village Idiot finally retires to Bedlam, Crawford or Uraquay.
Hi guys, for all those who feel like the last administration and particularly the last two years have felt totally absurd. Where "rendition" is a friendly tour through the prisons of Egypt, where "the 540 worst of the worst" at Guantanamo are actually the "120 not really so bad so can we just get the f*k rid of them now", where CH spends the same emotional investment on his crack waxing as his WaterBoarding(TM). I give you this:
January 27th (Lewis Carroll's birthday) is the fifth annual "Rabbit Hole Day," wherein bloggers and journallers change their blogging style for 24h. January 27th is the birthday of Lewis Carrol, author of ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND. Alice fell down a rabbit hole into a place where everything had changed and none of the rules could be counted on to apply anymore. I say, let's do the same: January 27th, 2005 should be the First Annual LiveJournal Rabbit Hole Day. When you post on that Thursday, instead of the normal daily life and work and news and politics, write about the strange new world you have found yourself in for the day, with its strange new life and work and news and politics. Are your pets talking back at you now? Has your child suddenly grown to full adulthood? Does everyone at work think you're someone else now? Did Bush step down from the White House to become a pro-circuit tap-dancer? Did Zoroastrian missionaries show up on your doorstep with literature in 3-D? Have you been placed under house arrest by bizarre insectoid women wielding clubs made of lunchmeat? Let's have a day where nobody's life makes sense anymore, where any random LJ you click on will bring you some strange new tale. Let's all fall down the Rabbit Hole for 24 hours and see what's there. It will be beautiful. Mark your calendars: January 27th is Rabbit Hole Day (via Warren Ellis) via BOING BOING
I feel like I've been down the rabbit hole since 911, however, like Mozart, 27 Jan is my birthday (and because I had a very belated sweet spot for Grace Slick and White Rabbit) so please help celebrate the insanity of the last few years in a positive way.
The usually very reliable watch dog of things disgusting in American Right Wing Media Media Matters has today given pride of place to our Chris for his endless attacks on the Clintons.
"Summary: Christopher Hitchens made another appearance on MSNBC and again targeted the Clintons, claiming: "No other president has had a senator on hand in the Senate who does favors for businessmen who are later found to have given large donations from upstate New York to the Clinton Foundation. Is it a case of buy one, get one free? I would maintain that it is." But neither Hitchens nor 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue host David Shuster pointed out that according to The New York Times article to which Hitchens was referring, Hillary Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines "said that Mrs. Clinton did not solicit the donation from" the businessman "or discuss it with him or anyone on his behalf, and that she was unaware of its timing and size until last month."
As Media Matters for America has documented, MSNBC hasrepeatedlyhosted Hitchens to make false or baseless statements to smear the Clintons.
And for pure chutzpa you cant go past this quote.
"It's a needless embarrassment to our foreign policy -- to our country, in fact. I don't know why the president is doing this to himself. It's also handing the secretary-ship to someone who has political ambitions of her own, that are not congruent with his, which is a sordid and boring thing to have to watch. We've already just been through all that. And it exposes us to the charge that foreign governments and shady businessmen can buy influence on American foreign policy, and that that charge is not groundless."
So for Chris it's yet another example of his enduring ability to hate and his blindness to the crimes of the current dying administration. It appears that 2009 sees him in the illustrious company of Hannity (never met a wetback I could trust) and Savage (all gays are sick).
Sorry for not being around folks, here in the antipodes we have the happy coincidence of Christmas and New Year happening at the start of summer. Pretty much the whole country heads to the beach and goes camping and fishing, I was, happily, no exception.
However, I have not been totally idle in an non internet sense
(For any Sonic-stalkers out there, I am in the video.....)
Of the many dozens of articles I've read this past two weeks on the Israel/Palestine issue, the one reproduced below, authored by Gideon Levy and published in Haaretz is the one that has made the strongest impression. As we await Hitch's next SLATE piece, which unless he's chickening out completely will have to focus directly on the actual killing and terrorizing of the civillians of Gaza by the Israel "Defense" Forces, it seems only fair and proper that we have something reasonable, ethical and sane to measure the Hitch worldview against.
This war, perhaps more than its predecessors, is exposing the true deep veins of Israeli society. Racism and hatred are rearing their heads, as is the impulse for revenge and the thirst for blood. The "inclination of the commander" in the Israel Defense Forces is now "to kill as many as possible," as the military correspondents on television describe it. And even if the reference is to Hamas fighters, this inclination is still chilling.
The unbridled aggression and brutality are justified as "exercising caution": the frightening balance of blood - about 100 Palestinian dead for every Israeli killed, isn't raising any questions, as if we've decided that their blood is worth one hundred times less than ours, in acknowledgement of our inherent racism.
Rightists, nationalists, chauvinists and militarists are the only legitimate bon ton in town. Don't bother us about humaneness and compassion. Only at the edges of the camp can a voice of protest be heard - illegitimate, ostracized and ignored by media coverage - from a small but brave group of Jews and Arabs.
Alongside all this, rings another voice, perhaps the worst of all. This is the voice of the righteous and the hypocritical. My colleague, Ari Shavit, seems to be their eloquent spokesman. This week, Shavit wrote here ("Israel must double, triple, quadruple its medical aid to Gaza," Haaretz, January 7): "The Israeli offensive in Gaza is justified ... Only an immediate and generous humanitarian initiative will prove that even during the brutal warfare that has been forced on us, we remember that there are human beings on the other side."
To Shavit, who defended the justness of this war and insisted that it mustn't be lost, the price is immaterial, as is the fact that there are no victories in such unjust wars. And he dares, in the same breath, to preach "humaneness."
Does Shavit wish for us to kill and kill, and afterward to set up field hospitals and send medicine to care for the wounded? He knows that a war against a helpless population, perhaps the most helpless one in the world, that has nowhere to escape to, can only be cruel and despicable. But these people always want to come out of it looking good. We'll drop bombs on residential buildings, and then we'll treat the wounded at Ichilov; we'll shell meager places of refuge in United Nations schools, and then we'll rehabilitate the disabled at Beit Lewinstein. We'll shoot and then we'll cry, we'll kill and then we'll lament, we'll cut down women and children like automatic killing machines, and we'll also preserve our dignity.
The problem is - it just doesn't work that way. This is outrageous hypocrisy and self-righteousness. Those who make inflammatory calls for more and more violence without regard for the consequences are at least being more honest about it.
You can't have it both ways. The only "purity" in this war is the "purification from terrorists," which really means the sowing of horrendous tragedies. What's happening in Gaza is not a natural disaster, an earthquake or flood, for which it would be our duty and right to extend a helping hand to those affected, to send rescue squads, as we so love to do. Of all the rotten luck, all the disasters now occurring in Gaza are manmade - by us. Aid cannot be offered with bloodstained hands. Compassion cannot sprout from brutality.
Yet there are some who still want it both ways. To kill and destroy indiscriminately and also to come out looking good, with a clean conscience. To go ahead with war crimes without any sense of the heavy guilt that should accompany them. It takes some nerve. Anyone who justifies this war also justifies all its crimes. Anyone who preaches for this war and believes in the justness of the mass killing it is inflicting has no right whatsoever to speak about morality and humaneness. There is no such thing as simultaneously killing and nurturing. This attitude is a faithful representation of the basic, twofold Israeli sentiment that has been with us forever: To commit any wrong, but to feel pure in our own eyes. To kill, demolish, starve, imprison and humiliate - and be right, not to mention righteous. The righteous warmongers will not be able to allow themselves these luxuries.
Anyone who justifies this war also justifies all its crimes. Anyone who sees it as a defensive war must bear the moral responsibility for its consequences. Anyone who now encourages the politicians and the army to continue will also have to bear the mark of Cain that will be branded on his forehead after the war. All those who support the war also support the horror.
The following tidbit appeared in today's Observer. This should give us Hitchwatchers something to look forward to this year.
A resumption of hostilities in the battle of the Hitchens brothers. Christopher (atheist; went to Oxford) published a book called God Is Not Great in 2007 and is now working on an autobiography. Peter (practising Anglican; didn't go to Oxford) has just signed a contract to write a volume of his own about God, to be published by Continuum in September. Friends suggest it is - in part - an attack on his brother: "Peter is determined his book should be published before Christopher's memoir."
Posted at Stabler's request, from a link provided by Angrysoba, these three videos form a 30-minute segment in which Christopher Hitchens and Eric Alterman discuss Iraq War-related issues in response to questions from the ever-gracious Charlie Rose.
We're grateful to berkeleyguy0 for making these and many other Hitch appearances available on YouTube.
In the interest of Common ground, I offer my new YouTube film "Barani Plays With Her Grandma's Face." I believe this film not only argues for Hitchens position on evolution, it serves as a perfect allegory for his relationship with "The Nation."
Two questions remain: Which is Which? And also, "Who evolved From Who?
Many years ago (anyone know which year?), Bill Maher did a show to which he invited a chirpy Hitch — then in the last flashes of puberty, but I swear he still wears that same shirt — along with radio host Dennis Prager, the Kiss guy Gene Simmons, and lastly but definitely not leastly, Whoppi Goldberg — a philosopher who I admire greatly for such observations as (and I'm quoting from memory here folks, so it's OK to get it wrong), "Getting on with other people is so difficult because they're not you."
In this chat, the subject was the Vietnam War (Whoppi and CH were against it!) and Gene said that there are times when you've got to stamp your foot down. In reply, Hitch said:
On who is this foot to be stamped down? You say lives had to be lost to prove your point. Well, just take the case of Senator [Bob] Kerrey. That's 13 old ladies and women and children. Did their lives have to be lost to make this point that the United States Should [inaudible]? No, I don't think so. By 1968, Robert MacNamara and Lyndon Johnson and all the people running the war had all said to their friends in the Senate and their friends in the CIA and the FBI, 'This war is over, it's lost, and we should never have got into it. But we can't break that news to the American people yet.' Now how is that going to sound to people who's sons were lost in Vietnam after the war had been given up on by the political class?
Then Whoppi talks about those killed in the Vietnam being wasted lives, and Maher (how I'd love to see that guy dropped by parachute behind enemy lines with a map and compass, a machine gun and a bunch of hand grenades!) talks about how wasted lives are sometimes unwasted when they prove a point. To which Whoppie responds: "Unless you have a damn good reason to be somewhere, don't ask my brother to go and do it." To which the Hich responds, "Absolutely!"
Later Hitch makes the following speech.
If your family has names on that (Vietnam) wall, you're entitled to say you were lied to about it and they were not just wasted; you're entitled to say that they were murdered by the state.... I think that's the least you can say.
And as the video cuts out, Hitch is dismissing Maher's claim that Mao killed millions with a curt, "That's history's problem." Aaaah, such halcyon days!
I happened across the above video recently where Maher was defending the Vietnam war and Hitchens was criticizing it. It is a bizarro moment because in more recent discussions I have seen between Hitchens and Maher about the Iraq war, they are in the opposite position. Hitchens is for the war; Maher is against. It floors me particularly because the arguments are essentially the same for the war, the actors are different.
Maher, when supporting the war in Vietnam, feels the need to stop the advance of communism. Hitchens, when supporting the war in Iraq, feels the need to stop the advance of Islamic extremenism. In both pro-arguments, the particular war is seen in the context of a larger war of civilizations....
One or two of my best friends are recovering Israelis, so I would be the last one to cast stones on this one. But The Angry Arab has come up with what I think is a valid point about what he sarcastically describes as Hitch's "sophisticated analysis" of this awful Gaza business.
"It is only when one begins to grasp all the foregoing that one understands exactly how disgusting and squalid is the behavior of the Hamas gang." And just like racists who claims that their "best friends are blacks", Hitchens says: "Before the new year, I talked to one or two knowledgeable Palestinians..." So did you speak to one or two Palestinians, I am not sure here. You are not able to tell one Palestinians from two? But don't blame him: he is still mourning the end of the Bush-Cheney regime.
It's nice to see Henry Kissinger looking so well, and interesting that he and Hitch are seeing eye to eye on Gaza, although Henry, as you'd expect of a veteran statesman, is far more diplomatic. Most notable of all, at the end of this scene, taken at the NYSE where he was celebrating the 30th anniversary of US-China relations, Henry says that President-Elect Obama "can give a new impetus to American foreign policy partly because the reception to him is so extraordinary around the world. I think his task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in this period when really a New World Order can be created—it's a great opportunity."
Here's hoping this New World Order comes with full employment and affordable healthcare for all!
You never seem to see Heinz and Hitch together in public, which is surprising in a way since they move in much the same lofty circles these days. Many are the TV chat show hosts, event producers and society hostesses who must have agonized over how to keep these two intellecutal leviathans apart. Or could it be that, like Bruce Wayne and Batman....... Naargh! It just doesn't bear thinking about.
A little late, but well-meaning, Christopher Hitchens has finally weighed in on the Gaza issue. And folks, what he's saying ain't pretty. First off, he says this massacre was inevitable:
So, that is why this nasty confrontation is taking place this time instead of at another time. But each miniature of the picture also implies its own enlargement, which in turn suggests that if the latest Gaza war hadn't come at this time, it would certainly have come at another.
Apparently it's got something to do with Israeli perceptions, surrounded as they are by hostile neighbors and by all those ethnically cleansed native Palestinians who have refused to fade away. So who can blame them for lashing out occasionally? But most of all it's the fault of Hamas, a bunch of fanatics who just don't know how to play fair. If only Yasser Arafat was still in charge:
It is only when one begins to grasp all the foregoing that one understands exactly how disgusting and squalid is the behavior of the Hamas gang. It knows very well that sanctions are injuring every Palestinian citizen, but—just like Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq—it declines to cease the indiscriminate violence and the racist and religious demagogy that led to the sanctions in the first place.
What Hitch doesn't note, is that just like Saddam's regime in Iraq, the Hamas gang and any "citizens" in the general vicinity are damned whatever they do. Cease fire or no cease fire, WMD or no WMD—it makes not a blind bit of difference to the aspiring global hegemons in the District of Colonia and the Town of Tel-a-Fib. The nonpersons of Iraq and their fellow unpeople in Gaza have been pencilled in for rubbing out — collective cultural genocide — and a fighting chance of individual euthanasia by lottery draw, with winning tickets to be delivered by one or other of the Four Horsemen. Like the tenants of the Town of Harlow in the old Genesis song, in the interests of humanity they've been told they must go. Hitch told us before that the Gazans were committing suicide by voting for Hamas. What he didn't say was that it was going to be an assisted suicide without the patients' consent.
After taking his readers' attention away from the fact that the Israelis are out-Clintoning Bill Clinton by committing genocide as part of an election campaign—in a sort of vastly magnified Ricky Ray Rector execution with added chutzpah and no lemonade, Hitch then goes on at considerable length to paint the very possibly true but totally unrelated evils of various Muslim regimes and movements in vivid colors, spending so much effort on drawing our attention to how corrupt and mendacious they are that despite an extended column, he finds himself with no space left to mention the most essential basic fact in this case — that it is evil for the State of Israel to be indiscriminately killing and wounding Palestinian civilians, carrying out air strikes on schools, police stations and hospitals in built-up areas, destroying ambulances, using white phosphorus to shake 'n' bake their victims, denying entry to the Red Cross and Red Crescent, as well as to media reporters, and generally acting like imperial stormtroopers overdosing on testosterone, fantasies of race supremacy, and speed.
So this is how far the termites (very educational vid!) have spread! Not only have they eaten away at his brain to the point where his head resembles a a coconut drained of milk, they've chewed through so much grey matter that they are obviously affecting the old boy's optic nerves. Talk about eyeless in Gaza. He knows very well that the current slaughter is indefensible and unconscionable, regardless of who provoked whom, but he is quite unable to acknowledge the plain fact that Israel is committing crimes against humanity. Nevertheless, knowing that he can't get away with total silence on what has become the world's most high profile issue of the new year, he has opted for a protracted performance of to-ing and thro-ing and humming and aarh-ing and harping on about matters of questionable relevance, while minimizing the culpability of those who planned and ordered first the siege and now the invasion of Gaza, and he has willfully blinded himself to the historical framework that underlies the entire Zioinist enterprise in Israel. (And a good place to start might be this 1921 article on Political Zionism from the archives of the Atlantic.) This stance of looking the other way and blaming the victims as their mass murder is perpetrated makes him barely less than an apologist for the murderers, a role he must feel quite comfortable in after all the practice he's had with Afghanistan and Iraq.
I say "barely less" because some of his fellow scribes who work from the same set of talking points are much more positive about applauding the blood sport. For example, Charles "Hammer of the Krauts" Krauthammer, has the temerity to speak of Israel's moral clarity in Gaza:
Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating.
Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life that, risking the element of surprise, it contacts enemy noncombatants in advance to warn them of approaching danger. Hamas, which started this conflict with unrelenting rocket and mortar attacks on unarmed Israelis - 6,464 launched from Gaza in the last three years - deliberately places its weapons in and near the homes of its own people.
This has two purposes. First, counting on the moral scrupulousness of Israel, Hamas figures civilian proximity might help protect at least part of its arsenal. Second, knowing Israelis have new precision weapons that may allow them to attack nonetheless, Hamas hopes that inevitable collateral damage - or, if it is really fortunate, an errant bomb - will kill large numbers of its own people, for which the world will blame Israel....
You can always tell when Charlie is bullshitting. You can see his lips moving! But seriously folks, I know there are some quantum physicists who subscribe to the many worlds theory, but it must be a really weird alternative universe in which anybody, let alone Hamas people, can afford the audacity of counting on the moral scrupulousness of Israel. Back in my version of reality, I'm not going to try to stretch this particular episode of barbarism into a rough fit with any others in history, as every genocide is unique. But I will note that last February the Israeli deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai warned that the Palestinians "will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves" — a comment that suggests, far more clearly than anything the Iranian President has ever uttered, a willingness on the part of the Israeli regime to commit genocide. The economic strangulation of Gaza by the Israelis since the election of Hamas two years ago also shows clear evidence of premeditation to commit genocide. And they may very well get away with it too. After all, who remembers now the destruction of the Armenians?
For commentary on the Israeli use of white phosphorus in Gaza, see Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque (and please read it right to the end).
And for a musician's take, check out Brian's Eno's short and succinct account Stealing Gaza in Counterpunch. Then come back and read Hitch's piece again and if you don't weep or puke, you are badly in need an enema. Take it away, Brian.
Gaza is now an experiment in provocation. Stuff one and a half million people into a tiny space, stifle their access to water, electricity, food and medical treatment, destroy their livelihoods, and humiliate them regularly...and, surprise, surprise - they turn hostile. Now why would you want to make that experiment?
Because the hostility you provoke is the whole point. Now 'under attack' you can cast yourself as the victim, and call out the helicopter gunships and the F16 attack fighters and the heavy tanks and the guided missiles, and destroy yet more of the pathetic remains of infrastructure that the Palestinian state still has left. And then you can point to it as a hopeless case, unfit to govern itself, a terrorist state, a state with which you couldn't possibly reach an accommodation.
And then you can carry on with business as usual, quietly stealing their homeland.
Many of us are still a bit hungover from the long break, and so I'm easing this blog gently into the New Year. Also, as today's Sunday, the day when Sonic, Bill O'Reilly, Anne Coulter and little old me turn our thoughts to spiritual things, what better time than now to contemplate God's creation? The above video features one Bible basher I would dearly love to see Hitch debate. It's such a rare pleasure to listen to someone who has the perfect combination of knowledge, understanding and subtlety to be able to interpret the Book of Genesis in a way that make it accessible to a generation raised on videogames.
Of course, these days not everyone believes in the creation. Indeed, many people have the audacity to laugh at those who do. This next video is the first of a series that examines the question of why this is the case.
Hitch's "name an ethical statement" challenge has gotten right up the nostrils of Donald Hank at Laigle's Forum, who points out that the Contrarian's choice of "ethical" rather than "good" indicates that he does not believe in good or evil. David further asserts that an atheist cannot believe in good vs evil because they are religious concepts, and then delivers the following lecture:
So first, let me remind you, Mr. Hitchens, that religion is not about ethics. It is about good and evil, and since you can’t define that and could not believe in the concept, you are disqualified to challenge anyone to “name an ethical statement or action, made or performed by a person of faith, that could not have been made or performed by a nonbeliever,” because you don’t define “ethical” the way we do. It is apples and oranges and is irrelevant.
Let’s look at “ethics” as interpreted by your kind: Peter Sanger [sic], a professor of “bioethics” at Princeton, says it is ethical to kill infants after they are born if they have birth defects.
Obviously, ethics in the eyes of atheists has nothing to do with standard traditional ethics or morality and it is misleading for someone like you to use it in a comparison with religious people because it suggests we would accept such nebulous usage, which of course we would not. You are using words randomly, without definition, and even if you defined them, other “ethicists” would certainly eventually challenge your definition in favor of their own. But if you are asking your audience to look at the world through an atheist’s eyes, then anything can be defined as ethical, so your challenge is meaningless, like your terms.
The real challenge is defining ethics in such a way that the definition sticks and can’t be manipulated at the hands of evil people. You would no doubt say “define evil,” whereupon I would say “define ethics. You used the word without definition.”
When you don’t believe in God, then all is in flux, eternally, and nothing could ever have a stable definition. Your definition of an ethical action today may not be the same as your definition tomorrow.
On top of all that, Donald shows some real mettle in throwing down a gauntlet and issuing a challenge to our hero:
First, define ethical, and then show how the fact that non-religious people can perform “ethical” actions, is evidence that there is no God.
The fact that non-religious people also do good is in fact hard evidence of what Paul wrote about the heathen following God’s laws spontaneously and taking their cue from the very universe to see and understand Him (Romans 1:18-20). You can ban the Bible but you can’t ban the universe, and it will proclaim Him.
The fact that non-believers are less altruistic (e.g., give less to charities) is hard evidence that religion is a better source of goodness than atheism.
Thus people who advocate atheism are undermining the greatest source of good known to man. Hitler’s strongest opponents were leaders of the Confessional Church and also a few courageous Catholics, some of whom were martyred for their stand.
Now, how does undermining the greatest source of good (or ethics) make people good (or ethical if you insist)?
Now it is clear that you refuse to use the word “good” and no doubt think that word is for the uneducated or superstitious.
If so, then in using the word “ethical” you are attempting to postulate an ethical society parallel to the good or godly society conceived of by ordinary people. But in that case, despite your great sophistry and excessive wordiness, you are in fact only imitating what godly people have already discovered 4,000 years ago.
Which leads to the question: If we religious folk are so inferior to you, why do you so slavishly imitate our concepts, going to great pains to rename them? I therefore further challenge you to construct a philosophical system that does not use parallel terms like “ethical,” in imitation of our term “good.” Go find your own way. Cut the umbilical cord once and for all. Your writings indicate we are irrelevant in your eyes. Prove you believe that. End this slavish obsession with the religious people whose vocabulary you despise....
Fighting words indeed! But will Hitch respond by breathing fire and giving this taunting sky-godder as good — sorry — as ethical as he gets? Or will he turn on his heels and flee like a coawardly dragon, tail between legs and leaving a long brown streak in his wake? Only time will tell.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
”
