Comrade Rakhmetov and Comrade Greywolf have already posted about the affair, but I think this audio stream deserves another visit: it's Hitch’s debate with Paul Edwards - the final, hilarious segment.
Hitchens has probably hurt the feelings of many Christians, and this radio guy sounds like he's genuinely hurt by Hitch's onslaught. Ol’ Hitch was probably intoxicated (a bottle of red wine, my guess), in a gutsy way. Hitch is right in this exchange, but he still comes across like an asshole. The poor SOB Paul Edwards was just trying to make friends with Hitch, but our popinjay would have none of it. Don't miss this classic.
Anyway, I guess that's so much for Hitch's reach-out program to the religious community.
"Leave me out of it...I won't put up with it. Up with which I won't put up!"
"Excuse me, you are my enemy...your preachments are evil, and you're an enemy of civilization."
That last line he actually said to the radio host. It's pretty awesome.
Having been alerted to Brummie Salma Yaqoob's latest video via Islamophobia Watch calling for the banning of a demonstration of the English Defence League (which is composed of BNP/NF types no matter how much they claim otherwise), it brought to mind Our Leader's call to "consider" banning the burka in the Daily News. Now, Hitchens hasn't seen fit to provide a video expounding this view, so we'll have to settle for a couple of efforts from his fellow radical atheist Pat Condell. He's a stand-up comedian! Keep in mind that Mr. Condell is not at all racist. The position of the Board of Directors of the Uptown Barber Shop is that the EDL should be allowed to demonstrate as long as they wear burkas. Submitted for your approval. QED. Indeed.
This must be the biggest story since Lindbergh landed in Paris — bigger even than Janet Jackson's exposed tit — and yet you'd never know because the eunuchs of the emasculated MSM have done their best to bury it. Well never mind. It's at times such as these that separate the real bloggers from the people who just have Facebook accounts. I am particularly grateful to Brad Friedman at The Brad Blog for working like a devil to keep reporting on the Sibel Edmonds story in the face of continuous apathy and stonewalling. After seven years of being subject to gag orders (which are still in place), the former FBI translator finally got to give a deposition under oath on August 8, at which names were named. The deposition came about due to a spat between Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH) and candidate David Krikorian, who issued a subpoena in Ohio for Sibel's testimony. As the Brad Blog tells it:
The deposition included criminal allegations against specifically named members of Congress. Among those named by Edmonds as part of a broad criminal conspiracy: Reps. Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Dan Burton (R-IN), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Bob Livingston (R-LA), Stephen Solarz (D-NY), Tom Lantos (D-CA), as well as an unnamed, still-serving Congresswoman (D) said to have been secretly videotaped, for blackmail purposes, during a lesbian affair.
High-ranking officials from the Bush Administration named in her testimony, as part of the criminal conspiracy on behalf of agents of the Government of Turkey, include Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Marc Grossman, and others.
During the deposition --- which we are still going through ourselves --- Edmonds discusses covert "activities" by Turkish entities "that would involve trying to obtain very sensitive, classified, highly classified U.S. intelligence information, weapons technology information, classified Congressional records...recruiting key U.S. individuals with access to highly sensitive information, blackmailing, bribery."...
Edmonds' on-the-record disclosures also include bombshell details concerning outed covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson's front company, Brewster Jennings. Edmonds alleges the front company had actually been shut down in August of 2001 --- three years prior to Bob Novak's public disclosure of the covert operative's identity --- following a tip-off to a wire-tap target about the true nature of the CIA front company. The cover was blown, Edmonds alleges, by Marc Grossman, who was, at the time, the third highest-ranking official in the U.S. State Department. Prior to that, Grossman served as ambassador to Turkey. He now works "for a Turkish company called Ihals Holding," according to Edmonds' testimony.
Hard as it may be to believe that Paul Wolfowitz, Neocon paragon, good friend of friend Hitchens, and "a bit bleeding heart" who "did nothing wrong" at the World Bank, would engage in a criminal conspiracy against US interests on behalf of agents of a foreign power, Brad says that the FBI has declared Sibel's classified allegations to be "credible," "serious," and "warrant[ing] a thorough and careful review by the FBI." For more information and the rest of the deposition on video, visit The Brad Blog.
Ms Edmonds was contracted by the FBI to translate and analyze documents and wiretap recordings it considered relevant to its criminal investigations from Turkish, Azerbaijani and Farsi into English. She apparently did her job too diligently and scrupulously, hence her subsequent muzzling and notoriety.
I encourage everyone who cares about present and future state the USA, or has a sufficiently long attention span to appreciate real-life spy thrillers, to take a closer look at Sibel Edmonds story. Wikipedia is as good a place as any to start.
Personally, I think it is too late to save the USA. The controlled demolition of the country has already begun, the momentum is building, and the remaining structural columns supporting society and the economy are being blasted away one Congressional vote and Presidential order at a time. After the whole lot lies in rubble, an official autopsy will declare it all to have been the result of too many moles burrowing in the basement. And there will be some truth in that.
In the following article posted at the Huffington Post on April 1, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach takes Christopher to task for a blood-libel against orthodox Jews. This is a serious charge and seriously made. And although we missed it at the time I think it deserves a wider audience among people who watch and read Hitchens. I haven't formed an opinion on whether Christopher's comments add up to a blood libel. I have seen numerous examples of Jewish settlers claiming the right to live anywhere in the Land of Israel on the basis that this land was given to the Jews by the Creator and numerous examples of Palestinian natives being dispossessed of their property, dignity and means of life by the forces of the Israeli occupation. But I see this as primarily a war of colonization between different ethnic groups with religious justifications as merely the icing on the cake. But when you start, as Christopher does, from the position that religion poisons everything, it is but a small step to ignoring the cake and seeing only the icing.
Christopher Hitchens and the Killer Jews By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
This past Shabbos my family and I hosted Rabbi and Mrs. Nachman Holtzberg, parents of Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, the head of Chabad in Mumbai who was brutally murdered with his wife Rivkah. You'd think that a family that watched their son and daughter-in-law slaughtered on TV by Islamic terrorists would feel hatred and a desire for revenge. But what this saintly father asked of our many guests was simply their participation in rebuilding Chabad of Mumbai so that his son's selfless work would continue.
What a shame Christopher Hitchens did not join us. It might have dissuaded from penning yet another ignorant and slanderous article about the murderous intent of orthodox Jews. To read Hitchens these days is to be transported to an alternate universe where religious Jews are often terrorists inspired by racist Jewish ideology that is fomented by their Rabbis. Of course, those who live in the real world and who never read about orthodox Jews setting off bombs in Bali and Baghdad might be a trifle confused by Hitchens' regular rants against Judaism.
You should be. Most of the time he is simply fabricating, like this famous quote taken from his 2007 book G-d is Not Great. "Dr. Baruch Goldstein... killed twenty-seven worshippers... While serving as a physician in the Israeli army he had announced that he would not treat non-Jewish patients, such as Israeli Arabs, especially on the Sabbath. As it happens, he was obeying rabbinic law in declining to do this, as many Israeli religious courts have confirmed." For this particular blood libel against Jewish courts Hitchens relied on a well- known hoax perpetrated by writer Israel Shahak and which was exposed as a fraud more than 40 years ago by Lord Immanuel Jakobovitz, Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth. This is the same Israel Shahak who once accused Jews of worshipping Satan. When I challenged Hitchens about his use of a well-known forgery, and when he could not cite a single other religious court to have ever ruled that a non-Jewish life could not be saved on the Sabbath, he wrote to me and agreed to amend the item in the next edition of his book.
He did not.
Now he is at it again, only this time he's outdone himself. Writing in the March 23rd edition of Slate, Hitchens argued that the religious settlers in Israel are preparing for a future where "Torah verses will also be found that make it permissible to murder secular Jews as well as Arabs" as they all coalesce together to make the West bank into an apocalyptic Jewish theocracy.
What makes Hitchens so sure that his vision of Jewish mass-murder is just around the corner?
He cites three proofs. First, Baruch Goldstein, whom he cites yet again. Second, Army Chief Rabbi Avichai Rontzski who 'said that the main reason for a Jewish doctor to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath... is to avoid exposing Diaspora Jews to hatred." And third, the story in Numbers 31 of how Moses commanded the Jews to slaughter the Midianites. Of the story Hitchens writes, "The nationalist rabbis who prepare Israeli soldiers for the mission seem to think that this book might be the world of G-d, in which case the only misinterpretation would be the failure to take it literally."
Now the fact that Hitchens must consistently fall back on Baruch Goldstein proves the very opposite of the point he is trying to make. Jewish religious terrorism is rare to non-existent. He must consistently use one lone attacker from 15 years ago and example of Jewish terrorism. More importantly, Goldstein has become a symbol to Jews everywhere of evil and is almost universally regarded as an abomination to the Jewish faith.
By contrast, many of our Muslim brothers and sisters and many clerics have the tragic habit of elevating suicide bombers to the rank of religious martyrs. But any Rabbi who was to praise a Jewish murderer would be fired from his post and banished from his community. The Torah is clear: 'Thou may not murder' (Exodus 20) and 'Thou shalt not take revenge' (Leviticus 19).
Second, no Biblical story of massacre, which is a tale and not a law, could ever be used to override the most central prohibition of the Ten Commandments and Biblical morality. Murder is the single greatest offense against the Creator of all life and no Jew would ever use a Biblical narrative of war or slaughter as something that ought to be emulated. In our time Churchill and Roosevelt, both universally regarded as moral leaders and outstanding men, ordered the wholesale slaughter of non-combatants in the Second World War through the carpet- bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin, and Tokyo. Truman would take it further by ordering the atomic holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How did men who are today regarded as righteous statesmen order such atrocities? They were of the opinion that only total war could end Nazi tyranny and Japanese imperial aggression. They did it in the name of saving life. Which is of course not to excuse their actions but rather to understand them in the context of the mitigating circumstances of the time. I do not know why Moses would have ordered any such slaughter even in the context of war. But I do know that the same Bible who relates the story also expressly forbids even the thought of such bloodshed ever being repeated.
Finally, the Talmud's debate as to whether a non-Jewish life may be saved on the Sabbath took place at a time when the Jews were subject to brutal Roman oppression and the non-Jews in question where cruel Roman centurions. Should we violate our religion to save the life of those who oppress us? It is remarkable that even then the Rabbis of the Talmud answered in the affirmative, mipnei darkei hashalom, because of the ways of peace. But whereas Hitchens quotes a Rabbi who translates this to mean, 'peace with our non-Jewish neighbors,' the Lubavitcher Rebbe explained it to mean that 'because all of Judaism is about love and peace.'
How sad that Hitchens, a self-proclaimed truth-teller and child of Orwell, has yet again ignored evidence clearly presented to him in pursuit of pre-existing prejudices.
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Hitch to his adopted country: I don't care what happens here
Hitch didn’t actually say that, of course, but if you look at his articles recently, especially in comparison to how furiously he wrote during the US presidential campaign, you’ll notice that they’re almost all about international issues, about his pet - often weird - interests abroad instead, rather than domestic concerns. Health care for Americans? Hitch hasn’t written anything. Or even said anything at all (to my knowledge). His latest column in Slate is a diatribe against the president of Iran’s choice for foreign minister. To me, this says more about Hitchens than anything else: he doesn’t really give a damn about Americans. He loves the idea of “America” (as a potential weapon) but does he care about our horrible economy, our abysmal health care system, our 10% unemployment rate? Of course not! He’s got all the money he needs from God is Not Great to pay his expensive mortgage for a long time coming.
So with America practically bankrupt, Hitch is still pushing for military aggression in Iran, and, who the fu*k knows where else. I’ve got a different idea: why don’t we close down the military and Hitch’s wars and use the money instead to feed people in America and abroad and perhaps create jobs by building vaster and better public transportation systems? Radical thought, I guess.
What a great leftist Hitch turned out to be. Peter Kropotkin would’ve been proud (not). Hitch is a traitor who still pretends to preach leftist ideology by actually claiming that it can come through American imperialism. If this ain’t fraud, folks, then what the hell is?
The fact that the American right now embraces Hitchens makes it even sadder, because he's now just using them also, just the same as he used the American left. Wake up, guys! This is all about Hitchens, and his superior wit and wisdom to us all! He is beyond right and left. He is the Einstein of Politics! That guy Mark, up above, was of course a worthy sacrifice to the cause of Julius Hitchens.
The Debate: The Catholic church is a force for good in the world.
Speakers for the motion: Archbishop John Onaiyekan, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, Nigeria; Rt Hon Anne Widdecombe MP, Conservative MP and Catholic convert.
Speakers agains the motion: Christopher Hitchens, Essayist, polemicist and author of God is Not Great and The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice; Stephen Fry, Actor, author, comedian and television presenter.
The Forecast: The Bishop is in tip-top condition and he's an expert in sharia law in Nigeria, while Ms Widdecombe is a real unholy terror — fearsome, formidable and ferocious. Expect a real bludgeoning with blood on the canvas, Hitch on the ropes, Fry in the pan, and the pair of them screaming "God help us! God save us!" by the end of Round 5. A bit like this next next scene, in fact.
The Representative Press guy thinks 9/11 was an Al-Qaeda job and that the Twin Towers fell due to structural failure, so he isn't by any definition a "truther". However, he does promote the view that the US was attacked on 9/11 because of its support for Israel's policies, which he also disaproves of. This has made him a lightning rod for some vicious and underhanded personal attacks from folks who don't want him to express such views.
Please take a look at the videos above and below to see why I support the Representative Press guy's courage, his video editing skills, and his indefatiguability.
As everyone on here knows, I have never hid my identity because, well, I'm reckless. But for those of you who do hide your identities, you may want to refer to this new information.
Some 'anon' guy was just sued for making negative remarks about a model. The court ordered Blogger.com to reveal his identity. Our Chris is no model, that's for sure, but he could still sue one of us inglourious basterds if he really wanted to. He doesn't want to though, because that would mean recognizing our existence, which is the absolute last thing he wants to do.
Still, I will sue the next troll who comes on here and disparages me (you hear me Louis? You want lawyers crawling down your spineless back?). I really will, so be careful, you lousy dipshits. We got your IP addresses, you scumsuckers. Try me.
Christopher went on ABC National Radio on August 16 and you can listen to what he had to say here. For those who prefer reading to listening, the transcript is available from the same web page.
In the early part of the show, Hitch talks at length about "the Axis of Evil" (what an infantile Newspeak lexicon the punditocracy is reduced to these days!) and goes into blood-curdling detail in telling the story of how Saddam Hussein seized absolute power in a Baathist version of the Night of the Long Knives:
Having confessed for himself and having begged to be executed for his crimes, having been reduced to a state of complete abjection, the man then says 'The following members of this Central Committee were with me in this plot', and he begins to read out their names, slowly, and as this happens you can see as the guards move, every time a name is mentioned and they grab the man and lead him out of the door. And after about a dozen of these, there's panic, sheer animal panic starts to spread, among those who haven't yet been named, and in the hope that they're not going to be they start screaming and jumping up and saying 'Glory to Saddam Hussein our leader; all praise to him the sun, the moon, the stars of Iraq' praying that it won't be them but of course there's nothing makes any difference, the harvest just goes on randomly. They're taken off the chessboard and taken out, and so half of them are gone and the rest are just limp and done for and almost dying with relief that it wasn't them.
It's the most extraordinary live show of a real for keeps political purge that you'll ever see. And then there's the second half which has been seen by much fewer people and was not shown on PBS where the surviving half are told to go out in the yard and are given guns and are told to shoot the convicted half. Now they're in the plot. Now they are cemented to the leadership....
When I used to go there in those days, it's often very difficult when you come out of a country like this, to explain to people quite what it's like when you're there; the atmosphere of terror, the look that comes into people's eyes when you mention the name of the leader, the absolute look of flash of panic, 'anything could happen to me now'. The person who spills their cup of coffee in the morning on a copy of the party paper that has the leader's picture on it, and everyone in the café goes completely quiet. He just desecrated a picture of the leader; the police are on their way now. You've just made the biggest mistake of your life, and it's very likely that your family will go to prison with you, and maybe they'll have to watch you being tortured, and if they do, they'll have to applaud. And if they have to watch you being executed they'll be later sent a bill for the bullets that were used to be fired into the back of your head because no-one's exempt.
The fateful assembly described above took place on 22 July 1979, and by that date Saddam had been in power in a first among equals sort of way for a decade after becoming deputy to President al-Bakr in the 1968 coup. Actually, we do have an idea of how hard Hitchens found it to explain to people outside about what life was life was like in Iraq because in 1976, while not exactly screaming, jumping up or yelling "Glory to the Great Leader", he revealed himself as quite an enthusiast, calling Saddam a man "who has sprung from being an underground revolutionary gunman to perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser."
While Hitchens was penning this paean, Amnesty International was monitoring Iraq through rather differently tinted glasses. In its report for 1975-76, it stated:
Iraq remains one of the most serious violators of human rights in the Middle East. Amnesty International continues to receive reports of arbitrary arrests routine torture, summary executions and inadequate legal safeguards It is however, difficult to give a comprehensive picture of political imprisonment because of the paucity of detailed and reliable information.
This is due largely to the secrecy which surrounds arrests, detentions and executions in Iraq. Equally, it is difficult to apply traditional AI techniques where information is so inadequate, and where the government tends to be highly sensitive about what it considers as interventions in its internal affairs.
There are no official or unofficial figures for the number of persons currently imprisoned for political reasons. Throughout the eight years of Baath Party rule, all opposition has been systematically suppressed, and has been considerably reduced as a result.
Later on, Christopher talks about his undisputed solidarity with the Kurds. He's a been consistent supporter of Kurdish rights and sovereignty for over thirty years now. But what irritated me was that he once again claimed that they were the largest people without a state of their own.
Moderator: There is a question here that asks if you were to wear a button defining your politics, what would it be? And I see you are in fact wearing something on your lapel this evening; radio listeners can't see that.
Christopher Hitchens: This is the flag of the largest people in the world who don't have a state of their own, the Kurds. There are 40 million Kurds we think in Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, some in Lebanon. It's the largest national ethnic group that doesn't have a State. The Kuwaiti royal family has its own vote at the United Nations; the Kurds, 40 million, don't have any representation at all. So I wear it in solidarity with them, and in solidarity with the autonomy that they've managed to build in liberated Northern Iraq.
Wrong! The Kurds are not the largest people in the world who don't have a state of their own — not by a long chalk. Larger stateless "national ethnic groups" include the Punjabis (88 million), the Telugu (84 million), the Javanese (80 million), the Wu (77 million), the Yue (71 million), the Marathi (68 million), the Tamils (66 million), and the Gujuratis (46 million). To add insult to injury, some of the above are not even recognized as ethnic groups at all, in the same way that Kurds were classified as "Mountain Turks". And let's not forget the biggest national ethnic group of them all, the Han, all 1,230 million of them, who are forced to lump in with over 300 million non-Han people.
Let me lift one last quotation from the interview just to go with today's illustration:
Moderator: We have a number of questions curiously enough about your favourite things. One wants to know things you can't live without when travelling; and one well-informed audience member of course wants to know what your favourite whisky is.
Christopher Hitchens: Well I don't see the difference between the two questions. [Laughter] The best blended Scotch in the history of the world which was also the favourite drink of the Iraqi Baath party as it is still in the Palestinian authority, and the Libyan dictatorship, and large branches of the Saudi Arabian royal family, Johnnie Walker Black. Breakfast of champions. Accept no substitutes.
There's much more to chew over in this little talk, or to yawn over if you've watched the Hitch strutting his funky stuff before. Hitch goes on about Iran, North Korea, religion, his upcoming trip to Poland, the Elgin Marbles, the Muslims, and how the next ME war is going to break out in Lebanon. But I trust you'll all agree that the Great Raconteur's true charm lies less in the tales he tells than in the way he tells 'em.
Fortunately they didn't taser him, so we can't call this a police brutality story, but it is a sobering thought that people can get pulled in for an ID check just for looking old, weird and unfashionable.
Bob Dylan had been taking an afternoon stroll as a way to relax before his appearance that night at the local stadium, when a resident of Long Branch, New Jersey (about a two-hour drive south of New York City) complained of a man 'acting suspiciously’
The incident began at 5 p.m. when the unnamed resident dialed 911 and claimed a man was wandering around the low-income, predominantly Latino neighborhood several blocks from the oceanfront, looking at houses.
Police arrived in the form of a 22-year-old female officer, who got out of her squad car, demanded to see some ID from the 68 year old ‘scraggly-looking’male.
Long Branch business administrator Howard Woolley said this past Friday, “I don’t think she was familiar with his entire body of work” – which could easily be considered a classic example of understatement in this case.
A second officer, also in his 20s, responded to assist the first officer. He, too, apparently was unfamiliar with Dylan, Woolley explained.
Mr. Dylan later said he assumed one or the other officers would at least recognize the name if not the face, but instead the first officer ordered him into the back of her squad car and took him to his hotel to check his story (as per New Jersey law, any civilian who is placed into the back of a police squad car, must be handcuffed first and remain so encumbered for the duration of the trip). The reaction of the staff of the hotel when the officer asked about the old guy in her backseat was so dramatic, she radioed the police station to ask her older colleagues if any of them knew who Bob Dylan was.
Meanwhile, that smug Neocon arse-licking sleazeball Justin Webb, the Beeb's man in America for the last eight years — my guess is they put him in to ensure no embarrassing questions were asked on the 9:00 News after 9/11 — has been packed off back to Blighty where he's suffering from Returning Expat Syndrome. Says Justin:
Now back in the UK I find myself utterly at sea - I say hello to people I pass in the street. They lunge on, muttering insults. We'll get used to it. But we will never forget the kindness of America. In Swindon buying a car the other day (yes, life has changed) the conversation turned to a familiar theme but one that endlessly fascinates me - the relative peaceableness of the American life, guns and all. Too many Brits seriously think that America is violent. It isn't. Most America lives are free of violence and the threat of it in a way no life in Swindon can be. Why that's true is a subject all of its own (religion, gun ownership, moral fibre, space, social cohesiveness?) and one worthy of a future study.
By the way, we bought a large second-hand American car and we will pay the extra costs with pride... Have a nice day!
I was intrigued while reading Henry Kissinger's piece The North Korea Fallout in the Washington Post to find the legendary Master of Diplomatic Immunity once again chanting in the same choir as his sworn enemy the Great Contrarian.
Amid the widespread relief that American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee have avoided the brutal fate meted out to them by a North Korean court, it may seem captious to consider the long-term implications of President Bill Clinton's trip.
The impulse to save two young women from 12 years of hard labor in a North Korean gulag is powerful. Yet now that this goal has been achieved, we need to balance the emotions of the moment against the precedent for the future.
It is inherent in hostage situations that potentially heartbreaking human conditions are used to overwhelm policy judgments. Therein lies the bargaining strength of the hostage-taker. On the other hand, at any given moment, several million Americans reside or travel abroad. How are they best protected? Is the lesson of this episode that any ruthless group or government can demand a symbolic meeting with a senior American by seizing hostages or threatening inhuman treatment for prisoners in their hand?
I call your attention to a small detail about Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two American journalists who were wrongfully arrested, illegally detained, and then capriciously released by the crime family that controls the northern section of the Korean peninsula and treats all its inhabitants as slave-prisoners and all the neighbors within its missile range as hostages.....
As of last week, and as the result of a huge investment of time and energy and prestige and forced politeness, we can now claim to have reduced the North Korean prison population by exactly two, and they were going to be released anyway. In return, we have immensely gratified and flattered the man who kidnapped them and who makes a daily mockery of international law. There was even "remorse" expressed. But guess by whom? Not by the slave master who makes his territory impossible to enter and impossible to leave. A lousy day's work.
When Bill Clinton welcomed Laura and Euna aboard his jet in Pyongyang, they were tired, depressed and worn out by their long ordeal in the North Korean prison system....
Despite the differences in prose style and in the minor points each is emphasizing, on the main issues of Clinton's mission of mercy playing Kim's evil hands the two men are singing from the same hymnbook, albeit if not on precisely the same page. While Henry is less confrontational and less condemnational of the North Koreans, there is really nothing in his stance that Christoper could take much exception to, although if he wanted to be his usual picky self, he might suggest that his fellow choirboy was singing in the wrong key or had too deep a voice to do justice to this particular tune.
When it comes to the sermonizing, Bishop Kissinger is the voice of gentle reason while Pastor Hitchens does his well-known parody of a rabidly certain, fundamentalist preacher. These girls were "wrongfully arrested" and illegally detained," he says. By whose law and in whose opinion? It's a question that many of his readers, caught up in the fire and brimstone of his performance, will not have stopped to ask.
Dearly beloved, I must caution you that whenever we find two such Chaucerian frauds as these in the pulpit and both are engaged in relating variations of the same parable, as indeed they have been doing since the opening of our current century, we would do well to check whether their text comes from sacred or profane sources. And in this case, it appears that they are both reading from the Book of Jackanory with a dash or two of Grimm's Fairy Tales and 1001 Arabian Nights thrown in for good measure, and with Kissinger reciting the original prose while Hitch gives us the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical interpretation. For by focusing exclusively on what an evil regime is resided over by the devilish Kim Song Il, their preaching obscures some rather unpleasant but nonetheless essential facts about Laura and Euna's trip to North Korea.
For instance, according to journalist Stephen Gowans writing in Cyrano's Journal Online, they deliberately entered North Korea illegally with the intention of producing "video footage that would add to the Western campaign of demonizing north Korea" and they "were working with a right-wing evangelist who is trying to destabilize north Korea."
Ling and Lee, then, had three strikes against them.
1. They entered north Korea illegally. 2. They were on a mission that could only be regarded by Pyongyang as hostile, for their documentary, had it been completed, would inevitably have demonized north Korea. 3. They were aided by an anti-DPRK evangelist whose aim is to bring down the north Korean government by training and deploying an evangelical Christian fifth column.
For these reasons Ling and Lee were convicted of illegal entry and committing a hostile act. They were sentenced to 12 years hard labor.
The US media, US state officials and ordinary US citizens have reacted to the arrest, conviction and sentencing of the two journalists with outrage. This is partly due to the State Department and US media portraying Ling and Lee as innocents who either mistakenly stumbled across the border or were abducted on Chinese soil by north Korean border guards. Acknowledging that the pair deliberately crossed the border illegally might reduce the outpouring of sympathy.
The arrest, conviction and sentencing of Ling and Lee have played into the hands of propagandists who cite the event as an example of north Korea’s disdain for press freedom. This is partly a red herring. Part of their sentence was related to their unlawful intrusion into north Korea. This has nothing whatever to do with press freedom. Press freedom does not give journalists carte blanche to cross international borders without authorization.
The other part of their sentence relates to a hostile act. This is closer to the idea of repressing press freedom, for it appears the hostile act the pair was convicted of pertains to the collection of documentary footage, while on north Korean soil, that would be used to vilify the country. Demonization is standard operating procedure for Western journalists covering north Korea. What Western press report on north Korea hasn’t begun with the assumption the country is belligerent, provocative, mismanaged, and repressive? While vilifying north Korea may be standard operating procedure, this doesn’t make it acceptable or any less intolerable to north Koreans. Vilification provides Western ruling class forces with openings to mobilize public opinion at home to justify economic warfare against, and military confrontation with, north Korea. While we may think of the words and ideas journalists wield as innocuous, their words and ideas have very real – and potentially devastating – consequences for the lives, safety, and well-being of north Koreans.
By the time they were leaving the plane on the other side of the Pacific, however, they were estatically happy, fully refreshed if shagged out after their long flight, and raring to go. I don't know how that old smoothie Bill Clinton does it, but he certainly has a rare gift for making women happy.
Gowans also says that "[d]enunciations of north Korea by US sources for arresting, trying and jailing the journalists are hypocritical" because the US also restricts and marginalizes press freedom. Al Jazeera's English Service, for instance, is virtually banned in the US, being available only via cable providers in Vermont, Ohio and Washington D.C. On top of that Gowan reminds us that Uncle Sam is not above imprisoning journalists without charge and leaving them to rot.
In Iraq, the US military has detained dozens of journalists since 2001. While Ling and Lee faced formal charges and were afforded a trial, the journalists the US military lock up are held without charge and denied access to the courts. Bilal Hussein, an Associated Press photographer, who won a 2005 Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography, was imprisoned by the US military for over two years without charge or trial. While rallies have been held in support of Ling and Lee, few US citizens are aware of the Iraqi journalists held by the US military.
Gowan's Guilty as Charged is a sizzlingly good article and reading it will definitely help us to understand even more clearly that Hitchens is as full of shit as a sewage farm. More importantly,it will form another brick in the wall of our education regarding the nature and boundaries of the "free society" we've been conditioned to assume we live in.
As Hitchens, even more than Kissinger, has seen fit to totally ignore the existence of law in the course of his crusade to beat the devil of Pyongyang, and because he has also recommended publicly that in the interests of learning about freedom and liberty we all watch A Man for All Seasons, let's once again Christopher's favorite scene from that play. And as you do so, ask yourself whether, in practice, Christopher is closer in temperament to Roper or More?
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law! Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that! Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
Yes, the whole Ling and Lee incident is a bit of a minefield for Christopher. It's a struggle between everything he hates and everything he hates that isn't Muslim, namely, crazy Christians, totalitarian theocrats, and Bill Clinton. He couldn't let on that these brave girls were part of a Christian effort against the godless North Korean regime because that would bring up the question of why there are no atheists in this particular foxhole. He couldn't afford to tell the truth about why and how they were detained because that would entail admitting that the North Koreans had the law on their side. He couldn't even give Kim's goons some credit for not treating these captives as badly as Bush's and now Obama's goons have been treating numerous Innocent and guilty people alike that they have picked up legally or illegally and thrown into a legal limbo complete with torture chambers. And he absolutely can't afford to say a single word in favor of anything the Clintons have ever done, because that would amount to the renunciation of a personal creed he has followed for almost twenty years. No wonder he felt compelled to conclude last week's sermon with the disconnected phrase, "A lousy day's work."
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What was the point of the Danish cartoons, anyway?
I have mixed feelings about the Danish cartoons issue (Hitch writes about the subject again, today in Slate - now even the Yale University Press disagrees with him, and he is PISSED), but I mostly agree with Hitchens because I'm against any suppression of words or images.
However, there are some things that bother me: why does Hitch link to Human Events in order to show us the 'offending' cartoons in question? How can he not realize that a Christian rag like that is only showing the images in order to disparage a hated opponent in the religious wars? Would Human Events, in the name of free speech, just as willingly display insulting images of Christian religious figures? Somehow, I doubt it. Their intentions are obviously far from pure.
Hitch had written that the cartoons are protected under free speech because they sought to "mock religion" rather than, say, disparage a group of people (such as an anti-Semitic or anti-Japanese image). But how does he know? Since he admitted that they weren't any good, and apparently failed to effectively mock religion, I think we might go back and consider the actual intention of the project: was the contest inspired by a simple attempt to send-up a popular religion, or was it perhaps motivated by something much less innocent: a particular hatred for a particular religion and even a group of people? If the latter is the case, questions of freedom of the press and libel become much more complicated.
I ask out of curiosity : what was the point of that contest held by the Danish newspaper? AND, doesn't it reek, isn't it kind of sickening to watch certain factions of the right (i.e. The Weekly Standard), normally so eager to shut down free speech that annoys them, so keen to suddenly defend free speech on the 'Danish cartoons' issue? This issue is about much more than just the freedom to criticize religion, Christopher. It's become a racial and ethnic along with a religious issue, whether we like it or not.
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Why there can't be a Palestinian Gandhi or Mandela
When in last week's New Statesman, Medhi Hasan wrote about "the need for a Palestinian (and an Israeli) Gandhi figure," Christopher Hitchens found himself in such strong disagreement that he actually wrote a letter — or, more precisely, an email. According to Hasan:
Now Christopher Hitchens has emailed me to say that I may be focusing on the wrong role model - it is a Nelson Mandela that the Palestinians need, not a Mohandas Gandhi. He writes:
"Edward Said used to talk and write about the need for a Palestinian Mandela. I think that might lead you - and such Israelis and Jews as will listen - in a better direction than Gandhi. But the ANC wasn't pacifist in name or in fact, despite the Mahatma's early input."
The Prisoner! Nelson Mandela wearing a university blazer, borrowed from the University of Fort Hare's gallery. Past graduates who have distinguished themselves in politics include Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Govan Mbeki, Mangosuthu Buthelezi and Robert Mugabe. It's no exaggeration to say that the battle for Southern African independence was won on the playing fields of Fort Hare.
Well, as Hitch is fond of exclaiming when he's confronted with embarrassing analogues, A isn't B. If he can shamelessly declare that Iraq isn't Vietnam, Haditha isn't My Lai and God isn't Great, the least one can do is point out is that India isn't South Africa and neither place is even in the same ballpark as Palestine. The problem with the latter is that it really is far too small for either the Israelis or the Palestinians to give up an inch of it.
When the British acceded to the demands for Indian independence, the 200,000 Sahibs and Memsahibs of the Raj had their damp and dingy home country to return to. When the White Bwanas of South Africans gave up political control of the country, they were able to retain economic power and retire to gated community enclaves much more expansive than the entire State of Israel dotted throughout the lush Veldt.
The Israelis don't have the luxury of either choice. If their national project goes belly up, it's back to the diaspora for them. Hence, they can't afford to loose their struggle, and for that same reason they can't afford to allow the appearance of a charismatic leader who can personify the struggle for the Palestinians.
Cheeky Arabs! Edward Said and his sister in Palestine in 1940.
Not to take anything away from Gandhi and Mandela, but they both had almost unbroken runs of good international press in their time. No Palestinian leader is going to get that kind of publicity because Israel is controlled by a group I will call (for the sake of brevity) the Zionists, and the Zionists are also — how can I put this without offending anybody's sensibilities? — they are extremely influential in the mass media and so adept at branding their adversaries as monsters in human form that there is a slim chance of any Palestinian leader developing the international aura of sainthood required to achieve the necessary moral authority to make the Israelis sit down and sign a fair and binding settlement of the Palestine issue.
Even the late Edward Said, who wouldn't hurt a fly and was one of the most refined, reasonable and humane people one could ever hope to come across, attracted plenty of contemptuous criticism and even claims that he was not who he purported to be, merely because he became known as a morally upright yet powerful advocate for the right to self-determination for the people of Palestine.
For example, There is an ample precedent for the Obama birth certificate non-scandal in the slime-job that Commentary magazine tried to pull on Edward's reputation. In particular, read now the whinings of Justus Weiner, described by Christopher Hitchens as "an essay of extraordinary spite and mendacity."
Now in Burmese magazines you'd expect to discover that Aung San Suu Kyi is a bat-faced whore, and when watching Chinese State TV or reading Hitch on Tibet, you'd be sorely disappointed to be treated to an unbiased appraisal of the Dalai Lama, while it's no surprise that Nelson Mandela didn't get such a good press inside old South Africa as he did outside. But neither the Burmese nor the Chinese nor the Afrikaners have sufficient wherewithal to blacken the names of their opponents in the minds of the masses worldwide and make it stick. But "Defamation, Zionist-style", to use the title of Said's own essay, is a very different kettle of fish. No major critic or adversary of the State of Israel can ever hope to be portrayed fairly, honestly or sympathetically by the scribes and recorders of the Zionist media and nobody who reads or watches the news in this "Free World" can hope not to be exposed to the biases of that media.
Had Gandhi or Mandela been principally fighting for Palestinian rights, they might well be renowned the world over for beating their wives or raping their daughters. At the very least, we would have been fed the meme that the Mahatma was an anti-Semite, Nelson was a Jew-baiter and the pair of them were sick to their empty core with Jew-hatred. As Weiner wrote in reply to Hitchens, "[t]he issue here is credibility, a man with an international reputation who made himself into a poster boy for Palestine." That, apparently, is all it takes to justify destroying the man's reputation.
Yasser Arafat was such a good-looking (in a Peter Lorre way) young man who had ample potential to become a Gandhi or a Mandela. Whatever went wrong?
Which brings me on to Yasser Arafat, who was such a let down as a Palestinian Mandela, let alone as a Gandhi. Had he followed the course of either of these luminaries, I submit that he would have failed totally in his mission and been eliminated from the game at much earlier date. If he eventually became monstrous — and I think he probably did — doubtless he was made monstrous by fighting for so long against impossible enemies, impossible allies and impossible odds, and his reputation was made more monstrous yet at the hands of the Zionist propaganda machine.
This eventually happens to almost everybody who fights against the Zionists and certainly to anybody who becomes "a poster boy for Palestine". Which is why I'd advise anyone who wants to fight the Zionists to think three times about the consequences.
To give Christopher the last word, here's an apposite quotation from his obituary of Arafat from November 2004:
But has any national movement ever been so appallingly led? Edward Said asked many times, in public and private, where the Mandela of Palestine could be. In rather bold contrast to this decent imagination, Arafat managed to be both a killer and a compromiser (Mandela was neither), both a Swiss bank-account artist and a populist ranter (Mandela was neither), both an Islamic "martyrdom" blow-hard and a servile opportunist, and a man who managed to establish a dictatorship over his own people before they even had a state (here one simply refuses to mention Mandela in the same breath).
ABC News takes a look at the British astrophysicist and weather consultant Piers Corbyn, who must surely qualify as one of Britain's greatest living eccentrics. He runs a company called WeatherAction that sells long-range forecasts, and this summer his predictions have put the Met Office to shame, with the result that he's written to Lord Mandelson with the advice that "the Met Office long range & climate operation should be called to account & put-out to tender."
An AGW sceptic and an opponent of the Copenhagen Protocol due to be signed this December, he is planning on releasing to the world some of his hitherto secret forecasting techniques in October. But is he, as ABC News puts it, a sage or a charlatan?
Here's Piers's weather forecast for the coming century.
This little gem comes from the Q&A session of the debate with Dr. Turek at VCU in Virginia.
This piece was posted on YouTube by Melvin6566842, who notes that:
At 4:45 Turek calls Hitler a humanist (!) what a shallow demagogue as well as a very pathetic apologist... even Hitchens (although just for a sec.) is speechless upon so much presumptuousness, but fortunately does not let Turek get away with it.
This was not a slip of tongue (Tureks dishonest "a human, a human" is simply defensive drivel of a rhetorical con artist) this was a deliberate smear -known from fundamentalists around the world- that backfired. Besides, this guy uses the word "ontological" like Bush or Palin the word "nucular".
If I would have been in the audience I would have probably booed although this usually goes against my nature. I had to laugh watching it anyway though because in this moment I suddenly remembered that "Turak" means "dimwit" in Russian - nomen est omen, as the Romans would say.
Personally, I reckon Melvin likes to boo as much as the next Humanist. But I watched the clip because I wanted to know if Hitchens was going to give us any more clues to his insight into where morality comes from, but all he gave us was a demonstration that he can speak in tongues — the ones I could identify traces of included Waffle, Babble and Piffle, not to mention Drivel, Mumbo Jumbo, Hocus Pocus, Gibberish and Gobbledygook. BUT there among the sounding brass and tinkering cymbals of Hitch's useful barratone, at around 5:40, he did come up in passing with the term "moral conditioning". So I must be thankful for small mercys. Now, if the stuff is "innate in us" as Hitch is always insisting, why does it need to be drummed into us by conditioning?
But essentially, what I saw in this exchange was Turek asking a straight, simple question and Hitchens dodging it in a deliberate attempt to wind up his opponent. And on this occasion the stratagem was successful. Hitchens was able to make Turek look shallow and ignorant. Referring to Hitler as a humanist was ridiculous, although no more so than referring to him as a Christian. Hitler undoubtedly had bits of humanism and Christianity in his character, just as Hitchens, Turak and I do, but neither of those words is a very good description of the dude.
When an exasperated Turak rephrases his question for the umpteenth time to ask, "Where does evil come from?", Hitchens shoots back with "Religion!", raising a cheer from the Hitch Bitches and fanboys in the audience, and echoing again what Chomsky told us almost a decade ago, that since "Hitchens evidently does not take what he is writing seriously, there is no reason for anyone else to do so."
At 4:40, Hitch also manages to come up with the definitive statement that "Morality comes from Humanism." This is a very interesting view because Humanism as we commonly use the term refers to a philosophical movement that began in the Renaissance, although the roots of Humanist thought can be traced back to ancient Greece, India, China, etc. QUite possibly, if Hitch were to waffle on at length about what he means by his statement, we would learn that there's been a little Humanist hiding inside almost every human being since the Taung Child and that morality springs from this Humanism which is in turn the product of the morality that is innate in all of us by virtue of the fact that we are all — apart from Hitler, Stalin, Saddam and Ahmadinejad — Humanists at heart.
Behind the bilge, Hitchens must be well aware that from the materialist standpoint he expouses, morality, just like religion, apple pie, and the Pyramids of Egypt, is manmade. But he is damned if he's going to admit that to the low- to mid-brow audience he is trying to wean off religion. Hence the need for duplicity, circumlocution and casuistry. The old Chaucerian fraud!
Hitch’s hatred of the Clintons is on full display in this week’s Slate column. Basically, the preening popinjay says that the two Chinese-American journalists were going to be released anyway, and so Bill Clinton doesn’t deserve any credit for his photo-op appearance in Pyongyang.
I would agree with this except for the fact that Kim Jong-Il apparently requested, specifically, Bill’s appearance as THE condition for a release. No Bill Clinton, no release, was the message. Those were the terms. So even if everything else Hitch says is true, Billy’s fame was still essential to the release.
I suppose they fed the girls well enough because they knew Billy would buckle. That’s supposedly Hitch’s match point: how could the girls have maintained their weight given how bad the conditions are? Well, perhaps things simply aren’t as bad in North Korea as Hitchens imagines? Is that possible? I grant that living conditions are poor in NK, but I think Hitchens exaggerates the level of depravity for political purposes. I carry no brief for "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea" but the place and the government is simply not as bad and not as threatening as Hitchens would have us think, so let's stop the bluster. I know the neocons want to go to war there, but let's keep a level head and not do it, please.
For his August 3 Slate column, Christopher took a break from his war and eschewed his usual "fighting words" stance in favor of a piece of warm-hearted travel writing. The subject was the Obon Festival put on by the Japanese community in Palo Alto, and rather surprisingly, Hitch was so totally mellow about the event that he actually forgot to mention that religion poisons everything. And don't let all the drinking and dancing fool you. Obon is nothing if not religious, although it is religious to the Japanese in much the same way that Christmas, Easter and Halloween are religious to people in the West, only more so to the extent that is has been far less commercialized or infantalized—at least so far.
Ancestor-oriented celebrations are not exactly my thing, but there is a very calm and charming way in which the Japanese use this particular moment in the lunar calendar to remember those who have preceded them and to make the occasion a general fiesta. (I suppose the nearest regional equivalent would be the Mexican Day of the Dead.) The clement weather allows the wearing of the lighter yukata, or summer kimono, and the staging of the Bon Odori dance, in which all can join, to the soft rhythm of taiko drums. For the rest of the time, the yagura, or wooden scaffold, is the center of a sort of fairground, in which stalls and raffles compete for custom with the sellers of sake and Japanese beer and with an amazing teriyaki buffet.
Wonderful though those taiko drums undoubtedly are, if you live near one of the temples or school gym halls where enthusiasts practice them each evening for weeks before every festival, they can start to sound a bit like heavy metal music played by a noisy downstairs neighbor, but on the big night and with the beer flowing freely, they can add a dash of magic to the atmosphere.
In his column, Christopher had some sincere praise and compliments for the Japanese people (and their skin color), and also some words of regret at how Japanese Americans were treated during WW2, noting that "Hatred and fear and bigotry were probably never more general or more strongly felt than against Japanese people in America in the period between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima/Nagasaki, and Hollywood and the comic book industry kept the feeling alive for some years afterward." Yet he seems blissfully unaware that in modern times there has been plenty of hatred and bigotry felt against Arab and Muslim people, especially in the period since 9/11, and that there is a veritable cartoon, movie and pundit industry keeping that pot boiling.
And my point? Well, my point is that under the azure blue skies that prevailed all of last weekend, you would not have known that any of the bitterness and misery had ever taken place. There were old people present, Japanese and non-Japanese, who had a real memory of it. And there were young people to whom, if it occurs at all, it must seem prehistoric. But there was no awkwardness; no "making nice," no pretense of a false coexistence. All could meet under the great roof of a secular multiethnic democracy, and all did, sharing the food and the music and admiring one another's children. And if this of all reconciliations can occur, without it even having to call itself a reconciliation, then perhaps we are not all heading for hell on a sled as fast as we sometimes think.
My comment on this is that, yes, secular multiethnic democracy can do wonders for bringing people together. But I also think a lot credit is owed to the Japanese for being such good losers in WW2. I've lived in Japan for close on 30 years and conversed with thousands of individual Japanese people, and not once has anyone of them ever shown me any bitterness towards the Americans or the British over the events of World War Two. There may well be some hidden bitterness in some hearts, but generally the culture frowns on the public expression of "negative" emotions such envy, anger, resentment, the desire for revenge, etc. Public shows of grief also tend to be quiet and restrained and even showing contempt is considered contemptible.
Regarding WW2 and all that, the conventional wisdom in Japan is that in wartime people go crazy. This sort of observation tends to get trotted out less to excuse bad behavior than to avoid having to discuss it and play the blame game, which when it breaks out only ends by stirring up inter-ethnic animosity and disrupting "international harmony". This attitude is very much a result of the defeat of 1945, and contrasts absolutely with the national mood of triumphant jingoism that prevailed for many years following the famous victory over the Russians in 1905. Nowadays, the Japanese place a strong emphasis on honoring and showing respect and gratitude to their ancestors—without whose efforts the present generation would not be here—rather than on glorifying or condemning deceased individuals for what they may have done or failed to do. The Obon Festival, when the living light lanterns to allow the spirits of the dead to find their way back their ancestral homes, is in perfect accord with this sentiment
Our Popinjay, The Preening One, participated in a chat with the British historian Robert Service on Uncommon Knowledge this week to discuss the life and legacy of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, also known as Leon Trotsky, one of the most notorious of the Bolshie Bonapartists who usurped the Russian throne from the Romanovs.
Service and Hitch have tangoed before, and on the same topic. Hitch had proposed Trotsky for the BBC's Great Lives program back in 2006, and the Beeb had brought in this great ringer (Service) who, truth be told, had Hitchens on the ropes the whole time and ended up making him look like a bloody fool for lamely attempting to champion a barbaric reactionary like Bronstein as a "great life" in the first place.
This time our Hitchens distances himself from Trotsky, so the chat regrettably lacks that same schadenfreude we all felt in the previous one where we got to listen to Hitchens squirm. And alas, it seems that the audio of Service's previous smackdown of Hitchens is unavailable, which is a great misfortune because for some strange and inexplicable reason I enjoyed that last discussion a lot more than this one (if anyone has a link available for the previous one, please feel free to post it in the comments, and in return Hitchens Watch will plant a tree in Israel in your name and honour).
Did Christopher get it right or wrong on Gates Gate? As one who felt Gates was playing the prima donna and failing to realize that even a high-profile academic is ill advised to lecture a team of police patrolmen they way one would a bunch of recalcitrant college students, I was a bit disappointed by Hitch's every man's home is his castle stratagem. Still:
There are the things you can try when confronted by a cop, and there are the things that you can't—or had better not. Last Memorial Day, I was going in a taxi down to Washington, D.C.'s Vietnam Memorial when a police car cut across the traffic and slammed everything to a halt. Opening the window and asking what the problem was and how long it might last, I was screeched at by a stringy-haired, rat-faced blond beast, who acted as if she had been waiting all year for the chance to hurt someone. (She was wearing a uniform that I had helped pay for.) I often have a hard time keeping my trap shut, but I saw at once that this damaged creature was aching for trouble and that it would cost me days rather than hours if I supplied her with any back chat. (I think it was the mad way she yelled, "Because I can!" and "Because I say so!") She was so avid with hatred that I didn't even try to get close enough to ask or see her name or number. The whole thing, especially my own ignoble passivity, gnaws at me still when I reflect upon it. But it didn't, if you understand me, reinforce any humiliating folk memory. Indeed, I had more or less forgotten it until recently.
No humiliating folk memory? Hitch, maybe that's because the chick was white, man — just like you. Hasn't your confrontation with the dusky, oriental, garlic-stinking SSNP thugs in Beirut laid down what can be described precisely as a humiliating folk memory that is still haunting your nights? It has for us at HW. We were hoping you would be able to shoulder the white man's burden and maintain Britain's virile reputation by keeping your end up in foreign parts. But alas.
[W]hatever he said to the cop was in the privacy of his own home. It is monstrous in the extreme that he should in that home be handcuffed, and then taken downtown, after it had been plainly established that he was indeed the householder.
It should make no difference whether a person is at home our outside when they use language or engage in behavior that gets them handcuffed and taken downtown. Do householders in their own homes have special rights to abuse the police that they don't have on the sidewalk? Possibly yes, in a legal sense. Which is why Officer Crowley cleverly suggested that he and Gates continue the conversation outside. Because Gates's disorderly behavior which was technically legal while he did it inside his home was illegal on the front porch.
It is the U.S. Constitution, and not some competitive agglomeration of communities or constituencies, that makes a citizen the sovereign of his own home and privacy. There is absolutely no legal requirement to be polite in the defense of this right. And such rights cannot be negotiated away over beer.
It's nice to see Mr. Hitchens sticking up for the U.S. Constitution at this late date. I only wish he'd been this supportive of it when President Bush declared that it was only a goddamn piece of paper.
In the Canadian Free Press, young Daniel Greenfield, who is trying hard to grow a beard, has a refreshingly different take on the Gates arrest. He sees it as not to do with race but with class, and he puts the blame squarely on Gates and sees the arresting officer as the victim:
Henry Louis Gates was not arrested because he was black. He was arrested because he was a famous man who felt entitled to tell off a middle class police officer, warning him, “You don’t know who you’re messing with.” Those are not the words of a powerless victim of America’s racial oppression. They’re the words of an important man who was warning the low paid city employee he was dealing with, that he was too prominent to be touched. He was messing not with a black man, but with a rich and important man. A man who was above the law.
And indeed the remaining narrative, which moved from a media firestorm over a simple arrest, to a supportive statement from the White House, proved Gates right. Crowley indeed didn’t “know who he was messing with”. He was messing not with a black man, but with a rich and important man. A man who was above the law.
Had Gates been arrested because he was a black man, there would have been no media response and no attention from the White House. Had Henry Louis Gates been a plumber or an associate professor whose name wasn’t listed in Who’s Who in America, with three names, and a list of titles and awards long enough to choke a whale-- his arrest would never have made the news. Nor would Gates have acted the way he did.
Once arrested, Gates and his defenders cynically used race as a smokescreen to conceal the real issue, which was class. Henry Louis Gates was not the victim of racism, he was the beneficiary of it. And all the media’s huffing and puffing about race in America cannot successfully transform a wealthy and prominent man who felt free to warn a police sergeant, “You don’t know who you’re messing with” into a victim.
My ten cents worth. The US may not technically be a police state but a growing number of beefy police officers seem blissfully unaware of that. Moreover, a growing number of Americans seem to be in need of a police state watching over them in order to cattle prod them in to behaving in a socially responsible way, while the level of hostility between people of different classes is high enough to power the national grid. Into this madhouse walk Prof. Gates and the very appropriately named Sgt. Jim Crowley. Both were more than old enough and wise enough and in responsible enough jobs to have diffused this storm in a teacup before it led to an arrest. It is regrettable that neither had the presence of mind to back down and placate the other before the cuffs went on.
Respectfully disagreeing with Hitch, I think President Obama was right to call the arrest "stupid", right to retract the remark, and right to buy the two of them a beer. America hasn't got time for this race and class divide shit. People of all races, creeds and colors need to quit griping and start respecting each other as people and working together on the same team. As for classes, well, there is certainly a class war going on in the US as almost everywhere else. And in the US, the middle and working classes are undergoing a pancake collapse while the super-rich are floating up there in the clouds. If you want a healthy, productive and functioning democratic society, you have to improve the lot of the poor and protect the working class and the middle class while progressively taxing the super-rich out of their ill-gotten gains. Personally, I think five Lear jets and ten palaces should be enough for anyone. And if you want techno-feudalism, just let the current laissez faire system continue, with generous bailouts for the rich to cover their losses and a choking off of bank lending to collapse the real economy, and you're likely to get it.
Was looking for Pastor Fred Phelps the other day in order to ask him what he thought about Christopher Hitchens, wound up talking to his daughter, Shirley Phelps-Roper Esq. Shirley didn't know anything about The Great Man, but she became very animated when I mentioned The Old Boy's nemesis, he of the "crap church," Jeremiah Wright.
According to Mediasite PowerGrid, our man on the wheels and steel is the 7th most influential columnist in...I'm not sure -America? This would be bad enough, except that Hitch gets beat out by Thomas Friedman, Michelle Malkin and Karl Rove in that order. And right below our man? Charlie Krauthammer.
Paul Krugman is number 1, but is that enough to salvage this disgraceful collection from being chucked into the garbage can?
I think we need to see a debate between Krugman and Hitchens right now. Not on religion. On government and economics. See how the generalist Hitch holds up against a specialist in economics.
Maybe Hitch deserves that column in the NYT more than Maureen Dowd and David Brooks combined, after all. I would certainly support it.
We all know that Christopher has issues with the Muslim comunity that are far too passionate to be covered by words like antagonism or ambivalence. But while the volcano of mis-Islamic fire and anti-Muslim brimstone has been rumbling away for many years now, Hitchens's latest eruption reaches a new level of pyrotechnic excess. The fear and loathing has been captured in an interview he gave in a bar (where else?) in Toronto with Dave Morris, published in six pages in the online edition of the Walrus for July & August 2009.
The first question was on the perceived aggression in God Is Not Great, which elicited the highly quotable Hitchensism: "So the book is written directly to get people to come out to play, which is a much better way of engaging people and indeed, winning them over, than trying to finger-fuck them." (As I said, t was two guys in a bar.)
Next, Morris asked Hitchens about his comment to David Wolpe: "The Europeans have imported into the center of their society the resources and the population of a future Jihad, something that wants to take away everything they’ve got, change all their laws and alter all their customs. And it's on the future of that struggle upon which everything will depend." And Hitch was happy to expand on that message.
You can see it here, too. I said the Europeans, but it’s true of Ontario also. It’s not yet true in any major part of the United States except perhaps New York, but that will change soon enough. When I was a kid in England, immigration was a controversy. We were talking about upholding the rights of British passport-holding Asians in Uganda who were thrown out by Idi Amin, or in Kenya where they were being purged because they weren’t African enough. And I thought, well, one, we have a legal obligation to them; two, they’re being terribly persecuted; and three, we’d be very lucky to get them, because they’re a fantastically talented, educated population. We were very lucky to get them. What I had not noticed, and people like Hanif Kureishi and Nadim Aslam and to an extent, Salman Rushdie, started pointing out, was that the guys who are coming from the backlands of Pakistan, these people would be considered very, very reactionary in Pakistan. And they’re colonizing cities in Yorkshire. A lot of people captured in arms, with Taliban uniforms in Pakistan, have Bradford Yorkshire accents. We didn’t see this coming, and it’s not going to get any better. It’s getting certainly much worse. And you think it’s not going to happen to you? Think again, it is going to happen to you. And it will be smuggled through your customs by multiculturalism.
This is an arguable point and while I think it qualifies Hitchens as an alarmist, it is nevertheless a point of view shared by many who are not on the lunatic fringe. However, when Morris follows up by asking whether "moderate Muslims, or in fact, moderate believers of any stripe, would be open to hearing alternative views such as yours," Hitchens effectively denies the existence of any middle ground and sees in its place only a slippery slope into appeasement and slavery:
But they don’t ask me. I told you I get Catholics and Rabbis wanting to debate me on a regular basis. [But there are] people who don’t take up the challenge. Mormons don’t and Muslims don’t. They just don’t. They don’t think there’s anything to discuss. They don’t want someone to come and say, “You know what? The Koran is not a holy book, and Muhammed was not spoken to by god, there is no god, there is no messenger.” They’re not going to have that — that’s how moderate they are! What I have to say to them is, are you a Muslim or not? And by the way, while we’re at it, don’t define yourself as a fellow citizen of mine. Don’t you realize you’ve already transgressed? This is why society is made of Muslim and non-Muslim. They’ve won the first battle. But I won’t have that. If I allowed that, what else would I have to allow? A Jews-only state in the Middle East, what would be wrong with that? A Protestant-only state in Northern Ireland, what would be wrong with that? Diplomatic recognition of the Vatican as a country, they’d have to allow that too. All of this poison and nonsense would have to not only be allowed but to be praised as a gorgeous mosaic of multiculturalism, instead of a very dangerous tribalizing and Balkanizing of the things most precious to a secular democracy.
Are we getting scared yet! But by now Christopher is showing the classic signs of reaching a crescendo, and we all know how dangerous it is to interrupt a man who's building up to a crescendo. Morris wisely remains quiet and lets the eruption continue until it climaxes in Hitch's nominations for the three great abominations:
It’s the same in Holland and large parts of France, people have come from North Africa, from villages where bride prices, dowry and circumcision of females is commonplace. You don’t get that everywhere in, say, Marrakesh, or if it’s in Pakistan, you don’t get it in Lahore or Peshawar. But the villages where it does happen have now reproduced themselves. Let me make it clear to you what I’m saying. There are people bringing practices — cousin marriage, honour killing and genital mutilation would be my three nominations, first of all — that are considered very dubious in their countries of origin. And they’re also bringing something that summarizes all of them, and intensifies them and refines them into one single point: the idea of holy war. That they have the right to do this, and the right to claim the supremacy of their own religion, and to spread it by violence — we will rue the day we let this happen. You can rue it now, or rue it later. I will rue it now.
I'll admit that I too was beginning to get caught up in the rhetoric of fear and demonization against the Oriental other, so reminiscent in terms of power and passion of the speeches of another defender of European values whose name began with Hit-. But once Christopher mentioned "cousin marriage", my pale blue eyes lit up and my rosy red lips curled into a knowing smile. For if cousin marriage is one of the three worst things we have to fear from the Muslim hoards, then we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Honour killing and genital mutilation are extremely nasty, but as threats to Western Civ they are paper tigers. They are going to be stamped out in the West, and Western Muslims are already at the forefront of doing this. Although people like Christopher are a major hindrance to the job as his particular brand of evangelism only gives ammunition to the most reactionary and barbaric forces within the Muslim community. Indeed, the best thing Hitchens could do to help improve the lot of Muslim women in the West would be to Shut the Fuck Up about the entire issue. But cousin marriage? Don't make me laugh.
Would it surprise you to learn that according to rational scientific opinion, the sinister piffle about the evils of cousin marriage is entirely on Hitchens's side of the fence? It would? Well then, let it be known that, in the words of Brandon Keim in Wired Magazine, "dispassioned analysis suggests that cousin marriage is no more troubling than childbearing by middle-aged women." But of course, Christopher has never stood out as a dispassionate commentator, particularly where Muslims are concerned.
In the United States, first cousin marriage is totally prohibited in 24 states, and allowed under any circumstances in 19 states and the District of Columbia. It tends to raise eyebrows when it does occur, but occur it does. Rock 'n' roll icon Jerry Lee Lewis, architect Charles Bulfinch, outlaw Jesse James, Secretary of War William C. Endicot, Mafia don Carlo Gamino, psychologist Abraham Maslow (physician heal thyself!), Representaitves William Ellery and Josiah Bartlett (both of whom signed the Declaration of Independence), inventor Samuel Finley Breese Morse and Presidents John Calhoun and Martin Van Buren all married their first cousins. But when it comes to marriage the US is a backwater where people of different skin color were prevented by law from getting hitched until as recently as 1967 in some states and territories. They had a scientific-sounding word to justify the prohibition: miscegenation. But in Europe the marriage situation is much more cousin-friendly. And among notable Europeans (non-aristocrats) who have married their first cousins are rocket developer Werner von Braun, explorer Vivien Fuchs, composer Edvard Grieg, director David Lean, the economist Thomas Malthus, playwright Delarivier Manley, actress Greta Scacchi, and novelist H.G. Wells. French Enlightenment demigod Voltaire and Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz were more daring still and married their nieces, which was nice for them.
No doubt this will come as a shock to Genetotaliban types such as Hitch, but physicist Albert Einstein's second wife Elsa was not only his first cousin on his mother's side but his second cousin on his father's side too. Horrifyingly, their mothers were sisters, and incredibly, Elsa's maiden name was Einstein too. More than this, they were both old enough to know better. But luckily, the pair didn't produce any offspring with or without webbed toes, and more fortunately still, neither of them were followers of the Prophet Mohammed, a detail that should prevent cousin marriage witchfinders from pissing on their graves.
Last on my list are the two little lovebirds in the illustration at the top of this post: Charles and Emma Darwin. Yes, the father of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection and his lawfully bedded wife and mother to his children were first cousins. And on top of that, their grandparents Josaiah and Sarah Wedgwood, nee Wedgwood, were third-cousins too. This little knot of inbreeding doesn't seem to have tangled up any Wedgwood-Darwin DNA and may even go some way towards explaining why the family has subsequently been blessed by more than its fair share of intellecutal talent, although first-cousin-marriage-o-phobes my be wondering if any of them have had webbed feet yet.
Jane Goodall and her cousin, an African ape, showing that kissing's AOK, even between close relatives.
A sanguine look at cosanguinity shows that Christopher's fears over cousin marriage, and even first cousine marriage, are unfounded. But while there is no pressing genetic rationalization for discouraging, let alone prohibiting, first cousin marriage on the grounds of increased risk of congenital defects, the same cannot be said in the case of marriage within groups derived from a relatively small number of founders.
As Martin Ottenheimer makes clear in his book Forbidden Relatives (p. 127~8):
It should be pointed out that this risk is with inbreeding, not with first cousin marriage. While first cousin marriage implies cosanguinity, the reverse is not true. This difference is important, especially for our purposes here, but it apparently is rarely made in the public's mind. For example, it is not uncommon for people in the United States to have heard about abnormalities among the Old Order Amish — for instance, the group has a relatively high number of case of Ellis ven Creveld syndrome, a form of dwarfism that is one of four suspected autosomal recessive genetic abnormalities appearing among them — but most do not realize that although they rarely marry outside of their group, the Amish do not marry their first cousins. The cause of the higher frequency of the disorders has been attributed to the founder effect and genetic drift.
“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!
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