In his "I'm still for the ground zero mosques but..." Piece in Slate last week Our hero pointed to one terrible consequence of what happens when you let the uppity Muslims get, er, uppity.
"Muslim cabdrivers in other American cities have already refused to take passengers with "unclean" canines.'
Oh the humanity! (or whatever the doggy equivalent is)
In an effort to back up Christopher's frightening story I thought I'd deeply research this issue spread by typing "New York dog taxi" into google and finding this lovely site
which gives you a breakdown of the rules about dogs and public transport in New York.
So what does it tell us?
Taxis dont have to take dogs
Greyhound buses, ironically, allow no dogs at all.
New York Subways only allow canines in kennels or bags (?)
New Jersey, ditto
Amtrak no dogs on the train.
So which conclusion do we draw? I'd say it is either
A) The Islamonazi conspiracy against Man's best friend is reaching dangerous levels.
B) A washed up journalist, desperately looking for evidence for the non-existent Sharia/Muslim threat to America threw out the first anacdotal story he could think of, a story so weak that a 2 second Google search makes it laughably obvious that said journo has not a clue.
I'd go for "A" personally but, as always here at HW, we merely report, you decide.
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Right or left, sometimes a hawk is just a chickenhawk
"So he comes down squarely on the side of the mosque being built in one article, then describes objections to the man behind it in another. This isn't splitting the difference. This is nuance. Sane human beings are capable of ambivalence."
"To call him a right wing hack is comically clueless. Left wing hawks exist."
-Guest
Guest is pretty much the ideal to represent the good-hearted, soft-headed media consumer who will always fall for Hitchens's balderdash and, one assumes, will always be quite happy to do so.
Such is the way of the world. Your contradiction is my paradox, my nuance is your bullshit. Yet, at some point we get to take a look at the track record. Hitch says Bill Clinton was swinishly corporatist, but corporatism is an issue missing in action when Hitchens endorsed Bush.
When your Presidential Pick (2004) is and is from a party that is much more pro-capital punishment (and will have a DOJ pushing for more executions) yet you have been staunchly been anti-capital punishment, how do you resolve this problem? In Hitchens case, you simply stop writing and talking about capital punishment. Other important issues (the economy, the environment) on which common sense would have to dictate the superiority of the often hapless Dems? You just don't write about those issues. You do, however, fixate on petty non-scandels (Gary Condit) that might be used to weaken the left. Is a leftist "hawk" on the invasion of Iraq even a leftist at all? Some, like our Guest, seem to be stumbling, even all these years after the invasion, from the fairy dust that sprinkled in their eyes by Htichens and the Media.
It is that Media, as much or more than Clinton, that is truly corporatist, and that is how Hitchens and many others ended up very wealthy people. It's how the U.S. ended up in two absurdist quagmires. So let your triangulation be my complex take..... but your reflex denial only points harder at my truth: Christopher Hitchens is a right wing, Republican HACK.
Argumentum ad ignorantiam means “appeal to ignorance.”It’s an informal logical fallacy that asserts a proposition is necessarily true because it has not yet been proven false (or vice versa). In other words, X has never been proven or demonstrated and so therefore X is/(must be) false. Or, in other words, “I’ve been bathing my innards in Scotch for fifty years and I haven’t gotten cancer yet - so I never will.”
Remember Ben Stein? You don’t? Well, there are a number of ways to jog your memory. He was a speechwriter for President Nixon and Gerald Ford. No?He was the valedictorian of his time at Yale Law School.Nothing? He was a professor of law at Pepperdine University. He created a creationist propaganda film called “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” which equated evolutionary biology with Nazism. Still nothing? Oh, I know what’ll jog your memory.Remember that wacky teen movie, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?” He was that monotone-voiced teacher that said, “Bueller, Bueller.”Ah yes, now you know who I’m talking about. Well, about 15 years ago, he appeared on C-SPAN with Christopher Hitchens. A viewer emailed in – no wait, called in – no wait, FAXED in a question. (It was the 90’s, after all.) The viewer faxes,
“Please ask Christopher Hitchens to comment on the life and death of Mickey Mantle … He notoriously shares with the late Mr. Mantle some of the proclivities that brought about Mr. Mantle’s early demise.If Mr. Hitchens leaves the world too soon, who will be left to comment on such issues as the racial partitioning in the south, the failure of Western foreign policy, or the character of our elected leaders?”
The viewer had a point. There really aren’t enough people willing to comment on race in the South.
On the subject of his “proclivities,” Hitchens replies (and this is breathtaking),
“All I can say is, so far it hasn’t done me any harm.”
So far it hasn’t done you any harm!? Well, young Hitchens, old Hitchens has a chilling surprise in store. Not only HAS it done you harm, it WAS doing you harm the whole time. A cancerous tumor has grown gradually, over the course of many years. Just because you hadn't gotten sick yet doesn’t mean you weren’t ever going to “leave the world too soon.” Your argument from ignorance has fallen flat – and soon, so will you.
(Oh, and by the way, watch the full clip. This has been pointed out before on Hitchens Watch – but it ends with Hitchens telling a blatantly anti-Semitic joke. Enjoy!)
This was Christopher Hitchens’s question a year after the death of Princess Diana, which brought forth a “frightful binging and gorging of sentimentality” from the British populace, odd in a nation stoic by reputation. The people of a stiff upper lip had quavered. Hitchens is hardly averse to sentimentality, some of his best writing causes a catch in the throat; it is bogus sentimentality that be abhors. The death of a “hyperactive debutante” didn’t merit the wall-to-wall coverage, acres of flowers, and very public, very group-therapyesque bereavement that it had inspired.
Sounds just like the Hitch we all know and love, doesn't it? In his 1998 Salon piece Bogus emotion and mass credulity, he demonstrates in his inimitable style that he absolutely couldn't stomach why or how so many people — her "increasingly irritable and frayed groups of fans" — were so cut up about her sudden passing, despite all the obvious faults he could see in her that they were so stubbornly intent on remaining blind to.
It's interesting how what goes around often comes around, but with all the crass sentimentality (and begging James's pardon, it makes not a shred of difference whether it is bogus or sincere) being expressed by so many in the Hitch fanboy community these days, the Preening Popinjay is visibly morphing more into an atheist pantomime version of the People's Princess with each passing day. If this keeps up, I half expect Tony Blair to be reading the eulogy at Hitch's non-religious memorial service while Elton John cranks out that same old tune with yet another new set of words: "And it seems to me that you lived your life like a vandal with the wind..."* And can you imagine the flowers that are going to pile up on the sidewalk outside his apartment building if the following "get well!" video is anything to go by.
Guys and gals who contributed to the above video, it's great that reading Christopher Hitchens has opened up your intellectual horizons on the theism issue. But in another way its deeply sad because if you needed his particular brand of eyewash to open them then they must have been very gummed up indeed before you happened to come across him. Now your eyes are wide open, you are young and there are plenty of fun distractions you can occupy yourselves with for many years to come. And if after serious consideration you are determined to head dow the scientific materialist road, well the very best of luck to you. But if you take GING as your BIble, then given enough time I rather suspect you will eventually find yourself at the end of a cul de sac in a deserted wasteland spending more and more mental energy on trying to blot out the pointlessness of your existence.
But all that's beside the point, as your own spiritual salvation is your own affair. It's none of my business what faith you follow or what metaphysical speculations you indulge in. The point is that your beloved Hitchens, your idol, hero, guru, teacher, map reader to his fellow travelers or what ever, just happens to be a genocidal, warmongering, logic-chopping, narcissistic, self-seeking, hypocritical, Chaucerian intellectual fraud with terrible manners, no sense of loyalty, and a bloated sense of his own smug superiority. It beats me how any bunch of reasonable, decent-with-a-small-d people could possibly bear to stand shoulder to shoulder with this monstrous manipulator of middlebrow minds, let alone give him a free pass for his role as poster boy for born-again George W. Bush's crusade.
Is a hyperactive demagogue any more worthy of an outpouring of syrupy sentiment than a hyperactive debutante is? Think what you like about Diana - and who doesn't? — but at least she tried to do something to stop innocent people being blown to bits by land mines. Contrariwise, Hitchens has been using his beautiful baritone warble to seduce and serenade people into accepting preemptive war (with all the horrors that come bundled with that package) as noble pursuit. And that, dearly beloved, the essential difference between the Princess and the Popinjay.
*Back in the nineties, I heard there was also a rather touching Mother Teresa version entitled Sandal in the Bin but a Google search reveals that somebody has dedicated that one to the Queen Mum..
Comrades, the above video shows Noam Chomsky speaking in 1989 in answer to an audience question about Lenin, Trotsky, Socialism and the Soviet Union. His main point is that once in power, Lenin and Trotsky moved the Soviet Union quickly away from socialism in the direction of totalitarianism. He also explains why although Lenin and Trotsky's regime destroyed socialism in the USSR, both the Soviets and the Western regimes, for their own very different reasons, were happy to go along with the fiction that the USSR was practicing socialism. All this wisdom, though, was wasted on one of Chomsky's brightest young acolytes, one Christopher Eric Hitchens.
Christopher (like his brother Peter) is well known as a former Trotskyist and, as his Wikipedia entry has it, "he continues to regard both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky as great men and the October Revolution as a necessary event in the modernization of Russia." But on the other hand, Hitch doesn't much care for Russia in its modernized form either. All in all, he's a difficult man to please. As late as 2006, he was still sufficiently enamored of Comrade Trotsky to choose him as his "great life" when he was invited onto the BBC's Radio 4 programme of that name. This led to what has been described by the blogger Sean Hanley as "fireworks" when his sentiments were opposed by two other participants in the discussion.
Although no longer a man of the left apparently, Hitchens wanted Trotsky as his great life and wanted to discourse effusively about him in plumy tones pretty much from the perspective of his student days in the International Socialists.
Presenter and ex-Tory MP Matthew Parris and historian Robert Service did not, however, let him get with this, quickly raising the issue of Trotsky’s endorsement of state terror and his chilling view of men as violent apes without tails, a remark that de Maistre would have been proud of. Quite true, said Hitchens and terror was well, sort of necessary in the circumstances etc - a tired old far left defence, both morally and politically dubious, although I wasn’t clear if at and at what point his endorsement of Bolshevik regime want and whether he thought the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising a turning point or not.
When Hitchens sought to avoid addressing Trotsky’s contradictory attitude towards the Soviet regime and the question of what a Trotsky-led USSR of 1920s been like (bureaucratic and repressive, but with slower industrial development, a small private section, a smaller gulag and decent literary criticism, I suspect) Hitchens waffled about the importance of a programme and certain political generation etc. Why then, they, asked why he had chosen to speak on Trotsky at all if his personal qualities and views were of no real interest? Here Hitchens lost his cool and seemed about to walk out. However, they then they then cut the tape and finished the programme with a short, uncomfortable edited-in final exchange.
Interestingly, given his pro-intervention stance on Iraq Hitchens briefly mentioned the Trotskyist pedigree of leading US neo-cons, but didn’t unfortunately discuss the linkage between enthusiasm for world socialist revolution and the neo-cons later enthusiasm for that other great project of historical optimism: global democratic revolution. Does it inform his own view? Sadly no one asked.
I'm very happy that I will probably live to see the death of that disgusting old sleazebag Christopher Hitchens. And why shouldn't I be? After all, the odds against him making it through the next five years are higher than those of Ralph Nader becoming the next US president. Who in the land of the not too badly off wouldn't be happy to have a good chance of living longer than that?
But "hark!", I hear the fanboys sing, "the mean and miserable point is not about you outliving the old sack of shit at all, but about you being happy he's dying. It's scandalous and shows what a hate-filled little moron you are."
Fair enough, mea culpa. But the nastiness is in the nuance. I do not wish for Christopher's death per se. Indeed, if pressed, I would rather he was cured by a trip to Lourdes.
But as a realist I must accept stoically his early demise, even as the Decents are mired in denial, false hope and blind faith in the gods of radiology and chemotherapy. In making my initial statement, I was taking, as I so often do, a leaf out of the Contrarian's own playbook, paying a form of homage to the master if you will. And in his time, Hitch has issued more death wishes than Charles Bronson. In this instance I was paraphrasing his disappointment voiced in Vanity Fair that he won't live to see the Pope and Henry K dead. If the preening popinjay can anticipate other people's demise with glee or lament that he won't be able to dance on their graves, then it should be quite alright by him for other people to treat him with equal regard. He, as a self-proclaimed rationalist and believer in the innate moral goodness of the Golden Rule, must welcome death wishes. It would be irrational of the old tosspot to think anything else.
What Christopher wrote was, as summarized by Damian Thompson in the Telegraph: “Will I really not live long enough … to read – if not indeed write – the obituaries of elderly criminals like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?”
Damian says he thinks this is a despicable slur against the Pope (although he doesn't care about poor Henry) and that the whole nasty piece of character assassination is desperately sad. That's as maybe. But for me, it's yet one more reason to be able to say without fear of offending anybody who counts, including the tumor boy himself, that I'm very happy that I will probably live to see the death of that disgusting old sleazebag Christopher Hitchens.
Michael Enright, the dude who slashed Bangladeshi taxi driver Ahmed Sharif yesterday in New York after asking him if he was a Muslim, is very like Christopher Hitchens in several ways. Not only are both of white Americans of European stock, with all the subliminal racial superiority over our little brown brothers and sisters that that often implies. They also both share some other behavioral, political and psychological red flags in common.
Both are smart intellectuals, not your usual skinhead or hoodie mugger type. Michael was an honors student. Both have been lauded by their friends as great guys and been described as having a passion for the truth. Both have been to places on the frontlines of the War on Terra. Michael went to Afghanistan, while Hitch has visited every Axis of Evil Country). Both have seen some of the nastiness of war close up, and doubtless have emerged psychologically disturbed as a result. Both have also written about their experiences abroad. In Michael's case, the police found two notebooks containing details of his Afghanistan experiences. Intriguingly, neither man appears to have made any anti-Muslim rants. (I admit this is debatable in Hitch's case!) And both are on record as supporting the construction of the Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan. Michael actually joined the group Intersections, which is supporting the proposal to build the center.
Curiously for us Hitch Watchers, when Michael was arrested, the police found an empty bottle of scotch in his backpack, and he appears to have consumed enough alcohol to stun a mule. Nuff said about that! And more curiously still, according to the arresting officers, Michael claimed falsely that he was Jewish, a claim that Hitch has been known to make a point of insisting on despite not having been born or raised in a Jewish community or having what can by any stretch of the imagination be described as an ethnically Jewish childhood, never having studied for or undergone a Bah Mitzvah or (as far as can be ascertained) submitting to a certain ritual Jewish surgical operation, and having no theistic beliefs whatsoever.
While Hitch has never to our knowledge wielded a knife in anger, he has been reported to have exploded into verbal violence on several occasions (for which he has subsequently issued equivocal denials — I'm thinking specifically of the Barbara Epstein memorial incident, described by Alex Cockburn as "this megalomanic outburst", and the attack on 9-11 hero priest Father Rutler,which was characterized by Richard Poe as "a drunken rage").
So while Michael and Hitch have both proven themselves passionate enough to slash out at other people, perhaps the main reason why Hitch has not actually drawn anybody else's blood yet is that he works off his negativity in more imaginative ways, such as by gloating over the misfortunes of his enemies and goading others to do the actual physical violence he wants done to them.
Here's KaraRvn ventriloquizing and psychoanalyzing the thinking of "every single theist" on God and on Hitch's cancer. This was posted in early July and she was obviously a bit cut up about the news. Still, Kara is one of a large and vocal group of apparently smart secular sophisticates who dote on the Popinjay as if it was 1964 and he was all four of the Beatles.
Some off-top-of-the-head thoughts: Kara has done a good job of explaining ad-lib how a lot of monotheists think. But when she starts talking about the ultimate arrogance of people who say their God has struck Hitch down, I have to start questioning the validity of her thesis. I've been around a while, and I've never come across anyone as arrogant as Christopher Hitchens. More conceited? Sure. More arrogant? No way!
Also, a lot of what she says about the Godders can be applied mutatis mutandis with equal effectiveness to the Hitch and his ilk. Because anything the theists can do do, Christopher can do better. When it served his cause, he has publicly blamed victims of injustice for their sufferings, made light of atrocities committed by his side, wished wasting diseases on his political opponents, joked that other people's misfortunes make his life bearable, and I seem to recall him alluding impishly, not to mention impiously, in an interview somewhere, to some mysterious power that brings misfortune on his enemies.
On top of all that, he says that despite knowing the health risks he would do it (hard-drinking, chain-smoking) again.
There are two main theories about Hitchens's cancer: (1) Act of God, or in other words, natural causes, fate, bad luck, the deity giving him a test, etc., and (2) Act of Hitch, or self-inflicted. You can all take your pick and strum your guitar with it for all I care. My pick, as I see it, is that nobody else struck Christopher Hitchens with cancer. He struck himself by pursuing behavior (spending decades of smoking like a chimney, drinking enough to stun a mule, and belching to the tune of the Star Spangled Banner) that was highly likely to increase his chances of getting this or any of a couple of dozen other life-ending maladies. The real miracle is why anyone should be so shocked that he has finally hit the jackpot.
Cancer Man was kind enough to return to the burning issue of the "Ground Zero Mosque" to be built on the sacred grounds of the Burlington Coat Factory in lower Manhattan. After performing the ritual Decent Inoculation of denouncing Newt Gingrich for violating Godwin's law, Hitch gets to the serious work of smearing the honorable Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf over his "[c]oyly untranslated" mention of Vilayet-i-faquih that The Great Man read about from Michael Weiss (or possibly Ross Douhat).
Hitchens still had a few column inches to fill after claiming that Rauf "publicly endorses the most extreme and repressive version of Muslim theocracy" when he obviously doesn't, so he shares the charming story of an unnamed "wife of a new ambassador" supposedly being threatened by some bearded wonder for bringing her unholy mutt too close to the Mass. Ave. Mosque. To further document this fascist canine intolerance, Hitch tells us, with bonus Decent scare quotes, that Muzzie cabbies have refused to transport dogs in some cities.
Well, it just so happens that a Glorious Warrior decided to take matters into his own hands in the wake of noted Sharia Law advocate Michael Levin removing Pam Geller's helpful Stop of Islamization of America ads on Chicago cabs:
As the cab headed north on Third Avenue, Enright allegedly asked Sharif, who is of South Asian origin, "Are you Muslim?" When Sharif confirmed that he was Muslim, police say, Enright stabbed him multiple times with a Leatherman knife.
According to a statement from the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which represents drives, Enright allegedly screamed "Assalamu Alaikum," a common Islamic greeting meaning "Peace be upon you," before slashing Sharif across the face, neck and shoulders. Sharif also sustained defensive wounds to the arm and hand.
Aren't you proud?
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HITCH WARS — Where the force is always against you!
We all know and love the HITCH WARS cartoon movie series. You know how they always open: "Not so long ago, in a galaxy not so far away, new Hitlers were showing up like moles in an arcade game, and the only hope for civilization was Christopher Hitchens with his trusty mallet......." In the first one, Mullah Omar — who should never have been in the series at all as he was originallly scheduled as a minor bad guy in an Indie Jones movie — was bombed out of power and fled tail between legs and horns bandaged deep into the tribe lands.
Then in the second one came Saddam Hussein's turn. He was either hung for a lamb before they got to trying him on the sheep stealing charges, or else he was spirited away to Belorussia while one of his kagemushas took the fall. But that hardly matters to the story because it turns out that Saddam was no Hitler after all but a mere Mussolini without so much as an ounce of WMD to his name.
And so now, after a seven-year hiatus and numerous false rumors, the third blockbuster of the series is maybe — nudge nudge, I have it on Bill Kristol's word of honor — getting ready to roll out of the production studio and onto 40-inch plasma screens the world over. HITCH WARS III — The Return of the Red-eyed Mullah, in which our hero metes out Armageddon for Ahmadinejad, looks set to be the most sparkling fireworks show since Uncle Sam and Co. bombed seven colors of the proverbial out of Germany and Japan and rained down so much death and destruction that they had to send Henry Kissinger to Nuremberg to make sure the whole world knew who the real bad guys were.
But like the rabid beasts that they are, these new Hitlers cannot be reasoned with and need taking out, whatever the consequences. Anything less would be appeasement, and we all know what happened to Chamberlain.
You don't? After he resigned in disgrace Churchill gave him a place in the Cabinet and called him indispensable to the war effort. The guy was ill with cancer at the time of his resignation and he died of it six months later, but did Hitchens ever give him a break for that? I think not.
But while we're all salivating with whatever emotion grabs us by the throat at the prospect of Hitchens the Heathen Infidel doing his best to persuade the Christians to make war on the Muslims in order to do civilization's duty and save the Jews — because after all, there simply aren't that many atheists in foxholes — let's remind ourselves of some of the fall out from his last big spectacular, HITCH WARS II — The Empire Strikes Blacks, when Ted Koppel was embedded, Saddam went down into his spider hole and lost his razor, our heroes were greeted with flowers, dates and Turkish delights — don't ever try to tell Hitch any different — and we got to give those pesky Al Jazeera reporters one in the eye.
All this I've written just to introduce you to an article by Adil E. Shomo that lays out some of the unpleasant facts about the state of life and death in today's Iraq — an Iraq that has come about in no small part as a result of the policies Christopher Hitchens evangelized for not so many years ago. So read it and weep with joy, anger or mortification. Better still, tell me who you weep for and I'll tell you who you are. And don't worry about not being macho enough. The HITCH WARS movies are among the great weepies of our age.
U.S. Occupation of Iraq More Than Doubles Poverty, Sickness -- Leaves Country a Total Disaster The American public has no idea just how terrible we've made conditions in Iraq.
August 22, 2010 by Adil E. Shomo at AlterNet
Iraq has between 25 and 50 percent unemployment, a dysfunctional parliament, rampant disease, an epidemic of mental illness, and sprawling slums. The killing of innocent people has become part of daily life. What a havoc the United States has wreaked in Iraq.
N-HABITAT, an agency of the United Nations, recently published a 218-page report entitled State of the World’s Cities, 2010-2011. The report is full of statistics on the status of cities around the world and their demographics. It defines slum dwellers as those living in urban centers without one of the following: durable structures to protect them from climate, sufficient living area, sufficient access to water, access to sanitation facilities, and freedom from eviction.
Almost intentionally hidden in these statistics is one shocking fact about urban Iraqi populations. For the past few decades, prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the percentage of the urban population living in slums in Iraq hovered just below 20 percent. Today, that percentage has risen to 53 percent: 11 million of the 19 million total urban dwellers. In the past decade, most countries have made progress toward reducing slum dwellers. But Iraq has gone rapidly and dangerously in the opposite direction.
According to the U.S. Census of 2000, 80 percent of the 285 million people living in the United States are urban dwellers. Those living in slums are well below 5 percent. If we translate the Iraqi statistic into the U.S. context, 121 million people in the United States would be living in slums.
If the United States had an unemployment rate of 25-50 percent and 121 million people living in slums, riots would ensue, the military would take over, and democracy would evaporate. So why are people in the United States not concerned and saddened by the conditions in Iraq? Because most people in the United States do not know what happened in Iraq and what is happening there now. Our government, including the current administration, looks the other way and perpetuates the myth that life has improved in post-invasion Iraq. Our major news media reinforces this message.....
I know, it's a toughie! But the answer is that they are both off the wall.
Judith Bello, writing for Op Ed News, thinks Hitchens is off the wall on Iran and Israel, a conclusion she reached after seeing him interviewed his fellow scribe at the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg. She has much to say about both the article and the video of the interview that resonates with me. She characterizes the interview "a shameless piece of hysteria", calls Hitch out on his highly specious misuse of logic, and comes within inches of accusing him of trying to ventriloquize the entire Jewish people. Most of all, she leaves us in no doubt that the preening popinjay is employing double standards in his analysis of the positions of Israel and Iran.
Hitchens is asked what he would do if he were in [Benyamin] Netenyahu. Hitchens speaks reverently about the US role as the leader in fostering Human Rights in the world, not just because we wrote the treaties, but because we convinced other countries to sign on to them. He specifically mentions the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations and the Convention for Human Rights. Apparently he hasn't noticed that the US has openly scorned those conventions and repeatedly bullied, cheated and undermined the UN for some time now. But apparently he's assuming that you haven't noticed either as he goes on to build his argument. Iran, he says, has signed all kinds of treaties and guarantees that they have no ambitions to build a nuclear weapon. So, if it "turns out" they have done so, then "there is no international law". And, if we find we have allowed this to happen, then "we have watched while [the law] was contemptuously dismantled".
This is an curious basis, and his logic grows more fantastic with every statement. If someone breaks the law, he argues, then there is no law, because if we allow this so far unproven violation to occur, then we are responsible for this fall into lawlessness, and this is important [because . . . . we are the law?] By contrast, another country has placed themselves above the law, refused to sign the salient treaties supporting human rights, rejecting WMD and showing a willingness to work with other nations, built the bombs, persists in a policy of ethnic cleansing and openly declares their right to attack their neighbors with impunity in the name of preemptive 'defense'. But our willing complicity in that project doesn't undermine the law. Moreover, our tolerance for that behavior is not a problem, and going back to the introduction, may not be sufficient to expiate ourselves for the aforementioned 'protean eternal . . .' bias against the population of that country and everyone else who shares their [religion? ethnicity?].
Hitchens goes on to make some rather strong statements about those being menaced and under threat having an "obligation" to "take out" the offending regime. Then he says, "don't look at me like that, don't look at the Jewish people like that". Apparently he isn't aware that his statements are pretty menacing, and represent a serious threat to someone. Furthermore, he contends to speak, not for Christopher Hitchens, not for the State of Israel, but for all of the Jewish People. It is problematic enough to live in a country where you disagree with government policy which is assumed to be 'speaking for you', but the Jewish people aren't safe anywhere from the aggressive little nation that insists on speaking for them. As for Hitchens, he was invited to speak [for Israel], so I guess you can't fault him on doing so. He finishes his thought in a defensive tone, with the statement that if you haven't acted, then you have acted. Inaction is action, culpable action. You deserve what you get. I suppose you could make this argument in a fever pitched crisis, but in the current case, it's a little over the top.
Goldberg now raises the issue that Iran will point out (as I have above) that Israel has developed an arsenal of nuclear weapons outside the international treaties, i.e. outside the law. Hitchens hangs his head, then looks up and responds defiantly, saying that he regrets the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the world, BUT, "there is a big difference a country that has a weapon to preserve a certain, what we used to call 'balance of terror', and one that wants one to upend the existing order". He refers to a regime (the Iranian Regime we must assume) that " is a messianic dictatorship that crushes it's own citizens and threatens the territories of it's neighbors". If that isn't the pot calling the kettle black, I don't know what is! It's true the Iranian theocracy is flawed, and more so recently, since they have been placed more and more on the defensive by those "preserving" the "balance of terror", but a supporter of a country that was founded through ethnic cleansing, and has preemptively attacked it's neighbors repeatedly since it's inception resulting in the occupation of neighboring territories nearly equal to it's allotted area, is hardly in a position to criticize.
On a related note, listening to Hitch and Goldie, one might be forgiven for thinking Iran's Jews were no better off than Gaza's Palestinians. But Mike Whitney in Counterpunch tells us that this is absolutely not the case:
The lies about Ahmadinejad are no different than the lies about Saddam Hussein or Hugo Chavez. The US and Israel are trying to create the justification for another war. That's why the media credits Ahmadinejad with saying things that he never really said. He never said that he wanted to "wipe Israel off the map". That's another fiction....
Ahmadinejad poses no threat to Israel or the United States. Like everyone else in the Middle East, he just wants a breather from US and Israeli aggression.....
There are 6 kosher butcher shops, 11 synagogues and numerous Hebrew schools in Tehran. Neither Ahmadinejad nor any other Iranian government official has made any attempt to close any these facilities down. Never. Iranian Jews are free to travel (or move) to Israel if they chose. They are not imprisoned by an occupying army. They are not deprived of food and medicine. Their children do not grow up with mental disorders brought on by the trauma of sporadic violence. Their families are not blown up by gunships lobbing rounds on the beaches. Their supporters are not crushed by bulldozers or shot in the head with rubber bullets. They are not gassed and beaten when they peacefully demonstrate for their civil liberties. Their leaders are not hunted down and killed in targeted assassinations.
But when you're shilling for the coalition of the willing, all such considerations pale before the imperative to provide faithful service for those who dole your shillings out, or shekels as the case may be. Could the Israelis seriously be running Operation Popinjay — a strategy for using Hitch as part of a clandestine Israeli PR campaign in America? Farfetched as it may seem, there's no telling what they might do if they are feeling really desperate. But to me this Goldberg tie-up looks more like a legit way of paying Hitch a stash of condolence money for his illness and saying thank you for past services rendered. Because as a propaganda exercise it is far too blatant to do anything than provoke howls of derisive laughter.
Today's post finds Peter is talking about his book and his brother to the National Post, promoting his view of an Anglican Arcadia where sensible people spend their Sunday mornings at church snoring through the sermon, followed by roast beef and potatoes and Yorkshire pudding for lunch, then off to the village green for a game of cricket and then a pint or two seated outside the pub while watching the evening sun sinking slowly over the Vale of the White Horse. Sounds delightful!
The Rage Against God is not a faith book, at least not in the conventional sense of defending doctrine or even making a philosophical case for God. The book is devoid of “faith talk”; the name Jesus does not appear once in the book.
“Remember, I’m an ex-Trotskyite — so I’m quite suspicious of the man of total conviction and certainty. What I did not want, coming away from Marxist utopianism, was to find another mirror image of utopianism,” he said.
“The argument I’m making for religion is largely a negative one: if you get rid of [God] you will be in a tremendous fix.”
Mr. Hitchens sees Christianity as not just a set of religious beliefs but as essential to shaping western culture — from law to music to architecture — as well as the essential bulwark against tyranny.
So the danger with his brother and the cadre of “new atheists” is that they not only deny the link between religion and culture “but argue for its repudiation” — much as atheist communist revolutionaries argued repeatedly in the 20th century.
“Soviet society was disgusting,” said Mr. Hitchens, who spent several years in Moscow as a reporter. And what you saw in the former Soviet Union was the work of “70 years of government led by atheists.”
“These were exactly the kind of people who are now the new atheists; they are recognizably the same. The same passions, the same ideals and the same belief in their own goodness — which is always the most fatal thing.”
* Due to objections that the original picture of Peter Hitchens was too sexy, I've replaced his mugshot with one of a South African ranger nicknamed "Lunch" and one of his charges.
Here at Hitchens Watch, where we believe it's wicked to mock the afflicted, we're absolutely devastated at having to keep watching and writing as our boy races towards his much publicized encounter with Thanatos. Like most of the world, we want to remember him when he was in his prime and still had that kiss curl and was on the Clintons' Christmas Card list.
However, others on the Indecent left are exposing themselves as not nearly as forgiving as us. I've had multiple mail messages from irate Hitch Haters telling me I am too soft on the old scrote. But of all Hitch's ill-wishers, first prize (non-rage boy category) must surely go to a particularly feisty socialist, feminist, pacifist and environmentalist lady named Sabina C. Becker. Sabina has written a blog post entitled Christopher Hitchens is dying. Big fuckin' whoop! Well, she IS Canadian. The British equivalent would be something along the lines of "Oh dear, how sad, never mind."
Sabina begins her post by quoting Hitch talking to Goldberg and then observing that:
The awful fact is that Hitchens's brain is already disintegrating; his own writings betray the fact. And it's been doing so for years. He moved from left to right over time; that's a sure sign of degeneration unto itself. But the manifestation of that cancerous phenomenon was particularly grotesque in him. When he devoted so much energy in the latter 1990s to excoriating Bill Clinton on moralistic terms for his affair with Monica Lewinsky, and aided the far right from the so-called left, I quickly came to despise him for what he'd done. Hitchens was not the only one who set back progress immeasurably during the Clinton era, but he was a so-called respected voice. I don't know why he wasn't blackballed on the spot by the so-called liberal media, unless they were not really liberal after all.
I am in full sympathy with the above opinion. Hitch has gone about as far downhill intellectually as HAL did in the movie 2001, although the process has taken years rather than minutes. And as for the so-called liberal media — yuck! Next she calls Hitch the "F" word, and backs it up with an impressive explanation.
And I couldn't believe anyone could consider him anything less than fascist when he supported Dubya's wars. Most hilarious was his insistence that they were "secularist". No, they were capitalist, with a hefty dose of religious fundamentalism thrown in. If Hitch were really serious about secularism, he'd have decried them. Instead, he chose to studiously ignore Dubya's very pointed use of the word "crusade"--a specifically religious term--in his war against Islam. I guess some religious conservatisms are more kosher than others, if you are a brown-nosing irrationalist like Hitch.
Sabina also goes on about Kipling and karma getting back at him and Hitch being a sociopath, and then finishes on a splendid crescendo, the last line of which is:
Happy dying, Hitch, you sick, seedy, disreputable fucking bastard.
Well, you have to hand it to the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy. It splits no hairs, takes no prisoners or leaves no infant splashing around in the bathwater. Sometimes Hitchens seems to be quoting Tony Hopkins in David Mamet's dumb but fun movie "The Edge": "All my life I've wanted to do something...unequivocal." Here it is! "Media idiocy, this is Bigoted Right Wing Thuggishness!" Bigoted Right Wing Thuggishness, meet Media Idiocy!" "You two must get together and put the boot in Mr. Constitution, he's over there looking at the record collection....."
Yet the question for the great self appointed watchdog of modern liberty.... which way, if any, will He go? What a perfect place to take a stand for the absolute importance to do what you want to do in a free society. I'm sure, after shouting down those scolds in Germany who sought to silence holocaust deniers just because they could, well, those who would try and outlaw a place of worship in Hitchens beloved New York City will get it turned up to 11! You wouldn't catch a man of principles like Hitch practicing selective targets.
And yet so far...nothing. I know, he's got a lot on his mind. This "Burning The Candle At Both Ends" business, I think Hitch fudges the meaning. It really means not getting enough sleep, from working and then doing something else. You know, like many Americans working who now work two jobs in an economy that's been blasted to hell by war and easy on the rich tax giveaways from the candidates Hitch supported. To Hitch, the phrase can only be about partying.
Oh yes, I know, something Islamic near Ground Zero. Well, it was easy enough to look the other way when it turned out that Giuliani had sent the fireman out with crap radios. Or that New York State would be handed a big bill to compensate the Rescue Workers who suffered, of all things, permanent lung damage from following the lead of mayor Happy Happy, "Hey, there's another World Series Game Tonight!" Or when Giuliani got his mafia friendly underling sent to Bagdad to clean up the crime problem. Not a word on any of this from pro Giuliani Hitchens.
So it is with this latest "controversy", constructed by the odious Pamela Geller and The New York Post. Finally, amazingly, the corporate echo chamber has got it's Whitewater on, and they will keep chanting "one term, one term" until Tinker Palin comes to life.
It's a dramatic moment for Htichens. With one Op Ed, he can make the right forget all about that Vietnam stuff and enshrine himself in the Hall of fame with Father Coughlin and Whittaker Chambers. Or, he can give his long, long suffering friends on the left some solid ground to start salvaging his reputation. As the syntax torturing Little Carmine told Soprano, "You stand at the precipice, Tony, of an enormous crossroad."
Or as The Band sang: "Olie showed me, the fork in the road.... you can take to your left or go straight to the right....."
If you are praying for Hitch to die as he has lived, like a squealing pig, well far be it from me to interrupt your spiritual activities. Last time I checked with the US Supreme Court and the UN, freedom of religion was still both a constitutional and a basic human right.
Some genocidal maniacs, however, are trying to tell you to @#$% off just for praying for Hitch's death, which I think is a despicable and shocking thing to do, especially for somebody who writes for the Atlantic Monthly. How the tone of that magazine has gone down since the old days. Less despicably but even more shockingly, that well-known scholar and gentleman PZ Myers has displayed abysmally poor judgement in linking to the genocidal maniac in question. Well, two can play at that game. If he can link to the Atlantic, then I can link to his blog Pharyngula.
As the comments on Myers"s site were almost all supportive of the popinjay and unfavorable to those who want to see him "taken out" pronto, I thought I'd do my bit to inject a bit of argument into their boy scout meeting by posting a few words of realist common sense. My contribution is reproduced below for your approval, applause and approbation.
Why should it matter to members the atheist rationalist materialist fraternity whether people pray for Christopher Hitchens to live to a hundred or to die soon quickly, slowly, screaming in pain or peacefully in his sleep? I've watched the guy critically for years because he is a genocidal warmonger and I detest him for that, and even to me his approaching death is a matter of supreme indifference. After all, he's the one doing the dying. If it leaves me with a window in my online hobby schedule, there are plenty of other genocidal warmongers to watch.
When Christopher isn't screaming for the US to "take out" yet another enemy country or making a living out of conning the credulous out of their faith, he is commonly found to be be either lavishly praising the benefits of tobacco and alcohol or salivating with a pleasure bordering on ecstasy at the deaths of well-known people he disagrees with or of anonymous assumed members of groups he opposes.
Love him, loathe him or laugh at him as the mood takes you, but please understand that when it happens, Christopher Hitchens's death from cancer will have been a form of suicide. Whether the main cause was decades of fags, booze, bile, or the daily adrenaline rushes he indulged in as so many of you cheered him on, he is merely reaping what he has sowed. Or, if you want a slightly less moralistic explanation, his death is simply his body's reaction to to the abuse he subjected it to.
I was thinking after Grey's recent post about the particularly atheist response to a potential death sentence and re-read another British atheist, Philip Larkin.
Not in anyway meant as a gloating piece, I think it sums up the late night fears that many of us have felt either for ourselves or for loved ones.
AUBADE
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what's really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. Arid interrogation: yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse -- The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused -- nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear -- no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round.
Apologies for the tone, it has been a rough year for many.
Liesl Schillinger in the NYT has put together a piece entitled Christopher Hitchens, Not Going Gently. Not surprisingly since gentleness has never been one of the Popinjay's defining characteristics.
One of his most defining characteristics, though, has been a tendency to define himself far too sharply and precisely by identifying overly with his intellect and his opinions. This tendency was on show when he told Jeff Goldberg what would be the case if he were to make a profession of faith.
The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain,” he said. “I can’t guarantee that such an entity wouldn’t make such a ridiculous remark, but no one recognizable as myself would ever make such a remark.
This is more evidence, if any were needed, that Christopher Hitchens's poor tortured mind is laboring under a totalitarian dictatorship of the ego that would make living in North Korea seem like a a summer holiday at Club Med.
Faith he may steadfastly disavow, but his fellow antitheists will be none too please to discover that he has finally discovered the soul, as Liesl reveals:
This subject is one Mr. Hitchens has mulled over since childhood, when he decided, as he wrote in “God Is Not Great,” that it was “contemptible” to rely on religion just for comfort if it “might not be true.” As an adult whose hopes lay assuredly in the intellect, not in the hereafter, he concluded, “Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and — since there is no other metaphor — also the soul.”
This conclusion rests on the assumption that scripture isn't literature, which it very often is, especially if it isn't taken too literally. Moreover, I can't understand why it is any more contemptible to rely on "religion" just for comfort than to rely on "literature", blow jobs or Johnny Walker Red.
The article also devotes considerable space to Martin Amis and the late Tony Judt. Tony told one of his students named Saul Goldberg that he wanted his epitaph to read, “I did words.” Liesl doesn't think Hitch needs an epitaph yet, but there's no harm in planning ahead. Any ideas anybody?
After the revelations about the Leys School, the first one that comes into my mind is "Beneath this sod there lies another." But I'm sure that between us we can do better than that.
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From the archives: Hitchens on Liars, Hypocrisy, Israel etc.
Oh, the humanity! Can it really be just three short years ago in September 2007, when the aged and ailing Billy Graham was lying in hospital and in failing health, that a cherubic Christopher was chirpily contemplating the nearness of Billy's death:
Interviewer: Do you think Billy Graham is an evil man?
Hitchens: Yes, a disgustingly evil man.....
He rakes in the cash for preaching brotherhood and compassion. It’s enough to make you sick…
This sort of valet, this sort of religious valet is always at [a troubled president’s] hand, saying “No, no, I can make this look good for you, I can be your religious P.R. man.” Power worshipper, cronyism, bigotry, it’s a very unattractive combination. And then going around spouting lies to young people for a living, lying to the young for a living. What a horrible career. I gather its soon to be over. I certainly hope so.
You can't make this stuff up! Christopher Hitchens is the only man I know who can accomplish Freudian projection on an Imax screen. What he accused Billy Graham of offering successive US presidents is uncomfortably close to the package of services he himself provided as a secular P.R man for the born-again G.W. Bush.
Although I have had little time to keep pace with all things Christopher, my jaw has constantly dropped with the range of venues that mention his illness and the response to it. The drawing on the left HT the Friendly Atheist. joins an incredibly mixed cast including white supremacists sites like Alternative Right, and major old school media outlets such as the Atlantic, which gave as the forthright quote:
...for the few of you who wrote to Goldblog to say they were praying for Hitch's death, I can say that he does not care one way or another what you do or think or pray, but on behalf of myself and the entire team here at The Atlantic, let me just say, Go fuck yourselves.
Despite the many, many ways that I have disagreed with CH: the casual cruelty to previous allies, the frequent misogyny, his allying with demagogues and race baiters and his support for brutal failing wars, it is perhaps one of his strengths that a man can raise such strong feelings across such a diverse part of the population.
For myself I appreciated his comment that implied at least he had gained his cancer honorably by drinking and smoking consistently, greedily and like an Epicurean.
Finally, I hope his treatment is successful because it is always sad to lose an opponent who both writes and reads (and pisses off the theocrats).
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For the sake of argument: Pollitt & Hitchens (1995)
Definitely dying and decidedly demented, Christopher reveals himself determined to destroy the lives and livelihoods of God knows how many poor middle eastern sods, innocent and guilty alike. Like that other classical literature-quoting intellectually superior villain, Khan from Star Trek, he's approaching the point where he screams Ahab's memorable lines at poor old Ahmadinejad: "From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” Still, no sacrifice is too great to prevent Israel from disappearing from the page of time, and human rights and demographics be damned.
"Now that it's there, I'm not gonna have it [Israel] destroyed by a crowd of genocidal fanatical theocrats. Civilization has to take on the defense of the Jewish people in any case," he tells Jeff Goldberg in the above video from the Altantic site. Whether he's referring to the Likud, the American Christian ZIonists, or the present Iranian administration is not absolutely clear — probably not even to Hitchens himself, inhabiting as he currently does a fear-, loathing- and chemotherapy-soaked cranium. But one thing that seems certain is that he thinks the enemies of genocide cannot afford not to usher in yet another genocide, even if that means bombing the crap out of millions more Muslims.
The United States is the first country in the UN, the promulgator of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and many things that go - and the Geneva conventions. Not just a signatory, but the people that cause other people to sign those things. The Iranian regime has, several times, publicly, not just sworn, but signed its name to documents in front of the International Atomic Energy Authority [sic], the United Nations, the European Union, that it has no ambition to weaponize its nuclear program. If, after that, it is found that they have driven such a force, then there is no such thing as international law, any more, and it would mean that we watched as it was contemptuously dismantled. Trampled. Well, in that case, I see absolutely no reason not to take out the regime that invites that. In fact, I think it's more or less an obligation.
I won't try to get into the whys and wherefores of why the War on Everyone-Who-Isn't-In-Or-Under-The-Thumb-Of-The-Elite-Gangster-Class is being fought, as I don't want to bore our gentle readers any more than necessary. But it does seem to me as if the spectacle of the Dying Hitch pitching for yet another genocide when he hasn't even owned up to the first two in Iraq and Afghanistan shows how when we take a laissez faire attitude to other people's bad behavior, they tend to slide even further into the abyss of wickedness until they finally reach pure unadulterated evil.
A further thought is on the question of why this Goldberg character, who incidentally served as a prison guard in the Israeli Defense Forces before maturing into and advocate for the invasion of Iraq on a moral basis, is interviewing Christopher at this time in the first place. And the bestest bestest answer I can come up with off the top of my head is that Hitchens is a total marionette for the racketeer puppeteers who've bought his services and that to capitalize on their investment they want to make as much use of his talents as possible before his joints seize up, his wires break, and too much more of his paint flakes off.
Hitchens is very fond of using the verb "to ventriloquize". The time has come to ask whether he became alert to its applicability in political writing as a result of his own personal experience of being operated like a dummy by some of the people who pay his wages and pull his strings. Just a thought.
I'm remembering the brave self incrimination of Pete Townshend, who confessed that the rest of the group were happy enough to enjoy the benefits of Keith Moon self destructing. Or even Oliver, remembering Noel Coward with utter gratitude for being the fist person to tell him he was talking like an ass. When you read something like Mary Elizabeth Williams "Sympathy For Christopher Hitchens," you can't but notice not much is mentioned that would have put Hitchens in an unsympathetic light in the first place. Among Hitchens fans such things seldom, if ever, were mentioned. Marc Cooper, Hitch's most shameless sycophant writes only "I can't stand to see Hitch like this." Cooper has actually always approved of Hitchens ratting out Bluementhal, and Iraq? Small potatoes.
Well, we all know of the star as martyr, and it's always a tricky proposition. Evidence suggests that Hitchens had little to do with those impertinent enough to disagree with him. Eric Alterman wrote for years that he wouldn't bad mouth a friend in print; when Hitch did an online debate with him over Iraq He behaved as if they had never met. Hitchens's arguments tended to boil down to Hitchens, so to disent was to personally scold.
Yet oh how our little Christopher was indulged over the years! The liberal masochism of The Nation is more than can properly covered in the space provided, but it was pretty much par for the course. It's probably not too far afield to put in context of the doomed comic actor Chris Farley. Part of him must have known that rich men were giving him money to make an ass of himself, but he had no one peel his fingers off the steering wheel on the fast lane to destruction.
Hitchens tells us of his wife's only complaint: "could you please not bring that Neo-Nazi around anymore?" In such a world, a man is highly unlikely to get a good ass kicking on his use of smoke and drink. Indeed, Vanity Fair, like Saturday Night Live bringing Farley back to slip and fall again, would pay him to let the audience chuckle at his girth.
Well, who knows if Hitchens would have had it in him to listen. Or again, think of the man Hitchens rightfully calls a great poet of his day, and the tone of humility with which he would remember his audience savagely booing him: "That's O.K., you can kill somebody with kindness." Hitchens, on the other hand, could only extend the middle finger.
“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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