Coming off his very worst Slate article of all time, I think it's worth suggesting to Hitchens that he give it a rest. And the best way for him to take a vacation is perhaps to experiment with psychedelic drugs. Aside from easing his pain, writes Alexander Zaitchik, Hitchens would be doing a service to the scientific community interested in treatment for cancer. Psilocybine can be ingested easily enough and would probably be the safest route for Hitchens. Acid is fun, but it may be too much for a cancer patient.
The last time I took LSD was over the summer at a concert in Colorado. MGMT was playing, and it was raining like hell. It was so damn rainy that it was actually dangerous: people were slipping and sliding all over the red rocks. It was absolutely miserable except for the fact that we were on acid - the drug made the whole thing fun. That's one truth you won't hear in civics class: drugs are fun. It doesn't have to be a requiem for a dream for all of us. Here in British Columbia, marijuana is celebrated like an ancient past time.
In short, I think Hitchens should consider Zaitchik's advice to experiment with psychedelics for treatment. It's not bogus medicine. There is real research to suggest that it's a good option for cancer patients.
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David Aaronovitch doesn't get enough of it, and I am living proof.
As an aside allow me a few words on David Aaronovitch's latest column in the Times today. In it he considers adultery; the public attitude towards high profile adulterers in the light of the super injunctions* controversy in the UK, and seductively hints at his own.
DA maps a journey, from reasoning:
"anyone can see that there's no read-across from sexual frugality to professional capacity"
to 'getting it', ie. to understanding the Zeitgeist:
"The unfaithful celebrity, who seems to get it all, rocks our world and mocks our limitations."
Mocks our limitations? Hmm. David doesn't so much 'get it' as gets some of it, some of the time. He certainly doesn't get me. And I am not alone.
It's not about popularity or skill with a ball *cough*. One blogger put it succinctly:
"The simple fact is this. If you become a star then you have to accept that many sad people want to know all about you and are prepared to pay for it. This knowledge is bought and sold at a premium. You knew of this downside before you came to stardom. This thirst for detail is the main reason why sponsors are prepared to pay you lots of money to wear their logos."
When you are a footballer promoting products you are not simply promoting a running shoe or a vest. The world and more particularly the world of advertising doesn't work that way. You are promoting an image. Pay £X for our face cream and you too can look like Kate Moss when actually you never will and a pot of Nivea will do the job just as well. But when the idea of Kate Moss became one of a cocaine snorting debauched druggy her brand was worth less. And that mattered. She traded on her image.
Paddy Pantsdown has demonstrated that adultery need not end a political career but I do think it's naive of Aaronovitch to laugh at the Fred Goodwin case as an illustration. Yes other factors may well have been at work but DA seems to find the idea of cosy corruption between the sheets ridiculous. I wonder what he'd say about the Profumo affair? And the public are right to mistrust a politician given to deceit and debauchery if Lord Boothby is any example. More recently David Laws' deceit about his expenses was fraud.
"If you make a commitment" DA tells us "it should cost you". Oh what rot. David Aaronovitch doesn't 'get it' again. It's not about anything costing you it's about having integrity. If David married in church I'm guessing he would have promised to honour his wife?
"David, will you take [this shorter person] to be your wedded wife? Will you love her, comfort her, honour and protect her, and, forsaking all others, be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?"
Imagine a society in which nothing can be believed. Where there is no trust. Imagine that all the food labels tell us lies and we never know who will be at home when we arrive there, or whether our key will fit the lock. Imagine phoning an ambulance and not knowing if it will arrive. Imagine caring for someone and never knowing where they are or if they are well or in pain or coming back? Imagine giving yourself to someone and in that moment of giving never knowing if this is shared joy or simply a convenient lie? Imagine the stress of not believing.
David Aaronovitch is an atheist and quotes Cromwell, presumably in an effort to mock the idea of sin. But society needs it's heros and gods, it needs its symbols of good and evil. If David would care to look back through history and philosophy he would see that. And we need to trust. I know that. Life is far too scary without it.
Notice that DA wrote "sexual frugality" not sexual fidelity. Why does he assume that faithful husbands have a frugal sex life and unfaithful ones an ample sex life? I don't think we can assume either way. An adulterous husband can be one who desperately searches for a shag and rarely gets laid whereas a happily married husband can enjoy a deeply satisfying sex life with his wife. It's completely subjective and not a matter of frugality or liberation per se. I've seen far too many desperate middle aged men rejected to subscribe to that view.
I think David is correct when he states:
"Those of us who stay within our own struggle will often want some kind of recognition for our own self-discipline"
Society should applaud good behaviour and denounce the bad. Isn't that what it's all about? Religion, philosophy and politics is all about telling us how to live; what is good and what is bad. But I don't think the unfaithful celebrity is mocking our limitations. As I've already stated, we need our heros. We need images to aspire to. But the example of wrongdoing is not about mocking our limitations. None of us are perfect. It is the casual acceptance of wrongdoing that mocks our value system. We cannot and will not put bad behaviour on the same comment free platform as good and nor should we. It is more about the acknowledgement of our frailty and our need for the public reassurance of what is right and what is wrong. The visible establishment of our shared values.
In my opinion this issue has now threatened the establishment. If an MP cannot stand up in parliament and speak honestly and freely, with full regard to his commitment to his constituency, then where is democracy? With secret 'Family Courts' in Britain and Super Injunctions for the rich and famous (they're costly) I can only agree with David Aaronovitch: it's a disgrace.
*Super Injunction: a gagging order so complete that you can't even say there's a gagging order.
Public figures and public morality are discussed on the Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4, chaired by David Aaronovitch, here.
Aaronovitch debates this topic, phone hacking and journalistic ethics with David Allen Green and others at the Frontline Club.
UPDATE:
I've never had sand kicked in my face before but tonight David Aaronovitch did just that by stomping on the opinion about injuctions protecting a brand with: 'well we all know it's shit' or words to that effect. Succinct and devastating. Check out the exact quote by watching the good and interesting debate about superinjuctions, phone hacking and ethics in journalism at the Frontline club here. I don't agree with all Aaronovitch says, especially when he claims to have special insight into the motives of other people (as this post states: I am living proof), but I recommend this enjoyable and informative debate. Was Peter Obourne pissed? Is Aaronovitch going to hug David Allen Green later on Hampstead Heath? Should we care? And is the UK so far behind America and Europe in enforcing a code of conduct in print journalism that change is needed? Watch the debate, here.
More on injunctions on BBC R4 here, Tues 21st June.
Peter Hitchens hates what I do: writing honestly what I think when it annoys him. I'm permanently on the naughty step as far as he's concerned. And this is no exeption - yes he's vomited his vile views about rape again. And yes I'm going to call him an idiot. How anyone so blessed, so clearly intelligent and capable can be so utterly wrong, so astonishingly wrong, so totally bloody stupidly wrong amazes me. It really does.
The naive Mail on Sunday reader may have been seduced into thinking Peter was defending Kenneth Clarke when really it was a convenient vehicle for Peter to peddle his disgusting misogynist views:
"Modern liberals make a few exceptions to their view that lawbreakers need to be let out of jail quickly. One is over child-molesting, which has become the one form of sexual behaviour of which we can all still disapprove. One is when people ‘take the law into their own hands’, by defending themselves, their families or their property. The courts and the police view this as competition, and fear it. So it is crushed with heavy sentences. Another is offences against political correctness. And another is rape. But in this case rape does not usually mean what most people think it means – the forcible abduction and violation of a woman by a stranger. It means a dispute about consent, often between people who are already in a sexual relationship."
Often, not always. So being held down and forcibly sexually penetrated by a friend, relative or neighbour isn't rape it's just a 'dispute about consent'? Oh well, nothing to see here then, move along, no biggy?
And he disapproves of "child molestation" but an uncle grabbing a child on thier 16th birthday and ramming his penis into the now legal adult is just a 'dispute about consent' is it? Not rape. Not real rape.
The last time I looked being raped by your spouse had been outlawed. Presumably Peter Hitchens thinks this is a liberal step too far?
If memory serves me well I think Clarissa Dickson Wright was involved in the last case of legal marital rape. The police forcibly returned a wife to her husband to be forcibly buggered to satisfy his sexual tastes and marital rights? Presumably Peter Hitchens doesn't think that amounts to rape. Just a slight marital dispute then? A domestic. A recalcitrant wife and her forgiving husband, silly old bugger eh?
Other journalists have defended Ken Clarke more intelligently and sensitively. But this offering from Peter is more about his views than Clarkes'. And on this issue I think Peter Hitchens can just bugger off.
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This Jersey Girl may be the only adult in the room
In the cacophony following the killing of Bin Laden this article by Kristen Breitweiser possesses a singular dignity. As Rudy Guiliani watched the towers fall, he turned to his gangland friendly Police Chief, and said, "Thank God George Bush is our President." When Guiliani told the world of his inadvertent response to watching around a thousand people parish in real time it was treated not a confession of mental illness but as common sense well within the boarders of the prevailing conventional wisdom.
Wild times, those post 9-11 days. Even Alex Cockburn (who has, by the by, gone full birther with "A Volcano Of Lies") praised Bush for his post 9-11 restraint, repeating the dubious progressive mantra that Al Gore would have gone insane and dropped the bomb or some such. The general perception of recent American Political History breaks down down into loosely connected pockets of mercifully self inflicted amnesia.
Breitiweiser and her partners fought a lonely battle to force Congress's hand in holding even a "fair and balanced" 9-11 Review. Hitchens, who now cites the 9-11 Report, was very much part of the gang that would have allowed the Bush White House to escape all accountability, just as he had been Ken Starr's tool during the previous Administration.
By the time Hitch's Impeachment pal Ann Coulter was writing that Breitwiser and the other widows who had forced the commission were glad there husbands were dead so they could bask in the publicity, he had backed away from Ann Not before, however, writing that Cindy Sheehan was "sinister" or celebrating the torture of John Walker Lindh. Htich tells us that he is listening to Leonard Cohen these days, but I would suggest Randy Newman: "God Bless the potholes, down on Memory Lane!"
As visitors to Hitchens Watch all know, Christopher Hitchens recently published an article bearing the childish title, “Chomsky’s Follies: The professor’s pronouncements about Osama Bin Laden are stupid and ignorant.”
The screed contrasted sharply with the opinion expressed by Hitchens on C-Span more than seventeen years ago:
“Professor Noam Chomsky…is one of the most extraordinary moral human beings of our time, and who has produced a shelf of books and critiques and findings and carefully calibrated work that hold up a mirror to American politics and society that it should look in more often.”
This abrupt change of opinion puzzled me, so I consulted Hitchens’s memoirs, Hitch-22. On page 394, he described Chomsky as a “then-friend.” Because the book left me more bored than enlightened, I had to look elsewhere for an explanation for the failure of this cherished friendship. I wrote to Dr. Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor and Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
I asked the professor what prompted the journalist’s abrupt ideological shift after September 11, 2001. “Good question,” Chomsky responded. “I thought the shift came about 20 years ago, but have no idea why. I don’t know him well enough to judge.”
Perhaps there is no rational explanation for this behavior, I wondered. “I don’t know much about him (or care), but there may be a perfectly rational explanation: the desire to curry favor with the powerful,” Chomsky continued. “That’s often quite a strong motivation.”
Apparently, Hitchens imagined a former intimacy that had never existed. Apart from rampant careerism, I suspect that an unfulfilled desire for greater contact still lingered from the past, prompting Hitchens to lash out at him. Hitchens claimed that Chomsky “doesn’t trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and society” on 9/11. Since Chomsky said no such thing, the “self-evident premise” is only evident to Hitchens himself.
“As to how to react, we have a choice,” Chomsky had actually written on 9/12. “We can express justified horror; we can seek to understand what may have lead to the crimes, which means making an effort to enter the minds of the likely perpetrators.” He then mentioned the 1996 Israeli assault on the Lebanese village of Qana, which was an American-sponsored atrocity, and the 1982 Lebanese slaughter of Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, which was an atrocity sponsored by Israel. In support of his point, Chomsky referred to the eyewitness reportage of Robert Fisk. To those who doubt the destructive impact of American and Israeli policy on the Middle East, I would myself recommend Fisk’s profound work, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.
Ironically, on 9/13, Hitchens also connected American statecraft to the terrorist attacks on 9/11. After traveling to Washington State to speak at Whitman College, Hitchens had been trapped by the nationwide grounding of all planes. “On the campus where I am writing this, there are a few students and professors willing to venture points about United States foreign policy,” Hitchens reported to the Guardian newspaper. “But they do so very guardedly, and it would sound like profane apologetics if transmitted live. So, the analytical moment, if there is to be one, has been indefinitely postponed.”
It is difficult to determine precisely when Hitchens decided to commit himself to neoconservatism, but within a few weeks, Hitchens began to distort Chomsky’s work, as well as much of his own. The hatchet job in Slate is only the latest example:
“Ten years ago, apparently sharing the consensus that 9/11 was indeed the work of al-Qaida, he [Chomsky] wrote that it was no worse an atrocity than President Clinton’s earlier use of cruise missiles against Sudan in retaliation for the bomb attacks on the centers of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.” The Clinton administration alleged that Al-Shifa, the only pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, was a nerve-gas facility funded by Osama bin Laden.
In fact, Chomsky refrained from speculating on the true motives behind the bombing of Al-Shifa, the only pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Rather, the professor simply made a factual comparison on the results of the president’s decision:
“The September 11 attacks were major atrocities. In terms of number of victims they do not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and probably killing tens of thousands of people (no one know, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to pursue it.)”
Chomsky only noted that the cumulative casualties of the 1998 Al-Shifa bombing were greater than the casualties of the 2001 terrorist attacks. He suggested that I consult an article written by Werner Daum, who served as German Ambassador to Sudan from 1996 to 2000. According to his piece in the Summer 2001 issue of the Harvard International Review, the night watchman and his family died in the bombing of the pharmaceutical plant. Compared to the nearly 3,000 people who perished on 9/11, these immediate casualties at the plant may seem negligible, but one must place the Al-Shifa bombing in long-range perspective. As Ambassador Daum pointed out:
“It is difficult to assess how many people in this poor African country died as a consequence of the destruction of the Al-Shifa factory, but several tens of thousands seems a reasonable guess. The factory produced some of the basic medicines on the World Health Organization list, covering 20 to 60 percent of Sudan’s market and 100 percent of the market for intravenous liquids. It took more than three months for these profits to be replaced with imports. It was, naturally, the poor and the vulnerable who would suffer from the plant’s destruction, not the rich.”
Chomsky explained to me exact statistics are still unavailable: “The U.S. doesn’t investigate its own crimes.” He added that Ambassador Daum was not alone in his estimation: “The only other expert analyses are similar. But those are just guesses.”
I inquired whether it would be either appropriate or possible to make an ethical comparison between the bombing of Sudan and 9/11. In other words, could he argue that one attack was worse than the other? Or could he only address the matter in statistical terms?
“Of course when you bomb the main pharmaceutical plant in a poor African country you can be sure that many people will die, just as when you walk down the street you can be sure you’ll crush many ants,” Chomsky answered. “How that attitude compares to explicit murder on ethical grounds is a question worth pursuing. I know my opinion, but I haven’t written about it.”
Nevertheless, solid evidence and common sense proved insufficient for the new darling of the right wing. The intentions of the perpetrators mattered more now to Hitchens than the lives of the victims. He had this to say one month after 9/11:
“The clear intention of the September 11 death squads was to maximize civilian deaths in an area renowned for its cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic character…The malicious premeditation is very evident and manifest: The toll was intended to be very much higher than it was…the cruise missiles fired at Sudan were not crammed with terrified civilian kidnap victims. I do not therefore think it can be argued that the hasty, politicized and wicked decision to hit the Al-Shifa plant can be characterized as directly homicidal in quite the same way. And I don’t think anyone will be able to accuse me of euphemizing the matter.”
Well, I will accuse Hitchens of misrepresenting his original conclusions about the Al-Shifa bombing. In the November 16, 1998 issue of The Nation magazine, Hitchens had charged Clinton with the infliction of deliberate harm on innocent people:
“Moreover, a very large number of people are going to die, or are dying now, as a direct result of the destruction of a poor nation’s chief producer of medicines and agricultural pesticides. And everyone knows how this works in an underdeveloped country; it is the children and the old people and those who are already sick who die when the vaccines and the antibiotics and even the analgesics fail to show up. I look at Bill Clinton’s face –when I can force myself to do it – and ask: ‘People were put to death to save that?’ This is, as far as I know, the only time in recent history when a President has made war on civilians for a contemptibly obvious and personal motive and escaped without any protest from the traditional stage army of the good.”
Hitchens’s contradictions are intentional untruths designed for the execution of a personal vendetta. I would go beyond the scope of this article if I fully addressed the controversy over the Al-Shifa bombing. In fairness to Hitchens, I still must acknowledge the excellence of his reporting on the issue. In his book, No One Left to Lie To, he made a convincing case that the bombing was unjustified.
Then again, Hitchens’s Slate piece was also unjustified. “The article was quite dishonest,” Chomsky observed to me, “even by his standards.” What set off this latest smear was the professor’s criticism of the extrajudicial execution of Osama bin Laden: “It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law.”
Certainly, I also would have favored arrest and legal prosecution. I am very pleased to find myself in agreement with the professor now. As a supporter of Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign three years ago, I disagreed with Chomsky’s position on strategic voting, but honest people can respectfully differ. I challenge the fanboys and Hitch hens to defend the lies of their lord and master.
"I find myself hoping that, like Zarqawi, Bin Laden had a few moments at the end to realize who it was who had found him and to wonder who the traitor had been. That would be something. Not much, but something."
Ah, the comforting revenge fantasies of the confirmed atheist. Actually, wasn't it the case in Hitch's wet dream of Zarqawi's death that he KNEW who had betrayed him? Maybe one is an agnostic's revenge fantasy, and the Zarqawi bit is for the true non-believer.
Those who suggested back in W's time that the U.S. should avenge 9-11 by going after those responsible for 9-11 were met with scorn by Hitchens, and the argument that Pakistan should be pressured into giving him up were laughed off. Now it's OBAMA's job to do the diplomatic dirty work. We might have even extended our history of Bin Laden back to Bill Clinton's warnings back in nines, met only with dumb Monia jokes and far fetched "wag the dog" scenarios. Yet as Hitch has rather pathetically admitted, one could afford to be frivolous in those days.
As the U.S. now stands as a torture state, in massive debt to communist China and locked into an Orwellian nexus of perpetual war, how easy it is to forget that ten years ago the U.S., with Christopher Hitchens still safely a British citizen, bore no such horrible burdens. All of this escapes Hitchens's scorecard, as does the real price of shock and awe. Yet as our boy inches over to join Bin Laden on the dark side, it is the true legacy that weighs on his crumbling shoulders.
Since his treacherous abandonment of the true Left, apostate Chris "Judas" 'Itchens has committed many sins and crimes against the Holy Left, ones which of course have been thoroughly cataloged and chastised by us Watchers and Hitchhunters the world round. But none of his transgressions have been greater nor more heinous than the ultimate offense that he has so unapologetically committed. Namely, his flagrant flouting of the most sacred and holiest of all commandments on the Left: Thou shall not smite thy Chomsky. Yes, attacking Noam Chomsky is the supreme international crime on the Left, encompassing all the evil that follows. One can be sure that as you read these words, somewhere somebody is on the internet scathingly denouncing someone else for denouncing Chomsky.
So naturally, as a card-carrying Leftie, my hackles were up and I bristled at this fatuous, crude, and dishonest drivel published in Slate posing as a vulgar attempt at a hit-piece against Chomsky for his reaction to Bin Laden's death.
The article is off the rails the moment it leaves the station. First there's the revelation that Hitchens doesn't seem to understand what cognitive dissonance is (it's not a contradiction for someone to believe simultaneously that Bin Laden wasn't behind 9/11 yet the attack was justified). Next, more insidiously, he obliquely implies that Chomsky is not just paranoid, wrong and--aghast!--"stupid and ignorant", but that he can be conflated with conspiracy theorists and may even in fact be one of the Truther variety himself at heart. Of course this is not even risible to anyone who knows anything about the Troofers. They tend to hate Chomsky more than Cheney. And the hypocrisy is rather rank for Hitch to stick his nose up at this sort of thing when he's done his own share of batty conspiracy theorizing himself (unlike Chomsky). Such as alleging that the Lusitania sinking was a vast, vast conspiracy conducted by none-other than Winston Churchill in order to draw the US into the war, or that the Russian apartment bombings in September 1999 may have actually been a false flag and the handiwork of Vladimir Putin and the FSB.
To parse some of what CH writes:
As far as I know, only leading British "Truther" David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who alsoannounced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all. (It was apparently by means of ahologramthat the widespread delusion was created on television.) In hisrecent articleforGuernicamagazine, however, professor Noam Chomsky decides to leave that central question open.
Chomsky has left the "central" question of whether 9/11 actually happened open? That's news to me, or any honest person who has actually read the Guernica article, where Chomsky obviously does nothing of the sort. Such a ludicrous accusation is about as delusional and serious as the Truthers' allegations, appropriate though, as Hitchens is becoming about as marginal and credible as them.
We have no more reason to credit Osama Bin Laden's claim of responsibility, he states, than we would have to believe Chomsky's own claim to have won the Boston Marathon.
No, it's just a simple fact that claims made by Bin Laden about 9/11 are not necessarily true and indisputable. Hitchens knows this, and clearly agrees with this truism given how he discounted Bin Laden's multiple "confessions" in the years after 9/11 that he was not responsible for it.
So the main new element is the one of intriguing mystery. The Twin Towers came down, but it's still anyone's guess who did it. Since "April 2002, [when] the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it 'believed' that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan," no evidence has been adduced. "Nothing serious," as Chomsky puts it, "has been provided since."
Of course CH knows that Chomsky is not agnostic about who was behind 9/11, he's disingenuously refusing to address the point NC raises, i.e. that the evidence that OBL was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks is actually more thin than conventional wisdom suggests, to the degree that it might have factored into Obama's reluctance to capture and try Bin Laden rather than assassinate him. Hitchens goes on to sneer at Michael Moore for daring to reiterate an elementary principle of a society governed by the rule of law: that criminal suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. And on top of Hitchens' snide contempt for the very values of the society he claims he is trying to protect from Islamofascism (talk about facile moral equivalence, Bin Laden is no Hitler, 9/11 was not remotely as bad as the Holocaust!), he then strangely suggests that it's somehow a contradiction to plausibly suspect Bin Laden was a culprit behind 9/11 whom should be apprehended and his guilt ascertained by the courts (and that we should rightly be aware of the US role in the creation of jihadi movement). Innocent until proven guilty doesn't mean that the police aren't allowed to have suspects in a case. This is pretty basic.
Unlike some, I don't really have a beef with folks attacking Chomsky, but a pathetic, fatuous and desperate attempt like this is pretty reprehensible and low, even for someone as shameless and dishonest as our Hitch. Another clear demonstration of how Hitchens seems to have genuninely lost it, morally and intellectually.
First, some clarification. Some of our older reader may remember a Richard Dawkins, active in the 1970s, who wrote important works on evolutionary theory, such as The Extended Phenotype. But he seems to have died, or moved to Canada or something, and instead this post will be about another Richard Dawkins. This other Richard Dawkins writes potboilers with big print (small words though!) and lots of brightly coloured pictures like The Greatest Show on Earth.
This other Richard Dawkins also hosts a website on which he expounds his (no longer) particularly interesting views on science, and his even less interesting view on politics.
Like many of the New Atheists, Dawkins leans to the Right. He takes it for granted, for example, that Islamic fundamentalism is caused by Islam (i.e. that there is something about Islam that lends itself to fundamentalism), that so-called Islamic terrorism is caused by Islam, and so on. Like any good saloon bar bore, Dawkins feels no need to actually provide any evidence for these startling propositions 'cos it's like, obvious, innit? Besides, Dawkins has doubtless done much empirical work of his own, perhaps by interrogating the taxi drivers who meet him at the airport to take him to his 5 star hotel where he will be staying for yet another highly paid speaking gig, and asking them for their own scientific opinion on why the Muzzies just can't cut it.
But I digress!
Dawkins Mark 2 is as famous for being a New Atheist as Dawkins Mark 1 was for being a serious scientist. But like preposterous buffoon Sam Harris, Dawkins Jr has now started to waver even in that, the closest thing he had to a principle. Indeed, like MadSam Harris, Dawkins would now seem to have become a New Faithiest. All religions are equal of course (equally bad that is!) but now it seems that some are very much more equal than others.
'Given that Islam is such an unmitigated evil, and looking at the map supplied by this Christian site, should we be supporting Christian missions in Africa? My answer is still no, but I thought it was worth raising the question. Given that atheism hasn't any chance in Africa for the foreseeable future, could our enemy's enemy be our friend?
(Note: Nick Griffin, head of the British National Party, has described Islam as a"wicked and vicious faith").
There are three things to point out here. First like the Wicked Hitch of 'The West', Dawkins Jr. is now keen on the imperial 'we'. Who is this 'we' who 'should' be doing things 'for' (not with, obviously!) Africans?
Secondly, following Mad Sam Harris, it now seems that whereas, in theory, 'we' hate all religions, in practice 'we' should be prepared to countenance a sort of Nazi-Soviet pact with fundamentalist extremist homophobic Christians (and presumably with fascists as well, as Mad Sam has made clear).
And finally, 'atheism hasn't any chance in Africa for the foreseeable future.' Dawkins views atheism as more or less synomymous with rational thought. So: according to this, rational thought has no chance in Africa for the foreseeable future. I know why Nick Griffin would think that. Why does Dawkins?
There's perhaps some slight satisfaction to be gained from this smoking-gun proof of official Pakistani complicity with al-Qaida, but in general it only underlines the sense of anticlimax. After all, who did not know that the United States was lavishly feeding the same hands that fed Bin Laden? There's some minor triumph, also, in the confirmation that our old enemy was not a heroic guerrilla fighter but the pampered client of a corrupt and vicious oligarchy that runs a failed and rogue state.
But, again, we were aware of all this already. At least we won't have to put up with a smirking video when the 10th anniversary of his best-known atrocity comes around. Come to think of it, though, he hadn't issued any major communiqués on any subject lately (making me wonder, some time ago, if he hadn't actually died or been accidentally killed already), and the really hateful work of his group and his ideology was being carried out by a successor generation like his incomparably more ruthless clone in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. I find myself hoping that, like Zarqawi, Bin Laden had a few moments at the end to realize who it was who had found him and to wonder who the traitor had been. That would be something. Not much, but something.
Aren’t you proud of President Obama? Are you not proud? Are you not proud that a man born—that a man born into segregation and discrimination is leading really hard professional, tough, generous, brave men and women in uniform for the defense of the United States and all the time has two daughters in Sidwell Friends and seems to think he can manage both?
Do you think they'll run a headline like this when Hitchens dies? And the Commander-in-Chief (do not patronize him!) has a message for Hitch's Republican friends:
“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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