Hitchens and Muggeridge in retrospect

“No serious person is without contradictions. The test lies in the willingness or ability to recognize and confront them.” So wrote the late Christopher Hitchens in 2003, on the centennial of the birth of his fellow countryman Malcolm Muggeridge. The two had much in common. Both were middle class products of the English public school system and elite universities; both were journalist-adventurers, disillusioned socialists, contrarians, and iconoclasts. They were not quite contemporaries—Muggeridge died in 1990, just over forty years after Hitchens was born—but Muggeridge’s life offers a lens through which to remember Hitchens, who died two years ago this December.

h/t Kathy S. 

The most disgusting man in the world

Disgusting British MP George Galloway starts his reprehensible YouTube broadcast celebrating the death of Margaret Thatcher with a condemnation of the BBC for having praised Margaret Thatcher.

"This is not North Korea. Adulation of the dead leader is not part of the British character"

That is quite an interesting comment coming from a deplorable individual whose character includes adulation of North Korea, as Galloway does in the video below.



As the late Christopher Hitchens noted about him, there isn't a brutal dictator in the world that Galloway doesn't prostrate before as a "daddy figure."

More than a year after his death, Communist idiots are still infuriated Christopher Hitchens turned his back on them

From a review of The Trial of Christopher Hitchens in the moronic, neo-Marxist website rabble.ca, published by the same-sex spouse of NDP Deputy Leader Libby Davies:

Immediately after the September 11 attacks, he spoke of caution, of not veering into overreaction, yet soon he was picking fights with anyone who dared question U.S. reaction or even contextualize the attacks as "Anti-American" or worse. His early smears of Noam Chomsky and many others allowed for the entry -- even into some quarters of the Left for a short time -- of talk of loyalty and patriotism.

Hitchens became the patron saint of what some came to call "The Decent Left," those who signed the "Euston Manifesto."  Seymour’s first book, The Liberal Defence of Murder, gives a history and analysis of this tendency, and is well worth the read.  But Hitchens went far beyond even the "decent left" in his calls for civilizational warfare, his shocking and even genocidal Islamophobia (stating that he refused to share a planet with this "enemy"), even, tragically, his disavowal of his early and stalwart anti-Zionism.

The review is peppered with the predictable vapid Marxist jargon; reactionary, comrades,  revolutionary socialism, McCarthyist and so on...

It reeks of the unintentionally self-parodying, hysterical outrage that only a stupid western Marxist could muster.

Kangaroo Court and Clown Show rolled into one - the Russell Tribunal on Palestine stumbles into New York this weekend

A tribunal, as defined by the meaning of the word, is a court with the authority to render decisions of justice. So among the other abuses perpetrated by the Russell Tribunal on Palestine is a debasement of the English language by the upcoming gathering this weekend of prejudiced fanatics and buffoons who comprise it.

After having already convicted the middle east's only democracy for crimes of which it is not guilty, this assembly of crackpots will, in New York this weekend, be re-empanelling virtually the same biased jury that participated in its Cape Town travesty last year that condemned Israel for practicing "apartheid."  By its own distorted definition of apartheid, the Russell group demonstrated both its bigotry and stupidity in their findings.

They define apartheid as occurring under circumstances:  "(i) that two distinct racial groups can be identified; (ii) that ‗inhuman acts‘ are committed against the subordinate group; and (iii) that such acts are committed systematically in the context of an institutionalised regime of domination by one group over the other."

Are the Russell group contending that black Ethiopian Jews are of the same distinct racial group as white European Ashkenazim Jews or of Semitic Middle Eastern Sephardi Jews?

Judaism is a religion. While black South Africans could not convert to becoming white Boers, Arabs can and sometimes do become Jews. There can only be two distinct racial groups in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict if one views, as the Russell group apparently does, "Jew" in the Hitlerian sense, where Jewish blood designates a racial category of its own.  Were he capable, Hitler would be smiling up from Hell to see the useful idiots of the Russell group taking up his mantle of hate.

One of the aspects of an actual tribunal is that it has some measure of authority. The Russell Tribunal has none of any sort, lacking even the moral authority of a swarm of flies buzzing around a dung heap. Indeed, it's each other`s malignant excrement the Russell jury will be ingesting.

The Russell Tribunal is a theatrical farce staged by buffoons

If you were actively seeking to form a group of declared, determined enemies of the Jewish state, you would be hard pressed to do better than the Russell group's "jury." It includes such extremists as oddball conspiracy theorist and former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who was a constant embarrassment to the Democratic party. She continues to blame the loss of her Congressional seat in a 2006 primary on the "Israel lobby." Her father, a Georgia state assemblyman at the time, said his daughter's loss was because "Jews have bought everybody. Jews. J-e-w-s"  McKinney recently alleged the NATO campaign against Libyan dictator Muammar Gadaffi was part of a conspiracy to further Israel's goals, so who better to be part of the kangaroo court judging alleged Israeli "war crimes"?

Among those joining McKinney will be intellectual giants like defunked British band Pink Floyd's Rogers Waters, and the hysterical, geriatric author Alice Walker. Seemingly motivated in large measure by antipathy for her Jewish, Zionist husband who divorced her, in a statement since expunged from her blog, Walker described an encounter with a Palestinian woman:

I gave her [an old Palestinian woman] a gift I had brought and she thanked me. Looking into my eyes, she said "May God protect you from the Jews." When the young Palestinian interpreter told me what she'd said, I responded: "It's too late. I already married one."  I said this because, like so many Jews in America, my former husband could not tolerate criticism of Israel's behavior toward the Palestinians. 

To compensate, there will be criticism of Israel aplenty for Walker this weekend. Another of her jury peers, Ronnie Kasrils, is a Jew who compared Israel to Nazis and once wrote, "I am convinced that in years to come humanity will look back to Soviet achievements as a source of profound inspiration."  It's not surprising that someone so inspired would be part of the cult wanting to boycott and sanction Israel that even anti-Israel activist Norman Finkelstein identified as dishonest  hypocrites who are really seeking the Jewish state's destruction.

Normally courts, even kangaroo courts, don't sell tickets. But the Russell Tribunal on Palestine is less a court than entertainment; a clown show charging admission to watch jesters who don't appreciate their own ridiculousness.

The late British essayist Christopher Hitchens posed some questions to activists like those peopling the Russell group's farce that are so determined to show solidarity with the Hamas-ruled Palestinians:

At a time of widespread democratic and pluralist revolution in the region, Hamas imposes its own version of theocracy on Gaza and seems otherwise aligned with the forces that stand athwart the hope of continued and deeper change. Who wants to volunteer time to make this outfit look more presentable? Half the published articles on Gaza contain a standard reference to its resemblance to a vast open-air prison (and when I last saw it under Israeli occupation, it certainly did deserve this metaphor). The problem is that, given its ideology and its allies, Hamas qualifies rather too well in the capacity of guard.   

Only a few weeks ago, the Hamas regime in Gaza became the only governing authority in the world — by my count — to express outrage and sympathy at the death of Osama Bin Laden. As the wavelets lap in the Greek harbours, and the sunshine beats down, doesn’t any journalist want to know whether the “activists” have discussed this element in their partners’ world outlook? Does Alice Walker seriously have no comment?   

Hamas is listed by various governments and international organizations as a terrorist group. I don’t mind conceding that that particular word has been used in arbitrary ways in the past. But what concerns me much more is the official programmatic adoption, by Hamas, of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This disgusting fabrication is a key foundational document of 20th-century racism and totalitarianism, indelibly linked to the Hitler regime in theory and practice. It seems extraordinary to me that any “activist” claiming allegiance to human rights could cooperate at any level with the propagation of such evil material. But I’ve have never seen any of them invited to comment on this matter, either.

Undoubtedly, there are obvious matters upon which Alice Walker and her coterie of clowns will avoid comment, focusing instead on demonizing the only country in its region that respects individual liberties. But their avoidance of context and the complete truth only highlights how little worth can be attached to anything else they have to say.

A few classic Hitchens moments

Who hasn't wanted to tell Bill Maher's audience they were a bunch of morons, but who else had the guts to do it to their face?

Another reason to celebrate Chris Hitchens' life and mourn his passing

The most disgusting, vile, stupid people on the planet are cheering that one of the loudest voices that exposed their vapidity, ridiculed them, and laid bare their moral debauchery is no longer with us.

But don't worry,  plenty more of us are still here.


Related video: A fascinating discussion taped in 2002 of Hitchens and Newt Gingrich discussing The War on Terror

Sanity lost one of its great voices today

Christopher Hitchens greatest crime, from the standpoint of radical socialists and the anti-Western left, was not just that he disagreed with them or that he consistently humiliated them with his reasoned logic, but that he ceased to be one of them.

He passed today at the age of 62 from the espohegeal cancer that, for the last year of his life, took his speech but not his powerful voice that he was able to express in writing until nearly his last day.

I had the priviliege of being on stage at one of his last public speaking appearances, at The Munk Debate where he and former British PM Tony Blair argued about whether religion is a force for good in the world. Despite the obvious bond of affection between the two, Hitchens never ceased to be a ferocious combatant, despite having to pause at times because of his failing health, and his arguments  overwhelmingly won over the audience. 

Hitchens' one consistent loyalty was to logic and the honesty of what he believed. The only sort of person who never changes their mind is the kind who doesn't have much of a mind. Hitchens possessed one of the great minds of our time and as he was exposed to new knowledge, he didn't reject it because it conflicted with his entrenched ideas; he absorbed it to develop, change and reason in a more complete way. 

He moved from being a comrade of the Marxist left to a veritable spokesman for the NeoCon right when he saw the reality of Saddam Hussein's persecution of the Kurds. The left was more interested in their ideological devotion to opposing the so-called forces of a non-existent imperialism than in the actual lives of human beings. In too many cases, this manifested itself among western socialists who claimed to be for peace in a gleeful acceptance of totalitarian dictatorships, under which less fortunate people would be consigned. As Hitchens, in his typically concise and devastatingly honest way put it, "it's not that they're anti-war, they're pro-war, but for the other side." 

He was not bound by simplistic notions of ideological partisanship. He just told the truth as he saw it, and in the process angered many whose attachment to a fixed idea was more important to reason. In the last decade of his life, his atheism was militant, if ironic for someone whose name means "friend of Christ" If the forcefulness of his disbelief did not disprove God, the reactions to it from believers bolstered his contention that such belief was irrational. 

As someone who does believe in God, I found the ferocious reaction to Hitchens from people who professed to have strong faith both curious and disheartening. If God is God, then He is not an imaginary friend who vanishes when you cease to believe in Him. The benefit of having God in one's life is to those who know Him, not to God.  So why would people who claim to believe in God be upset at the disbelief at others? God cannot be proven like a scientific formula. Those who know Him must find Him on their own path. And for those who do not, what really matters is not whether they believe in God but that God believes in them.  

The wealth of reason, truth, and the constant passion and battle for justice that he fought leaves me no doubt that God believed in Christopher Hitchens. Should Hitchens find that he was wrong about his atheism, I doubt he will be very disappointed.  Because if there's one thing he shared with the Creator, it's a sly sense of humor.

Christopher Hitchens poses questions to the Sea Hitler Gaza boat crew

Only a few weeks ago, the Hamas regime in Gaza became the only governing authority in the world—by my count—to express outrage and sympathy at the death of Osama Bin Laden. As the wavelets lap in the Greek harbors, and the sunshine beats down, doesn't any journalist want to know whether the "activists" have discussed this element in their partners' world outlook? Does Alice Walker seriously have no comment?

Hamas is listed by various governments and international organizations as a terrorist group. I don't mind conceding that that particular word has been used in arbitrary ways in the past. But what concerns me much more is the official programmatic adoption, by Hamas, of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This disgusting fabrication is a key foundational document of 20^th-century racism and totalitarianism, indelibly linked to the Hitler regime in theory and practice. It seems extraordinary to me that any "activist" claiming allegiance to human rights could cooperate at any level with the propagation of such evil material. But I have never seen any of them invited to comment on this matter, either.

Read it all at Slate

88 year old first-time debater, Henry Kissinger kicks butt at Munk Debate

The poll of the audience at last night's Munk Debate over the proposition, "Will the 21st Century belong to China?" was split right down the middle prior to the debate. The ballots showed that 39% agreed  and 40% disagreed with 21% being undecided.

The debate subject was a bit odd in that it required the participants to prognosticate and as Yoggi Berra said, "It's tough to make predictions. especially about the future."

Nonetheless, debaters David Daokui Li and Niall Ferguson for the pro side and Henry Kissinger and Fareed Zakaria for the con, despite presenting opposing positions, were all very convincing about their ability to see into the future as far as China's role in the world is concerned.

Doug Donderi's and my debate for the Head-to-Head contest won us seats on stage, a few feet from Kissinger, who as Munk Debate moderator Rudyard Griffiths informed the audience, was participating that night in his first public debate ever at the age of 88.

The audience was clearly there to see the legendary former Secretary of State, but if the debate had a star, it was Harvard professor and Kissinger biographer Niall Ferguson. Combining a remarkable command of information about the extent of China's global economic reach he also hilariously beat up Kissinger and Zakaria with quotes from their own works where they predicted China's global dominance.

Kissinger, famous for leading the move to establish relation between Communist China and America had a special insight into the evening's subject.  His view was that the political upheaval that China has in store from a growing middle class that will demand more political rights and freedoms combined with the shift from a rural to urban population, will keep China too busy internally to capitalize on its current economic trajectory.

The evening had a bit of an intimidating moment in the form of a warning from Professor Li. He cautioned the West that China is growing stronger and stronger and it would not tolerate interference in its interests from the outside. Ferguson revelled in that moment, using it as an example of growing Chinese confidence and power. I just found it kind of scary.

It wasn't until the end of the debate that I was convinced that China may indeed be the world's single dominant player for the bulk of this century until Ferguson made a concise and fascinating point. He discouraged the idea of thinking of democracy in American/Western terms. Democracy has different, yet functional approaches through the world, and he suggested that the Chinese model would look like a giant Singapore.

That swayed me. But I was in the minority among the audience. It was Fareed Zakaria's emotional  'mom and apple pie' closing appeal to the audience not to give up on the free west, free markets and free societies that won the argument for the con side.

The event itself was quite an evening with a number of notable attendees. Former US Defense Secretary William Cohen was in the audience and posed a question during the debate. Brian Mulroney was there as was Canada's current Minister of Foreign Affairs, John Baird.

Very Attractive
American Academic

Poor Mr. Baird was minding his own business, having a night off, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to accost him to ask what he thought about The Sea Hitler. He's intelligent and good humoured, and I could practically see the thought bubble appear over his head saying. "here we go...on the clock again." But he was adamant in his distaste for the effort by Canadian Islamists and radical leftists to break Israel's arms embargo of Gaza. I referred to them as silly and he corrected me, calling them `dangerous` and added a few other choice words.  But I had brought a very attractive American academic I met at the Worldviews Conference on Media and Higher Education to the debate with me and Baird quite sensibly redirected his attention to her.

With Friday`s debate and the previous one with Tony Blair debating Christopher Hitchens over religion, the Munk Debates series has established itself as one of Toronto`s premier intellectual happenings, and whatever the next one offers should be fascinating.

The last of the scholar warriors

Leigh Fermor had lived in Greece before the war, had taken a part in the revolution of 1935, and had seen the German invasion sweep all before it. He spoke the language and loved the culture and could be fairly inconspicuously infiltrated onto the island of Crete. In 1944, with the help of some British special forces and a team of Cretan partisans, he managed to kidnap the commander of the German occupation, Gen. Heinrich Kreipe, and carry him over a long stretch of arduous terrain before loading him into a fast motorboat that sped him to Egypt and British captivity. The humiliation of the German authorities could not have been more complete. Perhaps resenting this, Gen. Kreipe was at first obnoxious and self-pitying, until the moment came when he was being taken over the crest of Mount Ida and a "brilliant dawn" suddenly broke. According to Leigh Fermor's memoirs:

We were all three lying smoking in silence, when the general, half to himself, slowly said: Vides et ulta stet nive candidum Soracte. ["See how Mount Soracte stands out white with deep snow."] It was the opening of one of the few Horace odes I knew by heart. I went on reciting where he had broken off. … The general's blue eyes swiveled away from the mountain top to mine and when I'd finished, after a long silence, he said: "Ach so, Herr Major!" It was very strange. "Ja, Herr General." As though for a moment the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before, and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.

A fascinating tribute to Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor by Christopher Hitchens in Slate

Christopher Hitchens on The Art of the Feud

Perhaps no one has distinguished himself as a feudist in the past few decades more than Christopher Hitchens, who in an e-mail gave some helpful hints on how to start a feud — and, more important, how to keep it going.

A proper feud, Mr. Hitchens wrote, requires one of at least two things: a clash of strong and recognizable personalities, and a true clash of important principle. “A really first-rate bust-up must transcend the limits of ‘an entertaining side show’ and involve playing for high moral and intellectual stakes,” he said.


Read the whole fun article at The New York Times

Christopher Hitchens on Chomsky's Follies

Christopher Hitchens can't speak with his mouth right now due to esophageal cancer, but he still speaks loudly and forcefully with his pen.

His column on the stupidity of Noam Chomsky's moral relativism and misrepresentation appears in the current issue of Slate:

The professor's pronouncements about Osama Bin Laden are stupid and ignorant.

Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism. This cognitive dissonance—to give it a polite designation—does not always take that precise form. Sometimes the same person who hails the bravery of al-Qaida's martyrs also believes that the Jews planned the "operation." As far as I know, only leading British "Truther" David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who also announced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all. (It was apparently by means of a hologram that the widespread delusion was created on television.) In his recent article for Guernica magazine, however, professor Noam Chomsky decides to leave that central question open. 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.

I can't immediately decide whether or not this is an improvement on what Chomsky wrote at the time. Ten years ago, apparently sharing the consensus that 9/11 was indeed the work of al-Qaida, he 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. (I haven't been back to check on whether he conceded that those embassy bombings were also al-Qaida's work to begin with.) He is still arguing loudly for moral equivalence, maintaining that the Abbottabad, Pakistan, strike would justify a contingency whereby "Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic." (Indeed, equivalence might be a weak word here, since he maintains that, "uncontroversially, [Bush's] crimes vastly exceed bin Laden's.")

Read the rest here at Slate

UPDATE : Alan Dershowitz on bin Laden's defender

Christopher Hitchens: Taliban reality finally dawns on human rights camp

Even in a week that concentrated all eyes on the magnificent courage and maturity of the people of Cairo, a report from Kabul began with what must surely be the most jaw-dropping opening paragraph of the year. Under the byline of the excellent Rod Nordland, The New York Times reported: “International and local human rights groups working in Afghanistan have shifted their focus toward condemning abuses committed by the Taliban insurgents, rather than those attributed to the American military and its allies.” 

The story went on to point out that the Taliban was culpable for “more than three-fourths of all civilian casualties” and informed us that some human-rights groups are now so concerned that they are thinking of indicting the Taliban for war crimes. “The activists’ concern,” Nordland went on, “would have been unheard-of a year ago,” when all the outcry was directed at casualties inflicted by NATO contingents.

The story became more mind-boggling as it unfolded. One had to ask oneself what had taken the human-rights “community” so long.

Read the rest at The National Post