Tag Archives: Christopher Hitchens

A Secular Scientist’s Argument against the New Atheists

19 Tuesday Jan 2016

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David Berlinski and Christopher Hitchens

Moderator: Dr. Berlisnki, you’re not a Christian, and indeed, you’re not religious as I understand it. Why do you argue for a Judeo-Christian influence in society?

David Berlisnki: I presume you are not asking me in the hopes of a personal declaration. And I won’t say that this secular Jew has a remarkable degree of authority when it comes to these moral events: after all, I have lived my own life under the impress of having a good time, all the time. On the other hand, it doesn’t hurt to hear these words from someone such as myself, because at least you are hearing them from someone with no conceivable bias in their favor.

In its largest aspect, Western science is of course an outgrowth of Judeo-Christian tradition, especially to the extent, perhaps only to the extent, that it is committed to the principle that the manifest universe contains a latent structure that can be discovered by the intellect of man. I think this is true. I don’t think this is very far from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ declaration that, ‘the world is charged with the grandeur of God.’ […]

You know, Stephen Hawking just published a book, one explaining, again, how everything began — why it’s there, why we shouldn’t worry about God, et cetera. And to paraphrase the claim that he now makes: having given up on “A” through “L”, he now champions something called “M-theory” to explain how the universe popped into existence. I respect Hawking as a reputable physicist. But I can tell you this: What is lamentably lacking in every one of these discussions is that coruscating spirit of skepticism which a Christopher Hitchens or a Richard Dawkins would bring to religious claims, and then lapses absurdly when it comes to naturalistic and scientific claims about the cosmos.

Surely, we should have the sophistication to wonder at any asseveration of the form that the universe just blasted itself into existence following the laws of M-theory — a theory no one can understand, whose mathematical formulism hasn’t been completed, which has never once been tested in any laboratory on the face of the earth…

Finally, the fact that the earth, our home, is a small part of the physical universe does not mean it is not the center of the universe. That is a non sequitur. After all, no one would argue, least of all Mr. Hitchens, that the doctrine that home is where the heart lies is rendered false by distance. We should be very careful about making these claims. I agree that the universe is very big; there are lots of galaxies and amazing things. And there is certainly some biological continuity between humans and the animals that came before us. But as for the central religious claim that this particular place is blessed and important, that’s different. No doctrine about physical size rebuts it…

And as to why should a secular Jew open his mouth to questions pertaining to the Christian religion? It’s a big tent. I’m presuming I would be welcomed.

__________

An excerpt from Berlinski’s 2010 debate with Christopher Hitchens. Berlinski’s erudition reaches almost comical heights in this debate, which is, in my opinion, one of the more compelling Hitch ever did. I like the whole thing, but you can watch the pulled section below.

Continue onward:

That Time Margaret Thatcher Spanked Christopher Hitchens

29 Tuesday Sep 2015

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Margaret Thatcher

“I had written a longish article for The New York Times Magazine, saying in effect that, if Labour could not revolutionize British society, then the task might well fall to the right. I had also written a shorter piece for the New Statesman, reporting from the Conservative Party conference and saying in passing that I thought Mrs. Thatcher was surprisingly sexy. (To this day, I have never had so much anger mail, saying, in effect, ‘How could you?’)

I felt immune to Mrs. Thatcher in most other ways, since for all her glib ‘free market’ advocacy on one front she seemed to be an emotional ally of the authoritarian and protectionist white-settler regime in Rhodesia. And it was this very thing that afforded me the opportunity to grapple with her so early in her career…

Almost as soon as we shook hands on immediate introduction, I felt that she knew my name and had perhaps connected it to the socialist weekly that had recently called her rather sexy. While she struggled adorably with this moment of pretty confusion, I felt obliged to seek controversy and picked a fight with her on a detail of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe policy. She took me up on it. I was (as it happened) right on the small point of fact, and she was wrong. But she maintained her wrongness with such adamantine strength that I eventually conceded the point and even bowed slightly to emphasize my acknowledgment. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Bow lower!’ Smiling agreeably, I bent forward a bit farther. ‘No, no,’ she trilled. ‘Much lower!’ By this time, a little group of interested bystanders was gathering. I again bent forward, this time much more self-consciously. Stepping around behind me, she unmasked her batteries and smote me on the rear with the parliamentary order paper that she had been rolling into a cylinder behind her back. I regained the vertical with some awkwardness. As she walked away, she looked over her shoulder and gave an almost imperceptibly slight roll of the hip while mouthing the words ‘Naughty boy!’

I had and have eyewitnesses to this. At the time, though, I hardly believed it myself. It is only from a later perspective, looking back on the manner in which she slaughtered and cowed all the former male leadership of her party and replaced them with pliant tools, that I appreciate the premonitory glimpse—of what someone in another context once called ‘the smack of firm government’—that I had been afforded. Even at the time, as I left that party, I knew I had met someone rather impressive. And the worst of ‘Thatcherism,’ as I was beginning by degrees to discover, was the rodent slowly stirring in my viscera: the uneasy but unbanishable feeling that on some essential matters she might be right.”

Margaret Thatcher 2

__________

A segment from Christopher Hitchens’s memoir Hitch-22.

I thought of this encounter as I was watching the last GOP debate and saw Mrs. Fiorina dispense one by one with her male counterparts, even spurring The Donald to bow in submission (a first for him, no doubt). That their particular clash came on the heels of Trump’s remark about “that face” only doubled the association to Thatcher, whose looks, despite what Austin Powers may’ve thought, had more than a few fans on the left and right. (I’ve heard similar compliments about Carly, confirmed just a few days ago by a female journalist friend who interviewed her last week.)

It was Thatcher who once mused, in a poached version of a famous labor union saying, that, “being powerful is like being ladylike — if you have to say you are, you probably aren’t.” The same goes for other adjectives, like smart, classy, rich, and many of Trump’s other favorite words which he likes to apply to himself. Yet it’s precisely this do-don’t-tell orientation which makes a female politician like Thatcher so potent. What you think you see ain’t necessarily what you’ll get. As Mitterand said, “she had the eyes of Caligula and mouth of Marilyn Monroe.”

If you’re at all familiar with Hitch’s work, you’ll know this type of fixation on and flirtation with women were central to his persona. His best pal, Martin Amis, along with Amis’s father Kingsley and several other Englishmen of those generations, had a lot to say about Mrs. Thatcher — most of which didn’t have to do with her stance on Rhodesia. Martin uses the above interaction as a basis to analyze Thatcher’s appeal to the English male psyche. In an excerpt pulled from his essay collection The War Against Cliché, he writes:

I once discussed Mrs Thatcher’s feminine qualities with Christopher Hitchens who had recently spent some time in her company. This was his verdict: ‘Oh, she stinks of sex.’ And this is my father, Kingsley Amis, in his Memoirs: her beauty, he writes, is ‘so extreme that… it can trap me for a split second into thinking I am looking at a science-fiction illustration of some time ago showing the beautiful girl who has become President of the Solar Federation in the year 2200. The fact that that is not a sensual or sexy beauty does not make it a less sexual beauty, and that sexuality is still, I think, an underrated factor in her appeal (or repellence).’ Helplessley I reach for the commonplace about the glamour of power. I could further infuriate my father’s shade by adducing another cliché: English nostalgia for chastisement. Philip Larkin shared his friend’s enthusiasm for the Prime Minister (‘I adore Mrs Thatcher’). Larkin was a great poet… he once asked Mrs Thatcher, who had professed herself a fan, to quote a line of his. She blinked and said, ‘All the unhurried day/ Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.’

I like that she could quote Larkin. Counts for a lot in my book. What would my Larkin nomination be? I’m glad you asked. “The trees are coming into leaf/ Like something almost being said.”

By the way, is his repetition of  “saying, in effect…” in the first paragraph a rare Hitchens misstep? Watch him relay the encounter below.

You can also move on:

How Christopher Hitchens Became an American Citizen (Or, a Case Study in the Need for Immigration Reform)

17 Monday Aug 2015

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“The American bureaucracy very swiftly overcompensates for any bright-eyed immigrant delusions. Nihil humanum a me alienum puto, said the Roman poet Terence: ‘Nothing human is alien to me.’ The slogan of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service could have been the reverse: To us, no aliens are human. When folded — along with the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco, the only department of state I had ever hoped to command — into the vast inner space of the Department of Homeland Security, the resulting super-ministry was more like the Circumlocution Office than a reformed bureaucracy. My Canadian friend David Frum, who was actually working in the White House and had had a hand in writing the famous ‘axis of evil’ speech, had his personal paperwork lost when he applied to become an American. Ian McEwan was put under close arrest and hit with an indelible ‘entry denied’ stamp while trying to cross from Vancouver to Seattle for a big public reading: it would have been of little use to him to plead that the First Lady had recently asked him to dinner…

Innumerable times I was told, or assured without asking, that I would hear back from officialdom ‘within ninety days.’ I wasn’t in any special hurry, but it grated when ninety days came and went. Letters came from offices in Vermont and required themselves to be returned to offices in states very far away from the Canadian border. Eventually I received a summons to an interview in Virginia. There would be an exam, I was told, on American law and history. To make this easier, a series of sample questions was enclosed, together with the answers. I realized in scanning them that it wouldn’t do to try and be clever, let alone funny. For example, to the question: ‘Against whom did we fight in the revolution of 1776?’ it would be right, if incorrect, to say ‘The British’ and wrong, if correct, to say ‘The usurping Hanoverian monarchy.’ Some of the pre-supplied Qs and As appeared to me to be paltry… Q: ‘What did the Emancipation Proclamation do?’ A: ‘It freed the slaves.’ No it didn’t: that had to wait until the Thirteenth Amendment, the first United States document to mention the actual word ‘slavery’ (and not ratified by the State of Mississippi until 1995).

Christopher Hitchens

Having previously been made to go to a whole separate appointment in deepest Maryland just to be fingerprinted, I sat up on the night before my Virginia one, and decided to read slowly through the Constitution… One had to admire the unambivalent way in which these were written. ‘Respecting an establishment of religion,’ said the very first amendment, drawing on Jefferson’s and Madison’s Virginia Statute For Religious Freedom, ‘Congress shall make no law.’ Little wiggle room there; no crevice through which a later horse-and-cart could ever be driven. Alas for advocates of ‘gun control,’ the Second Amendment seems to enshrine a ‘right of the people to keep and bear arms’  irrespective of whether they are militia members or not. (The clause structure is admittedly a little reminiscent of the ablative absolute.) And the Eighth Amendment, forbidding ‘cruel and unusual punishments,’ is of scant comfort to those like me who might like that definition stretched to include the death penalty. If the Founders had wanted to forbid capital punishment (as, say, the state constitution of Michigan explicitly does), they would have done so in plain words…

For a writer to become an American is to subscribe of his own free will to a set of ideas and principles and to the documents that embody them in written form, all the while delightedly appreciating that the documents can and often must be revised, so that the words therefore constitute, so to say, a work in progress.

This was all rather well set out in the passport that I immediately went to acquire… Human history affords no precedent or parallel for this attainment. On the day that I swore my great oath, dozens of Afghans and Iranians and Iraqis did the same. A few days later, I noticed that I had sloppily gummed a postage stamp onto an envelope with the flag appearing upside down. I am the most frugal of men, but I reopened the letter, tore up and threw away the envelope, invested in a whole new stamp and sent Old Glory on its way with dignity unimpaired. A small gesture, but my own.”

__________

From the closing of the chapter “Changing Places” in the memoir Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens.

Below: Hitchens takes his oath of citizenship with the Director of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, on April 13, 2005. You can read more about the event and its lead up in Hitch’s piece in the Atlantic in the following month “On Becoming American”.

Then read on:

Hitchens Citizenship

Peter Hitchens: The House I Grew up in

27 Friday Feb 2015

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Peter Hitchens

“I know perfectly well that it’s actually quite wrong to try to live in the past or to seek it.

I think a lot of the reason why people do sometimes do it and some little moment of reminiscence will bring on a voyage into the past is because they would like to open a door and find that their parents were alive again. And then you could show them that you’d grown up. You’d like to say, ‘Look, all that nonsense that you had to put up with, it’s over. And here are your grandchildren,’ who in my mother’s case, she never met and in my father’s case he only ever met one of them.

So yes, that would be a good thing to do. It’s futile. There is no such door. You can go back into the houses of your youth and they are other peoples’ houses — they’re not yours anymore.

The only purpose of going into the past is to examine it and to know what it was really like. And often these days, people defame the past and pretend that it was a waste of time — nothing but misery and poverty and drabness. And to recognize that while yes there were many things that were wrong about the past, there were good things that we’ve lost and that are recoverable.

And those who know nothing of the past will simply experience the future as a series of unnecessary mistakes and of mysterious events they had no possibility of understanding because they have no understanding of the way people behave and the way nations behave.

He who doesn’t know his own past and the past of his own country and his own people is perpetually a child.”

__________

The concluding remarks from Peter Hitchens in his 2011 profile for the BBC radio program The House I Grew Up In, for which he returned to several childhood homes on the English coastline to see how they reflected and stirred his memories of family life.

These remarks are especially melancholic in context, as Peter spends much of the episode wandering the streets of his childhood and discussing his rebellious youth, which involved, among other things, burning his Bible on the soccer pitch of his prep school. That prep school, more especially the money it siphoned from his working class mother and father, is to his mind at least part of the reason for their unhappy divorce and his mother’s eventual, tragic demise. Peter declines to discuss either event in much detail; Christopher, his older brother by two years, was more open, facing it with beautiful, plaintive words in the first and best chapter (“Yvonne”) of his memoir Hitch-22.

I recommend listening to the entire episode, as Peter’s a first class guide of not only his past but of a kind of postwar English life that’s now nearly all gone. Perpetually overcast skies drizzling on hedgerows and Edwardian pubs; wheezing tea kettles; the cults of Winston Churchill and Admiral Nelson; double-decker buses and soldiers scuttling by in crisp Royal Navy uniforms. The England of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. Peter can immerse readers and listeners in that world because he is of that world. His wry lamenting of his 60’s rebelliousness recalls one of his most epic lines, wielded in his debate at the Oxford Union on the existence of God: he opens his rebuttal by saying of his opponents that they — paraphrasing — “remind me of the most obnoxious, selfishness person I’ve ever known: my 15-year-old self.”

For more on Peter’s conversion to Christianity, pick up his apologetic memoir The Rage Against God. For more on his politics, check out The Abolition of Britain and Short Breaks in Mordor: Dawns and Departures of a Scribbler’s Life.

More Hitchens bro’s:

Peter and Christopher Hitchens 3 Peter and Christopher Hitchens 1 Peter and Christopher Hitchens 2

Christopher Hitchens: Their Hatred Towards Us Is a Compliment

24 Tuesday Feb 2015

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Hitchens


“Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people alone, but as the common enemy of humanity, and of civilization, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason. Most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad.

Daniel Pearl’s revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college and was the chair of the Islamic Students Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people have been reported from all over Europe today as I’m talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected.

Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, by its right name, to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it’s probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that their hatred towards us is a compliment and resolving some of the time at any rate to do a bit more to deserve it.”

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The closing of Christopher Hitchens’s fantastic Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture, given in March 2010.

Daniel Pearl, one of the first Americans killed at the hand of Islamic extremism in the post-9/11 era, was murdered 13 years ago this month. His death looks more and more like our most stark, literal harbinger of the kind of barbarism we now see everyday in the Middle East and around the world.

As a supplement to Hitch’s talk, I recommend reading Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Who Killed Daniel Pearl?. In it, BHL argues convincingly that Pearl was murdered not only for his Jewish/American roots, but also because he had uncovered hidden connections between the Pakistani nuclear program and al-Qaeda.

Daniel Pearl

Christopher Hitchens: Resisting Radical Islam 101

08 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by in Political Philosophy

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Christopher Hitchens

“It’s coming to a place near you.

The Qurans that are given out in our prison system, to Muslim prisoners by Muslim chaplains, paid for by Saudi Arabia, are Qurans written to the Wahabi tune. They’re not just your everyday Quran; they’re the Qurans that the Wahabis want you to read, containing direct incitement.

They’re being given out with taxpayers’ money in the prison system, where militias are forming. Next you’ll have militias of this kind with their own chaplains within the United States armed forces. Are you ready for that? Are you ready to have Wahabi preachers in the U.S. armed forces?

You better get ready for it, unless you’re going to take the James Madison view that there shouldn’t be any chaplains in the U.S. armed forces to begin with, or in the prison system. People want to pray, you can’t stop them. But we cannot have state subsidized prayer. We cannot have state subsidized preachers or chaplains.

Give it up, or give it to your deadliest enemy and pay for the rope that will choke you.

This is very urgent business, ladies and gentlemen, I beseech you: resist it while you still can and before the right to complain is taken away from you, which is the next thing.

You will be told, you can’t complain – because you’re Islamophobic. The term is already being introduced into the culture, as if it’s an accusation of race hatred or bigotry, whereas it’s only the objection to the preachings of a very extreme and absolutist religion.

Watch out for these symptoms… The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it’s your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you.”

__________

Christopher Hitchens, riffing in a Q&A before his debate with John Lennox in Birmingham, Alabama in 2009.

Who Survived the Holocaust — and How?

02 Thursday Oct 2014

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Holocaust Survivor Tattoos“What you had to have is usually tabulated as follows: luck; the ability to adapt, immediately and radically; a talent for inconspicuousness; solidarity with another individual or with a group; the preservation of decency (‘the people who had no tenets to live by — of whatever nature — generally succumbed’ no matter how ruthlessly they struggled); the constantly nurtured conviction of innocence (an essential repeatedly emphasized by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago); immunity to despair; and, again, luck.

Having communed with the presences in [Anton] Gill’s book [which chronicles stories of survivors], with their stoicism, eloquence, aphoristic wisdom, humour, poetry, and uniformly high level of perception, one can suggest an additional desideratum. In a conclusive rebuke to the Nazi idea, these ‘subhumans,’ it turns out, were the cream of humankind. And a rich, delicate, and responsive sensibility — how surprising do we find this? — was not a hindrance but a strength. Together with a nearly unanimous rejection of revenge (and a wholly unanimous rejection of forgiveness), the testimonies assembled here have something else in common. There is a shared thread of guilt, the feeling that, while they themselves were saved, someone more deserving, someone ‘better’ was tragically drowned. And this must amount to a magnanimous illusion; with due respect to all, there could have been no one better.”

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From the epilogue to Martin Amis’s new novel The Zone of Interest, the closing dedication of which reads:

To those who survived and to those who did not; to the memory of Primo Levi and to the memory of Paul Celan; and to the countless significant Jews and quarter-Jews and half-Jews in my past and present, particularly my mother-in-law, Elizabeth, my younger daughters, Fernanda and Clio, and my wife, Isabel Fonseca.

Strikingly, this moving statement echoes almost exactly the words of M.A.’s closest friend, Christopher Hitchens, who remarked,

I once wrote that anyone who wanted to defame the Jewish people would, if they were doing so, be defaming my wife, my mother, my mother- and father-in-law, and my daughters, and so I didn’t think I really had to say anything for myself.

But I did add that in whatever tone of voice the question was put to me — whether it was friendly or hostile — Was I Jewish? I would always answer yes. Denial in my family would end with me.

Martin Amis

What to be Wary of in Your Government

04 Wednesday Jun 2014

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John Adams

“The management of so complicated and mighty a machine, as the United Colonies, requires the meekness of Moses, the patience of Job and the wisdom of Solomon, added to the valour of Daniel…

We may feel sanguine confidence of our strength: yet in a few years it may be put to the tryal.

We may please ourselves with the prospect of free and popular governments. But there is great danger, that those governments will not make us happy. God grant they may. But I fear, that in every assembly, members will obtain an influence, by noise not sense. By meanness, not greatness. By ignorance not learning. By contracted hearts not large souls. I fear too, that it will be impossible to convince and perswade People to establish wise regulations.

There is one thing, my dear sir, that must be attempted and most sacredly observed or we are all undone. There must be a decency, and respect… introduced for persons in authority, of every rank, or we are undone. In a popular Government, this is the only way of supporting order—and in our circumstances, as our People have been so long without any Government at all, it is more necessary than, in any other.”

__________

John Adams, writing to his friend and Paymaster General of the Continental Army, James Warren, on April 22nd, 1776.

It’s critical to keep in mind exactly what Adams and the founders meant by “happy” in the context of writing about government and law. As Robert P. George recently clarified:

The term “happiness” in the 18th century—and, in fact, until quite recently—did not refer simply to a pleasing or desirable psychological state—one that might be induced by virtue, vice, or, for that matter, some pharmacological product. It included the idea of flourishing or all round well-being, which necessarily was understood to involve virtue. (As in “happy the man who walks the path of justice.”) In other words, it was a morally inflected locution.

Exactly two decades following the delivery of this letter, Adams himself would be elected to the Presidency. Commenting on that event, Christopher Hitchens noted, “It is perhaps both heartening and sobering to reflect that, in the contest between Jefferson and Adams in 1796, the electors were offered a choice between the President of the American Philosophical Society and the founder of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and chose both of them.” Jefferson was President of the APS in 1780 (Benjamin Franklin had founded the society in 1743), and John Adams founded the AAAS with John Hancock and James Bowdoin during the American Revolution. In the election of 1796, Adams carried 71 electoral votes to become President, barely edging Jefferson’s 68.

More Adams:

Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens: What Country Would You Live In?

23 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by in Journalism, Politics

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Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens

Brian Lamb: If you had to choose a country to live in, besides Great Britain and the United States–

Christopher Hitchens: India. I love India. It’s the only place I’ve ever felt sort of instantly at home. It must seem incongruous when you look at me.

Brian Lamb: And Andrew?

Andrew Sullivan: I would die. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.

Brian Lamb: You would not pick anywhere else?

Andrew Sullivan: No.

__________

Two British transplants, Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens, reflecting on where they would live and their love for the United States during a joint interview with C-Span in February, 2002. Both men, though born in the United Kingdom, became American citizens in the last decade.

Watch the whole thing — but this particular segment is below.


On Life with a Death Sentence: Reflections on 25 Years Since the Salman Rushdie Fatwa

13 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by in Freedom, Literature, Original, Politics

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Salman Rushdie Fatwa

On February 14th, 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwā against the Indian-born British novelist Salman Rushdie, in retaliation for Rushdie’s allegedly blasphemous book The Satanic Verses. Stripped of context, what this event signified was the theocratic leader of a foreign country openly offering money for the murder of an author living 3,000 miles away, as punishment for the crime of writing a novel.

But with that declaration, the distance between London and Tehran took on darkly allegorical shades, too. In this twisted reworking of the Athens-Jerusalem paradigm, forces of barbarism and fanaticism around the globe were quick to riot against Rushdie, burning copies of his book and effigies of him. Judging by sales, a majority of these rioters had not read the novel, and a large majority of that majority probably couldn’t have read it if they’d tried. Nevertheless, Rushdie immediately went into hiding as Hitoshi Igarashi, the novel’s Japanese translator, was stabbed to death, and Ettore Captiolo, its Italian translator, was gravely wounded. Rushdie’s wife Marianne Wiggins would later recall that in just the first three months after the fatwā, the couple moved 56 times.

In 1998, the newly inaugurated Iranian President Mohammad Khatami revoked the fatwā. That decade, which was in certain ways a prelude to the events of 2001, had begun with one of the most momentous events in modern literary history. A field of battle had been cleared, and down its center a line was drawn. On one side, a culture that sections off certain sacrosanct ideas, censoring them from inquiries and perceived insults; on the other side, a culture that categorically affirms no individual can be killed for what he or she says or writes.

Yusuf Islam

Below are two striking personifications of this split. First, Yusuf Islam’s (née Cat Stevens) response to the fatwā. Second is Rushdie’s response, 20 years later, to Islam’s (the musician) take. While short, their responses are enormously suggestive about where ethical and free people must stand in this ongoing struggle for the freedom of expression.

On February 21, 1989, Yusuf Islam was asked by a student at Kingston University about whether the fatwā against Rushdie was Quranically justified. He replied, “[Rushdie] must be killed. The Qur’an makes it clear. If someone defames the prophet, then he must die.”


Two months later, Islam was a panelist on the BBC program Hypotheticals, which was moderated by Geoffrey Robertson. There the two men exchanged the following words:

Robertson: You think that this man deserves to die?
Islam: Who, Salman Rushdie?
Robertson: Yes.
Islam: Yes, yes.
Robertson: And do you have a duty to be his executioner?
Islam: Uh, no, not necessarily, unless we were in an Islamic state and I was ordered by a judge or by the authority to carry out such an act – perhaps, yes.
Robertson: Would you give him shelter?
Islam: Yes, I’d try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is.
Robertson: Would you go to a demonstration where you knew that an effigy was going to be burned?
Islam: I would have hoped that it’d be the real thing; but actually, no, if it were just an effigy I don’t think I’d be that moved to go there.

Salman Rushdie

Two decades after these remarks, Salman Rushdie, now out of hiding and promoting his memoir about those harrowing days, sat for an interview about about Yusuf Islam and the fatwā with George Stroumboulopoulos.

Stroumboulopoulos: The “Rally for Sanity” just happened, with Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, and Yusuf Islam performed… he kind of laid it on you during the fatwā. How did you feel about that?

Rushdie: Not good. Not good. Actually, you know, he’s dropped the ‘Islam’ now for mysterious reasons. Yes now he’s just ‘Yusuf,’ like Cher or Madonna, except with a very big beard.

No, but I actually think it was a mistake to have invited him, and I called up Jon Stewart and we had a couple of conversations, and I think that, by the end of it, he was pretty clear that is was probably a misstep.*

Because he’s is not a good guy. It may be that he once sang “Peace Train” – and there was a point when I was a college student when I had a copy of Tea for the Tillerman – but he hasn’t been Cat Stevens for a long time. He’s a different guy now.

Stroumboulopoulos: Are you a different guy from the guy who wrote that book?

Rushdie: I’m older. But I’m the same writer. You know, I feel very proud of that book. And I think one of the great things about the time having passed, is that now people can read The Satanic Verses as a novel… And so now some people like it, some people don’t like it, but that’s the ordinary life of a book.

Stroumboulopoulos: Is there any fear in you that now you’re going to reprint and relive that stuff?

Rushdie: No. I think we have to stop thinking like that. That’s pussy thinking.

*In 2012, Stewart commented on Rushdie’s allegations, saying, “I wouldn’t have done [the bit], I don’t think. If I had known that, I wouldn’t have done it. Because that to me is a deal breaker. Death for free speech is a deal breaker.”

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For more on this subject, take a look at two recent works by Rushdie: Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002 and Joseph Anton: A Memoir.

Salman Rushdie at 9/11 Memorial

The great voice on this subject, as with so many other topics, was Christopher Hitchens’s.

Dennis Perrin, a friend and protégé of the Hitch, recounts a moment in 1991 when the two men were conversing in a D.C. pub and Cat Stevens’s “Moonshadow” began to waft from the jukebox:

Hitch stops talking. His face tightens…

“No,” he said, shaking his head, exhaling Rothman smoke. “No–get rid of that!”

Bartender asks, “Excuse me?”

“Get rid”–gesturing to the music in the air–“of that.”

“Can’t. Someone played that song.”

“Well, fuck it then.”

Don’t know if Hitch is serious. Yes, his anger about the fatwā is real and understandable. And the fact that the former Cat Stevens, Yusef Islam [sp], endorsed the mullahs’ death sentence clearly enraged him. But getting shitty over “Moonshadow”?

“You know,” I say, “Yusef Islam [sp] renounced everything about his past. He hates Cat Stevens more than you do. He gave away or destroyed all his gold records. If you really want to show your disgust for him, embrace Cat Stevens. Play his stuff loud and often. Whistle ‘Peace Train’ or ‘Oh Very Young’ when you pass the local mosque.”

Hitch listens, head down, fresh Rothman lit.

“No. Never. Fuck them both.”

In one of Hitchens’s smoothest rhetorical flourishes, he riffed on this issue as a guest on Question Time in 2007. His argument is a full-throated defense of not only Rushdie, but absolute free expression and the value of our language. (London Mayor Boris Johnson’s more comical take is also worth a listen.)

The Greatest Debate of All Time: Hitchens Versus Galloway on Iraq

10 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by in Current Events, Debate, Freedom, Original, Politics, Speeches, War

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Christopher Hitchens

It’s often tricky to identify “the best” of a certain category. But with debates, ironically enough, the question is, at least to my mind, settled. There are a lot of nominees for second place: Buckley-Vidal, Chomsky-Foucault, and Miliband–Poulantzas (Here I’m talking about debates for which we have a substantive record, so Lincoln-Douglas, Huxley-Wilberforce, and Einstein-Bohr don’t count). But the greatest recorded debate of all time is Hitchens-Galloway. No Question.

It is simply the most caustic, articulate, and galvanizing verbal clash that has ever been captured on film. If you do yourself the favor of watching it, within a minute you will have found a side — and you will be enthralled. Once, after a long, desultory day of swimming last Spring, two politically-minded friends and I decided to put Hitchens-Galloway on in the background as we poured some drinks and planned out our evening. Within 5 minutes, we were glued to the screen; within 10, we had forgotten about the night’s plans and were rehearsing arguments about the Iraq War; within 20, we had taken sides in a 2-on-1 verbal fray that eventually ended — I’m amused and embarrassed to admit — with several not-so-light shoves being thrown.

I happened to be fighting solo in that scuffle. Because I did, do now, and have always categorically opposed the invasion of Iraq. In this debate, I take the side of Mr. Galloway. My two friends, loyal as ever to the Hitch, were flanking me from the right.

George Galloway

This does not alter the fact that I despise almost everything I’ve subsequently read about Mr. Galloway, and believe that Hitchens is dead right in many of his cutting ad hominems against the Respect MP. Nevertheless, the gravity and intensity with which Galloway gives voice to the concerns of the anti-war Left is unmatched really by anyone I have ever seen. Like an acid reacting to its catalyst, the venom that bubbles out of Galloway is clearly a response to what he identifies as the “malevolence and incompetence” of the “neo-con gang” which occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at the time. Fanning this brushfire of wild contempt were the looming effects of Hurricane Katrina, and the naturally conjoined questions which arose from it: Why are we hemorrhaging resources over there? Don’t we need that cash and manpower here?

Galloway makes this explicit several times in the exchange, but it runs like an underlying seam through several of his rejoinders. Some of these are, in addition to very clever, scathing and overflowing with (righteous?) animosity: “What you are witnessing is something unique in natural history: the first ever metamorphosis from a butterfly back into a slug”; “Never wrestle with a chimney sweep… there’s no way you can come out clean”; “People like Mr. Hitchens are ready to fight to the last drop of other people’s blood”; etc. But while these are below the belt, I don’t think they are — to borrow a line from Hitchens in the debate — beneath contempt. For one, Hitchens invites them (see the last two minutes of his opening remarks); and second, Hitchens can handle them. Galloway and Hitchens were two of the biggest alpha-males on the planet, and Galloway was not going to relent on his alpha-maleness. He couldn’t bring a knife to what was so clearly going to be a gun fight.

I can remember watching this debate when it aired on DemocracyNow the week of September 9th, 2005. I can also remember how much the Iraq question was beginning to fill the sky in the Fall of 2005 — that moment when some of us could foresee the now nearly unavoidable truth that our invasion was an enormous blunder and our occupation a Sisyphean waste. As a freshman at my conservative Southern Baptist high school, I was among the only students who felt this way about Iraq, and I can remember not only how strongly I was beginning to oppose the invasion, but also how much I despised the assumed self-righteousness of those who repeatedly excused the Bush administration’s rank deceptions and bravado.

It would be several years until I would read James Fenton’s “Prison Island”, a poem he wrote during his visit to Cambodia as the U.S. began bombing there in 1970. One particular stanza rings most acutely in my mind when I recall the bad early news out of Iraq and that 15-year-old kid who didn’t exactly know how to express why he didn’t like the war.

My dear friend, do you value the counsels of dead men?
I should say this. Fear defeat. Keep it before your minds
As much as victory. Defeat at the hands of friends,
Defeat in the plans of your confident generals.
Fear the kerchiefed captain who does not think he can die.

Ironically enough, I would for the first time stumble upon these words in the second-to-last page of Christopher Hitchens’s memoir, Hitch-22. The fact that Hitchens could write them without embarrassment or irony stands as verification of Michael Faraday’s immortal rejoinder. “There is nothing quite as frightening as a man who knows he is right.”

Watch “The Grapple in the Big Apple”, the greatest debate of all time (Playback begins as the debate heats up, so rewind to the start to watch all of Hitchens’s opening):

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Some of my comments on the so-called “Debate of the Decade”: George Galloway versus Christopher Hitchens on the Iraq War.

For the record: I don’t endorse all of Galloway’s remarks, nor do I oppose all of Hitchens’s. I admire this debate first for the rhetorical skill and knowledge it exacted from the interlocutors, and second because it brings to light many nuanced issues surrounding the Iraq invasion and occupation — issues which we should still grapple with today.

Christopher HitchensGeorge Galloway