Category Archives: Chris Hitchens
Chris Hitchens: Thank you brave sir. Hitchens obliterates a post modernist wanker.
Hitchens: It is a mistake to assume that the ayatollahs, cynical and corrupt as they may be, are acting rationally.
Hitchens as usual is lucid accurate and deadly in his analysis of Iran, and Obama’s posture. From Slate Magazine:
Persian ParanoiaIranian leaders will always believe Anglo-Saxons are plotting against them.
By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, June 22, 2009, at 12:43 PM ET
I have twice had the privilege of sitting, poorly shaved, on the floor and attending the Friday prayers that the Iranian theocracy sponsors each week on the campus of Tehran University. As everybody knows, this dreary, nasty ceremony is occasionally enlivened when the scrofulous preacher leads the crowd in a robotic chant of Marg Bar Amrika!—”Death to America!” As nobody will be surprised to learn, this is generally followed by a cry of Marg Bar Israel! And it’s by no means unknown for the three-beat bleat of this two-minute hate to have yet a third version: Marg Bar Ingilis!
Some commentators noticed that as “Supreme Leader” Ali Khamenei viciously slammed the door on all possibilities of reform at last Friday’s prayers, he laid his greatest emphasis on the third of these incantations. “The most evil of them all,” he droned, “is the British government.” But the real significance of his weird accusation has generally been missed.
One of the signs of Iran’s underdevelopment is the culture of rumor and paranoia that attributes all ills to the manipulation of various demons and satans. And, of course, the long and rich history of British imperial intervention in Persia does provide some support for the notion. But you have no idea how deep is the primitive belief that it is the Anglo-Saxons—more than the CIA, more even than the Jews—who are the puppet masters of everything that happens in Iran.
The best-known and best-selling satirical novel in the Persian language is My Uncle Napoleon, by Iraj Pezeshkzad, which describes the ridiculous and eventually hateful existence of a family member who subscribes to the “Brit Plot” theory of Iranian history. The novel was published in 1973 and later made into a fabulously popular Iranian TV series. Both the printed and televised versions were promptly banned by the ayatollahs after 1979 but survive in samizdat form. Since then, one of the leading clerics of the so-called Guardian Council, Ahmad Jannati, has announced in a nationwide broadcast that the bombings in London on July 7, 2005, were the “creation” of the British government itself. I strongly recommend that you get hold of the Modern Library paperback of Pezeshkzad’s novel, produced in 2006, and read it from start to finish while paying special attention to the foreword by Azar Nafisi (author of Reading Lolita in Tehran) and the afterword by the author himself, who says:
In his fantasies, the novel’s central character sees the hidden hand of British imperialism behind every event that has happened in Iran until the recent past. For the first time, the people of Iran have clearly seen the absurdity of this belief, although they tend to ascribe it to others and not to themselves, and have been able to laugh at it. And this has, finally, had a salutary influence. Nowadays, in Persian, the phrase “My Uncle Napoleon” is used everywhere to indicate a belief that British plots are behind all events, and is accompanied by ridicule and laughter. … The only section of society who attacked it was the Mullahs. … [T]hey said I had been ordered to write the book by imperialists, and that I had done so in order to destroy the roots of religion in the people of Iran.
Fantastic as these claims may have seemed three years ago, they sound mild when compared with the ravings and gibberings that are now issued from the Khamenei pulpit. Here is a man who hasn’t even heard that his favorite conspiracy theory is a long-standing joke among his own people. And these ravings and gibberings have real-world consequences of which at least three may be mentioned:
- There is nothing at all that any Western country can do to avoid the charge of intervening in Iran’s internal affairs. The deep belief that everything—especially anything in English—is already and by definition an intervention is part of the very identity and ideology of the theocracy.
- It is a mistake to assume that the ayatollahs, cynical and corrupt as they may be, are acting rationally. They are frequently in the grip of archaic beliefs and fears that would make a stupefied medieval European peasant seem mentally sturdy and resourceful by comparison.
- The tendency of outside media to check the temperature of the clerics, rather than consult the writers and poets of the country, shows our own cultural backwardness in regrettably sharp relief. Anyone who had been reading Pezeshkzad and Nafisi, or talking to their students and readers in Tabriz and Esfahan and Mashad, would have been able to avoid the awful embarrassment by which everything that has occurred on the streets of Iran during recent days has come as one surprise after another to most of our uncultured “experts.” Continue Reading →
Chris Hitchens: Iran does not have elections
H/T GAR From Slate Magazine:
Don’t Call What Happened in Iran Last Week an Election. It was a crudely stage-managed insult to everyone involved.
By Christopher HitchensPosted Sunday, June 14, 2009, at 6:41 PM ET
For a flavor of the political atmosphere in Tehran, Iran, last week, I quote from a young Iranian comrade who furnishes me with regular updates:
I went to the last major Ahmadinejad rally and got the whiff of what I imagine fascism to have been all about. Lots of splotchy boys who can’t get a date are given guns and told they’re special.
It’s hard to better this, either as an evocation of the rancid sexual repression that lies at the nasty core of the “Islamic republic” or as a description of the reserve strength that the Iranian para-state, or state within a state, can bring to bear if it ever feels itself even slightly challenged. There is a theoretical reason why the events of the last month in Iran (I am sorry, but I resolutely decline to refer to them as elections) were a crudely stage-managed insult to those who took part in them and those who observed them. And then there is a practical reason. The theoretical reason, though less immediately dramatic and exciting, is the much more interesting and important one.
Iran and its citizens are considered by the Shiite theocracy to be the private property of the anointed mullahs. This totalitarian idea was originally based on a piece of religious quackery promulgated by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and known as velayat-e faqui. Under the terms of this edict—which originally placed the clerics in charge of the lives and property of orphans, the indigent, and the insane—the entire population is now declared to be a childlike ward of the black-robed state. Thus any voting exercise is, by definition, over before it has begun, because the all-powerful Islamic Guardian Council determines well in advance who may or may not “run.” Any newspaper referring to the subsequent proceedings as an election, sometimes complete with rallies, polls, counts, and all the rest of it is the cause of helpless laughter among the ayatollahs. (“They fell for it? But it’s too easy!”) Shame on all those media outlets that have been complicit in this dirty lie all last week. And shame also on our pathetic secretary of state, who said that she hoped that “the genuine will and desire” of the people of Iran would be reflected in the outcome. Surely she knows that any such contingency was deliberately forestalled to begin with. Continue Reading →
PAKISTAN: ISLAMIC RADICALS STORM ‘BLASPHEMY’ HEARING
I think it was Hitchens who said: “Blasphemy is the one truly victimless crime”. Sadly it’s just the opposite. Blasphemy is the crime where all are victims. As this article from Compass Direct shows, an Irrational unprovable thought crime is the perfect fertile soil for blackmail. Much like how the morality laws created in Iran forced a large number of women to become prostitutes, blaspheme pretty much forces everyone to live in fear of what a neighbor may accuse you of, for any number of reasons. Be afraid of this one people. While this blog shows a large number of Islamic and irrational leftist horrors around the world be aware that many nations including but not limited to, Ireland and Holland are considering laws banning blaspheme, and this may have larger consequences to culture and every day life then someone blowing up in the next country over.
An assault on freedom of speech is an assault on all freedoms. Even ones most of us so take for granted we don’t even think of them as freedoms at all. Blaspheme isn’t an assault on freedom of speech and thought, its a chemical weapons attack on it.
Eeyore for Vlad
PAKISTAN: ISLAMIC RADICALS STORM ‘BLASPHEMY’ HEARING
Christian couple on trial; member of prosecution team threatens to kill wife.
ISTANBUL, May 29 (Compass Direct News) – Radical Pakistani Muslims in a town outside of Lahore this month overran a courtroom in hopes of swaying a judge in a “blasphemy” case against a Christian couple, and a member of the prosecution later threatened to kill the wife.
Some 50 molvis (Muslim clergy) on May 14 burst into the courtroom in Mustafabad, where a bail hearing was taking place in the case against Munir Masih and his wife Ruqiya Bibi, according to the Centre for Legal Aid Assistance and Settlement (CLAAS).
“Nobody could stop them as they rushed into the court,” said CLAAS’s Tahir Gull, sole representative for the accused. “They said, ‘No non-Muslim has the right to keep a Quran in his house, they have done this so they are liable to be punished.’”
Masih and Bibi, both in their 30s, were originally accused under section 295-B of Pakistan’s penal code with defiling the Quran by touching it with unwashed hands on Dec. 8 of last year. Masih was taken to prison and remained there until Jan. 22, when a Muslim neighbor who had asked him to store some of his possessions, including his Quran, testified on his behalf and the case was dropped.
The complainant, Mohammad Nawaz, subsequently filed another accusation on Feb. 12, this time under 295-C, blasphemy against Muhammad, Islam’s prophet. This charge carries a death sentence, whereas defiling the Quran calls for life imprisonment.
Despite pressure from the crowd of clerics, Judge Shafqat Ali – also a molvi – granted the couple bail. Following the hearing, however, a member of the prosecution team approached Bibi outside the courtroom and threatened to kill her.
“Ruqiya was waiting outside the court,” said Gull, “and one man came and said, ‘Whatever the decision, we will kill you.’”
A prosecution lawyer read portions of the Quran while presenting his case, he added.
“He was not explaining the law in which the accused were charged,” said Gull. “He was trying to influence the court religiously.”
Charges of blasphemy are common in Pakistan and particularly incendiary, often leading to strong shows of religious zeal. It is not uncommon for sections 295-B and 295-C of the Pakistani penal code to be invoked in retaliation for personal grievances.
“It is very easy to grab any person for religious reasons,” said Parvez Choudhry, chairman of Legal Aid for the Destitute and Settlement, who specialize in blasphemy cases. “There are many personal cases involving property, or money, or business that motivate the complainant against the accused person. All the cases are falsely charged.”
Pakistan’s blasphemy laws have come under heavy fire from international rights groups. Any private citizen can file blasphemy charges, destroying reputation and livelihood. The charge can possibly lead to the death penalty in the conservative Islamic country.
Masih, who before his initial arrest had been a day laborer, is no longer able to find work due to the stigma of the blasphemy accusation.
“There is a need to repeal these sections [295-B and 295-C],” said Choudhry. “This is considered a draconian law.”
Section 295-C carries a death sentence for anyone found “by words or visible representation or by an imputation or insinuation, directly or indirectly, [to have] defiled the name of the Muhammad of Islam.”
Choudhry suggested that just correcting the vagueness of this definition would go a long way toward reducing its frequent misuse.
“The word ‘indirect’ should be repealed – this is wrong, unconstitutional,” he said. “They have no value in the Evidence Act of Pakistan. The Evidence Act states that there needs to be direct evidence for a conviction.”
The next court date has not yet been assigned, but Gull said he is confident about securing an acquittal.
“We have a good case on our side,” he told Compass. “I am very optimistic.”
END
Hitchens on Obama Euro tour.
Truth comes before reconciliation.
Updated Monday, April 13, 2009, at 6:57 AM ET
President Barack Obama’s visit to Europe afforded us an opportunity to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of his style in operation. And, even though he has almost attained the Holy Grail of public relations—in other words, he is practically at that ineffable and serene point where he gets good press for getting good press—there may come a time when even his trans-Atlantic admirers will have to take a second look.
His speech in Strasbourg, France, was much too long, given the youth of the audience and the way in which presidential sonorousness ate into the time that was to be allowed for questions, but its aim of changing the American tone was largely successful. I thought that the best moment was when he focused on the German and French citizens who had perished in the World Trade Center. George W. Bush always spoke as if the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001, were an attack on the United States only and drew the corollary in his rhetoric that you are either “with” the United States or with the “terrists” (as he always seemed to think they were called). By underlining the losses suffered by other countries, not only did Obama redress this imbalance, he also gently but firmly reminded Europeans that this was and is their struggle, too.
In January, Michael Young asked whether Obama could succeed in his plan to “engage” with Iran and Syria. Karim Bardeesy explained why Obama is so popular in Canada. Anne Applebaum wrote about Obama’s decision to campaign in Berlin. Christopher Flavelle asked if Uzbekistan would be the site of Obama’s first foreign-policy compromise.
One would have liked a bit more of this combination and perhaps very slightly less willingness to make disclaimers about American power. It’s absurd to act as if, at NATO and G20 meetings, the United States is just another modest member. In the case of NATO, it is at least “first among equals,” or primus inter pares, in that its military strength is greater than that of all the other members of the alliance combined. In the case of the world’s economic powers, a disproportionate share of the blame for the current crisis lies with America and so does a comparably vast element of the chance that the decline can be reversed. It is obviously not a moment to strut around impersonating a hyperpower, but that doesn’t mean that Madeleine Albright’s injunction about the United States being a “necessary” power can be disowned, either.
The limitations of the Obama manner were exposed in his address to the Turkish parliament and his press conference with the Turkish leadership. The president did not take the opportunity to reiterate his principled stand on the Armenian genocide that we are commemorating this month and took refuge in platitudes about healing and negotiation. It’s not as if the Turks don’t know what he thinks, so it’s difficult to see the value of undue reticence. And it’s hardly an accident that, in all successful attempts at settling accounts with the past in other nations, the word reconciliation has invariably been preceded by the word truth. The first duty is to stop lying. Only then can any genuine attempt at settlement get under way.
It was also somewhat naive of Obama to deny that the United States is “or ever will be” at war with Islam. Of course, one cannot exactly make war on a faith, most especially a faith that is currently undergoing a civil war within itself, in which Turkey has several times been attacked by Bin Ladenist forces. But twice in the past, jihad has been officially proclaimed from Turkey’s capital. It was in the name of the Quran that the piratical Ottoman provinces known as the Barbary States took hundreds of thousands of American and European voyagers into slavery in the 18th century, until Thomas Jefferson dispatched the fleet and the Marines to put down the trade, and it was from Constantinople that the Ottoman military alliance with German imperialism in 1914 was proclaimed as a holy war binding on all good Muslims. In other words, what one really wants is an assurance that Islam is not, nor ever will be, at war (again) with the United States.
That Obama is confused about this, and also slightly weak, is demonstrated by his earlier attempt at quiet diplomacy, or constructive engagement, or whatever we agree to call it, with Iran. He sent a message to “the people and leaders of Iran” on the occasion of Nowruz, or New Year—a day that he may or may not have known is slightly frowned upon by the Islamic authorities, because it involves fire ceremonies and other celebrations that predate the Muslim conquest of Persia. Any offense they might have taken on that score must have been mollified when the president twice referred to the country as “the Islamic Republic of Iran,” as in, “The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations.”
Does this boilerplate goodwill represent anything true? In order for the great and civilized nation of Persia to take its rightful place in the community of nations, it would have to be able to demonstrate that its leadership was freely chosen by its own people and that it was willing to abide by agreements and undertakings (on nontrifling matters such as nuclear proliferation) that it had solemnly signed. The mullahs rule Iran on the basis of a Khomeini-ite dogma known as the veliyate faqui, which makes them the owners and “guardians” of all the country’s citizens. And they have been covertly seeking enriched uranium of the sort not required for a civilian nuclear program, while never ceasing to proclaim the imminent and apocalyptic return of the 12th or “hidden” imam. In other words, in order to claim its “rightful place” in any recognizable community of nations, Iran would in effect have to cease to be an Islamic republic.
Meanwhile, the theocratic regime has several times exerted its power to arrest and imprison Iranian-Americans for “offenses” that would not be crimes in any civilized country. The most recent such outrage is the imprisonment of journalist Roxana Saberi, framed for allegedly buying a bottle of wine. We should hear more from the White House about her case and less about the sensitivities of her jailers. Some differences cannot be split. Many conflicts are real and do not arise from mere cultural misunderstandings. Obama must learn this or be taught it, whichever comes sooner.
Hitchens, Bill Maher, Rapper Mos Def and Salman Rushdie
Chris Hitchens on the Barbary Pirates, Jefferson and John Adams
This is a bit of history that all of us urgently need to know. Chris Hitchens is no slouch. He does his research well. Get a coffee and enjoy. From Townhall
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When I first began to plan my short biography of Thomas Jefferson, I found it difficult to research the chapter concerning the so-called Barbary Wars: an event or series of events that had seemingly receded over the lost horizon of American history. Henry Adams, in his discussion of our third president, had some boyhood reminiscences of the widespread hero-worship of naval officer Stephen Decatur, and other fragments and shards showed up in other quarries, but a sound general history of the subject was hard to come by. When I asked a professional military historian—a man with direct access to Defense Department archives—if there was any book that he could recommend, he came back with a slight shrug.
But now the curious reader may choose from a freshet of writing on the subject. Added to my own shelf in the recent past have been The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World, by Frank Lambert (2005); Jefferson’s War: America’s First War on Terror 1801–1805, by Joseph Wheelan (2003); To the Shores of Tripoli: The Birth of the U.S. Navy and Marines, by A. B. C. Whipple (1991, republished 2001); and Victory in Tripoli: How America’s War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation, by Joshua E. London (2005). Most recently, in his new general history, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present, the Israeli scholar Michael Oren opens with a long chapter on the Barbary conflict. As some of the subtitles—and some of the dates of publication—make plain, this new interest is largely occasioned by America’s latest round of confrontation in the Middle East, or the Arab sphere or Muslim world, if you prefer those expressions.
In a way, I am glad that I did not have the initial benefit of all this research. My quest sent me to some less obvious secondary sources, in particular to Linda Colley’s excellent book Captives, which shows the reaction of the English and American publics to a slave trade of which they were victims rather than perpetrators. How many know that perhaps 1.5 million Europeans and Americans were enslaved in Islamic North Africa between 1530 and 1780? We dimly recall that Miguel de Cervantes was briefly in the galleys. But what of the people of the town of Baltimore in Ireland, all carried off by “corsair” raiders in a single night?
Some of this activity was hostage trading and ransom farming rather than the more labor-intensive horror of the Atlantic trade and the Middle Passage, but it exerted a huge effect on the imagination of the time—and probably on no one more than on Thomas Jefferson. Peering at the paragraph denouncing the American slave trade in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, later excised, I noticed for the first time that it sarcastically condemned “the Christian King of Great Britain” for engaging in “this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers.” The allusion to Barbary practice seemed inescapable.
One immediate effect of the American Revolution, however, was to strengthen the hand of those very same North African potentates: roughly speaking, the Maghrebian provinces of the Ottoman Empire that conform to today’s Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. Deprived of Royal Navy protection, American shipping became even more subject than before to the depredations of those who controlled the Strait of Gibraltar. The infant United States had therefore to decide not just upon a question of national honor but upon whether it would stand or fall by free navigation of the seas.
One of the historians of the Barbary conflict, Frank Lambert, argues that the imperative of free trade drove America much more than did any quarrel with Islam or “tyranny,” let alone “terrorism.” He resists any comparison with today’s tormenting confrontations. “The Barbary Wars were primarily about trade, not theology,” he writes. “Rather than being holy wars, they were an extension of America’s War of Independence.”
Chris Hitchens on the UN resolution on blasphemy
Don’t Say a Word
A U.N. resolution seeks to criminalize opinions that differ with the Islamic faith.
By Christopher Hitchens Slate Magazine
Posted Monday, March 2, 2009, at 2:07 PM ET
The Muslim religion makes unusually large claims for itself. All religions do this, of course, in that they claim to know and to be able to interpret the wishes of a supreme being. But Islam affirms itself as the last and final revelation of God’s word, the consummation of all the mere glimpses of the truth vouchsafed to all the foregoing faiths, available by way of the unimprovable, immaculate text of “the recitation,” or Quran.
If there sometimes seems to be something implicitly absolutist or even totalitarian in such a claim, it may result not from a fundamentalist reading of the holy book but from the religion itself. And it is the so-called mainstream Muslims, grouped in the Organization of the Islamic Conference, who are now demanding through the agency of the United Nations that Islam not only be allowed to make absolutist claims but that it also be officially shielded from any criticism of itself.
Though it is written tongue-in-cheek in the language of human rights and of opposition to discrimination, the nonbinding U.N. Resolution 62/154, on “Combating defamation of religions,” actually seeks to extend protection not to humans but to opinions and to ideas, granting only the latter immunity from being “offended.” The preamble is jam-packed with hypocrisies that are hardly even laughable, as in this delicious paragraph, stating that the U.N. General Assembly:
Underlining the importance of increasing contacts at all levels in order to deepen dialogue and reinforce understanding among different cultures, religions, beliefs and civilizations, and welcoming in this regard the Declaration and Programme of Action adopted by the Ministerial Meeting on Human Rights and Cultural Diversity of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries, held in Tehran on 3 and 4 September 2007.