Hitchens was a drunk who couldn't tie his own shoes together let alone be a credible source for anything. 3 down.....
MESO-Rx
Anabolic Steroids
Why is CNN airing Isis video over and over
- Thread starter MassTurk
- Start date
Hey CBS,
If you would follow the money of the people or media outlets you state, than you would possibly see where their true intent lies. And maybe you are okay with the corporate nepotism and the far reaching hand of the Military Industrial Complex and Wall Street who owns all our media outlets. I am not. The average American Voice is snuffed out by the timbre of the MSM.
And it's funny, people of your thinking are always pointing fingers and react angrily at a different perspectives because you don't want your shell, built of a house of cards to shatter. "You see, I've been dealing with you Chomsky fanboys for years and I know how you think - correct that, you don't think, you follow your spiritual leader" Big assumption of me on your part. lol.
Name calling does not demonstrate intelligence. You can do better, because you are an intelligent person.
Hitchens was another bombastic egomaniac self promoting himself. It is hard for me to imagine why people like these grandiloquent personalities. They shout and rant and rave like an infomercial or some ordained preacher to pull in the lost sheep. But as the wheel spins so does the patterns over the centuries of human folly. Same shit, different century.
I like Chomsky, but I don't idolize him or anyone but my wife and family. I don't believe half the shit I read from anyone. Everybody has their agenda in mind. Just like I have my family in mind first. I do think Chomsky and Howard Zinn have taken different angles of looking at the American life and history and I believe most people in our OCD society cannot have their belief systems questioned or they get scared and lost, just as if they were children again separated from their mother, and they react out with prevaricate anger.
The MSM IMHO, uses the reinforcement of the American Dream belief system and fear of losing this to keep people entranced while they take our freedoms away.
Hitchens also an Islamophobe?
They are often described as “The Unholy Trinity” – a trio of ferociously bright and pugilistic academics who use science to decimate what they believe to be the world’s greatest folly: religion.
But now Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris are on the receiving end of stinging criticism from fellow liberal non-believers who say their particular brand of atheism has swung from being a scientifically rigorous attack on all religions to a populist and crude hatred of Islam.
In the last fortnight a series of columns have been written denouncing the so-called New Atheist movement for, in one writer’s words, lending a “veneer of scientific respectability to today's politically-useful bigotry.”
The opening broadside began earlier this month with a polemic from Nathan Lean on the Salon.com website. Lean, a Washington DC native and Middle East specialist who has recently written a book about the Islamophobia industry, was prompted to pen his attack following a series of tweets last month by Professor Dawkins attacking Islam in snappy 140 character sound bites.
“Haven’t read Koran so couldn’t quote chapter & verse like I can for Bible. But often say Islam [is the] greatest force for evil today,” the Cambridge evolutionary biologist wrote on 1 March.
For a man who has made a career out of academic rigour the admission that the author of the God Delusion hadn’t studied Islam’s holy book surprised many and led to a flurry of responses from both fans and critics alike. Three weeks later – in an apt illustration of Godwins’ Law (the idea that as an online discussion grows longer the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one) – Dawkins added: “Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur’an. You don’t have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about Nazism.”
Muslims, Lean wrote of Dawkins, are “ a group that have come to occupy a special place in his line of fire — and in the minds of a growing club of no-God naysayers who have fast rebranded atheism into a popular, cerebral and more bellicose version of its former self.”
Lean argues that few atheists in the western world historically paid much attention to Islam, concentrating instead on debunking Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Judaism. But after the September 11 attacks, the New Atheists “found their calling”. Criticism of all religion on an equal footing was one thing. But the New Atheists, he argued, have begun flirting with Islamophobes, using irrational hatred, as opposed to rational critique, to attack an already deeply misunderstood and much maligned faith.
“Conversations about the practical impossibility of God’s existence and the science-based irrationality of an afterlife slid seamlessly into xenophobia over Muslim immigration or the practice of veiling,” wrote Lean. “The New Atheists became the new Islamophobes, their invectives against Muslims resembling the rowdy, uneducated ramblings of backwoods racists rather than appraisals based on intellect, rationality and reason.”
Writing on Al Jazeera’s website a few days later, Murtaza Hussain, a Toronto based Middle East analyst, penned an even more scathing critique. What the New Atheists were doing, he argued, was similar to the kind of scientific racism that was dominant within western cultures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they tried to use eugenics to classify – and consequently legitimise – the subjugation of certain races.
Hussain reserved particular ire for Sam Harris, a neuroscientist by trade whose atheist tracts “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation” have made him one of the leading anti-religious polemicists of his age.
Harris is an accomplished writer and public speaker with a solid background in academic rigour. But there are no shortages of statements from his over the years lumping all Muslims into one box. “The idea that Islam is a ‘peaceful religion hijacked by extremists’ is a fantasy, and is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge,” is just one he wrote in “Letter to a Christian Nation.” Wearing a palpable disdain for Islam on his sleeve he has also written in favour of torture, pre-emptive nuclear strikes and the profiling not just of Muslims but “anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be a Muslim.”
In response, Hussain wrote: “[Harris’] sweeping generalisations about a constructed civilisation encompassing over a billion people are coupled with fevered warnings - parallel with the most noxious race propaganda of the past - about the purported demographic threat posed by immigrant Muslim birthrates to Western civilisation.”
He added: “Citing “Muslims” as a solid monolith of violent evil - whilst neglecting to include the countless Muslims who have lost their lives peacefully protesting the occupation and ongoing ethnic cleansing of their homeland - Harris engages in a nuanced version of the same racism which his predecessors in scientific racism practiced in their discussion of the blanket characteristics of “Negroes”.”
Dawkins has so far remained silent on the attacks whilst Hitchens, who passed away in December 2011 after a long battle with cancer, is unable to defend himself. But Harris has not been willing to let sleeping dogs lie.
When left-wing US columnist Glenn Greenwald retweeted Hussain’s original article Harris got in touch, describing the piece as “garbage”, “defamatory” and an exercise in “quote mining”. In a lengthy email exchange that Greenwald eventually posted online, Harris insisted that there was nothing remotely racist about his criticisms of Muslims: “I criticize white, western converts in precisely the same terms,” he said. “In fact, I am even more critical of them, because they weren't brainwashed into the faith from birth.”
He added: “There is no such thing as “Islamophobia.” This is a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia. And it is doing its job, because people like you have been taken in by it.”
But the email exchange did little to convince Greenwald who has since responded on the Guardian website with a lengthy piece attacking Harris. Like Chomsky, who has also been a vocal critic of New Atheism, he blames writers like Harris for using their particularly anti-Islamic brand of rational non-belief to justify American foreign policies over the last decade.
“When criticism of religion morphs into an undue focus on Islam - particularly at the same time the western world has been engaged in a decade-long splurge of violence, aggression and human rights abuses against Muslims, justified by a sustained demonization campaign - then I find these objections to the New Atheists completely warranted,” Greenwald concludes. “In sum, [New Atheism] sprinkles intellectual atheism on top of the standard neocon, right-wing worldview of Muslims.”
They are often described as “The Unholy Trinity” – a trio of ferociously bright and pugilistic academics who use science to decimate what they believe to be the world’s greatest folly: religion.
But now Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris are on the receiving end of stinging criticism from fellow liberal non-believers who say their particular brand of atheism has swung from being a scientifically rigorous attack on all religions to a populist and crude hatred of Islam.
In the last fortnight a series of columns have been written denouncing the so-called New Atheist movement for, in one writer’s words, lending a “veneer of scientific respectability to today's politically-useful bigotry.”
The opening broadside began earlier this month with a polemic from Nathan Lean on the Salon.com website. Lean, a Washington DC native and Middle East specialist who has recently written a book about the Islamophobia industry, was prompted to pen his attack following a series of tweets last month by Professor Dawkins attacking Islam in snappy 140 character sound bites.
“Haven’t read Koran so couldn’t quote chapter & verse like I can for Bible. But often say Islam [is the] greatest force for evil today,” the Cambridge evolutionary biologist wrote on 1 March.
For a man who has made a career out of academic rigour the admission that the author of the God Delusion hadn’t studied Islam’s holy book surprised many and led to a flurry of responses from both fans and critics alike. Three weeks later – in an apt illustration of Godwins’ Law (the idea that as an online discussion grows longer the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one) – Dawkins added: “Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur’an. You don’t have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about Nazism.”
Muslims, Lean wrote of Dawkins, are “ a group that have come to occupy a special place in his line of fire — and in the minds of a growing club of no-God naysayers who have fast rebranded atheism into a popular, cerebral and more bellicose version of its former self.”
Lean argues that few atheists in the western world historically paid much attention to Islam, concentrating instead on debunking Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Judaism. But after the September 11 attacks, the New Atheists “found their calling”. Criticism of all religion on an equal footing was one thing. But the New Atheists, he argued, have begun flirting with Islamophobes, using irrational hatred, as opposed to rational critique, to attack an already deeply misunderstood and much maligned faith.
“Conversations about the practical impossibility of God’s existence and the science-based irrationality of an afterlife slid seamlessly into xenophobia over Muslim immigration or the practice of veiling,” wrote Lean. “The New Atheists became the new Islamophobes, their invectives against Muslims resembling the rowdy, uneducated ramblings of backwoods racists rather than appraisals based on intellect, rationality and reason.”
Writing on Al Jazeera’s website a few days later, Murtaza Hussain, a Toronto based Middle East analyst, penned an even more scathing critique. What the New Atheists were doing, he argued, was similar to the kind of scientific racism that was dominant within western cultures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they tried to use eugenics to classify – and consequently legitimise – the subjugation of certain races.
Hussain reserved particular ire for Sam Harris, a neuroscientist by trade whose atheist tracts “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation” have made him one of the leading anti-religious polemicists of his age.
Harris is an accomplished writer and public speaker with a solid background in academic rigour. But there are no shortages of statements from his over the years lumping all Muslims into one box. “The idea that Islam is a ‘peaceful religion hijacked by extremists’ is a fantasy, and is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge,” is just one he wrote in “Letter to a Christian Nation.” Wearing a palpable disdain for Islam on his sleeve he has also written in favour of torture, pre-emptive nuclear strikes and the profiling not just of Muslims but “anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be a Muslim.”
In response, Hussain wrote: “[Harris’] sweeping generalisations about a constructed civilisation encompassing over a billion people are coupled with fevered warnings - parallel with the most noxious race propaganda of the past - about the purported demographic threat posed by immigrant Muslim birthrates to Western civilisation.”
He added: “Citing “Muslims” as a solid monolith of violent evil - whilst neglecting to include the countless Muslims who have lost their lives peacefully protesting the occupation and ongoing ethnic cleansing of their homeland - Harris engages in a nuanced version of the same racism which his predecessors in scientific racism practiced in their discussion of the blanket characteristics of “Negroes”.”
Dawkins has so far remained silent on the attacks whilst Hitchens, who passed away in December 2011 after a long battle with cancer, is unable to defend himself. But Harris has not been willing to let sleeping dogs lie.
When left-wing US columnist Glenn Greenwald retweeted Hussain’s original article Harris got in touch, describing the piece as “garbage”, “defamatory” and an exercise in “quote mining”. In a lengthy email exchange that Greenwald eventually posted online, Harris insisted that there was nothing remotely racist about his criticisms of Muslims: “I criticize white, western converts in precisely the same terms,” he said. “In fact, I am even more critical of them, because they weren't brainwashed into the faith from birth.”
He added: “There is no such thing as “Islamophobia.” This is a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia. And it is doing its job, because people like you have been taken in by it.”
But the email exchange did little to convince Greenwald who has since responded on the Guardian website with a lengthy piece attacking Harris. Like Chomsky, who has also been a vocal critic of New Atheism, he blames writers like Harris for using their particularly anti-Islamic brand of rational non-belief to justify American foreign policies over the last decade.
“When criticism of religion morphs into an undue focus on Islam - particularly at the same time the western world has been engaged in a decade-long splurge of violence, aggression and human rights abuses against Muslims, justified by a sustained demonization campaign - then I find these objections to the New Atheists completely warranted,” Greenwald concludes. “In sum, [New Atheism] sprinkles intellectual atheism on top of the standard neocon, right-wing worldview of Muslims.”
Hitchen's own brother thinks he's a quack
"Christopher is an atheist. I am a believer. He once said in public: "The real difference between Peter and myself is the belief in the supernatural.
"I’m a materialist and he attributes his presence here to a divine plan. I can’t stand anyone who believes in God, who invokes the divinity or who is a person of faith."
I don’t feel the same way. I like atheists and enjoy their company, because they agree with me that religion is important."
"I also think it is wrong, mostly in the way that it blames faith for so many bad things and gives it no credit for any of the good it may have done.
I think it misunderstands religious people and their aims and desires. And I think it asserts a number of things as true and obvious that are nothing of the sort."
Christopher describes how at the age of nine he concluded that his teacher’s claim that the world must be designed was wrong. "I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong."
At the time of this revelation, he knew nothing of the vast, unending argument between those who maintain that the shape of the world is evidence of design, and those who say the same world is evidence of random, undirected natural selection.
It’s my view that he still doesn’t know all that much about this interesting dispute. Yet at the age of nine, he "simply knew" who had won one of the oldest debates in the history of mankind.
It is astonishing, in one so set against the idea of design or authority in the universe, how often he appeals to mysterious intuitions and "innate" knowledge of this kind, and uses religious language such as "awesome" – in awe of whom or what?
Or "mysterious". What is the mystery, if all is explained by science, the telescope and the microscope? He even refers to "conscience" and makes frequent thunderous denunciations of various evil actions. "
"Where is his certain knowledge of what is right and wrong supposed to have come from?
How can the idea of a conscience have any meaning in a world of random chance, where in the end we are all just collections of molecules swirling in a purposeless confusion?
If you are getting inner promptings, why should you pay any attention to them? It is as absurd as the idea of a compass with no magnetic North. You might as well take moral instruction from your bile duct.
On the few occasions where Christopher is prepared to admit that religious people have done any good, he concludes that they did so in spite of their faith, not because of it.
He even suggests that the atheist Soviet tyranny was itself a form of religion.
You can’t win against this sort of circular absolutism.
Yet he has this absurdly backwards. Religious and unbelieving people have both done dreadful things, and the worst of them have committed their murders and their tortures in the belief that they were doing good.
Nothing is proved by either side in this argument, by pointing to the mountains of skulls piled up by evil atheists, and evil theists.
What they have in common is that they are human, and capable of the sin of pride. The practice of religion does not automatically prevent this, and nobody said it did.
It sometimes joins in with it, as Christopher points out."
"There is one chapter in this book whose implications are sinister. It is Chapter 16, which attempts to suggest that religion is child abuse.
On the basis of such arguments, matched by similar urgings from Professor Richard Dawkins, I can see a movement growing to outlaw the teaching of faith to children.
Then what? Liberal world reformers make the grave mistake of thinking that if you abolish a great force you don’t like, it will be replaced by empty space.
We abolished the gallows, for example, and found we had created an armed police and an epidemic of prison suicides. We abolished school selection by exams, and found we had replaced it with selection by money. And so on.
We are in the process – encouraged by Christopher – of abolishing religion, and so of abolishing conscience, too.
It is one of his favourite jibes that a world ruled by faith is like North Korea, a place where all is known and all is ordered."
On the contrary, North Korea is the precise opposite of a land governed by conscience.
It is a country governed by men who do not believe in God or conscience, where nobody can be trusted to make his own choices, and where the State decides for the people what is right and what is wrong.
"Christopher is an atheist. I am a believer. He once said in public: "The real difference between Peter and myself is the belief in the supernatural.
"I’m a materialist and he attributes his presence here to a divine plan. I can’t stand anyone who believes in God, who invokes the divinity or who is a person of faith."
I don’t feel the same way. I like atheists and enjoy their company, because they agree with me that religion is important."
"I also think it is wrong, mostly in the way that it blames faith for so many bad things and gives it no credit for any of the good it may have done.
I think it misunderstands religious people and their aims and desires. And I think it asserts a number of things as true and obvious that are nothing of the sort."
Christopher describes how at the age of nine he concluded that his teacher’s claim that the world must be designed was wrong. "I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong."
At the time of this revelation, he knew nothing of the vast, unending argument between those who maintain that the shape of the world is evidence of design, and those who say the same world is evidence of random, undirected natural selection.
It’s my view that he still doesn’t know all that much about this interesting dispute. Yet at the age of nine, he "simply knew" who had won one of the oldest debates in the history of mankind.
It is astonishing, in one so set against the idea of design or authority in the universe, how often he appeals to mysterious intuitions and "innate" knowledge of this kind, and uses religious language such as "awesome" – in awe of whom or what?
Or "mysterious". What is the mystery, if all is explained by science, the telescope and the microscope? He even refers to "conscience" and makes frequent thunderous denunciations of various evil actions. "
"Where is his certain knowledge of what is right and wrong supposed to have come from?
How can the idea of a conscience have any meaning in a world of random chance, where in the end we are all just collections of molecules swirling in a purposeless confusion?
If you are getting inner promptings, why should you pay any attention to them? It is as absurd as the idea of a compass with no magnetic North. You might as well take moral instruction from your bile duct.
On the few occasions where Christopher is prepared to admit that religious people have done any good, he concludes that they did so in spite of their faith, not because of it.
He even suggests that the atheist Soviet tyranny was itself a form of religion.
You can’t win against this sort of circular absolutism.
Yet he has this absurdly backwards. Religious and unbelieving people have both done dreadful things, and the worst of them have committed their murders and their tortures in the belief that they were doing good.
Nothing is proved by either side in this argument, by pointing to the mountains of skulls piled up by evil atheists, and evil theists.
What they have in common is that they are human, and capable of the sin of pride. The practice of religion does not automatically prevent this, and nobody said it did.
It sometimes joins in with it, as Christopher points out."
"There is one chapter in this book whose implications are sinister. It is Chapter 16, which attempts to suggest that religion is child abuse.
On the basis of such arguments, matched by similar urgings from Professor Richard Dawkins, I can see a movement growing to outlaw the teaching of faith to children.
Then what? Liberal world reformers make the grave mistake of thinking that if you abolish a great force you don’t like, it will be replaced by empty space.
We abolished the gallows, for example, and found we had created an armed police and an epidemic of prison suicides. We abolished school selection by exams, and found we had replaced it with selection by money. And so on.
We are in the process – encouraged by Christopher – of abolishing religion, and so of abolishing conscience, too.
It is one of his favourite jibes that a world ruled by faith is like North Korea, a place where all is known and all is ordered."
On the contrary, North Korea is the precise opposite of a land governed by conscience.
It is a country governed by men who do not believe in God or conscience, where nobody can be trusted to make his own choices, and where the State decides for the people what is right and what is wrong.
Hitchens a sensationalistic, deceitful war monger? CBS, I guess you do follow the National Enquirer when it's au tired by hitchens
Christopher Hitchens and His Critics:
Terror, Iraq and the Left
edited by Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman, New York University Press, 365 pages, 2008.
L.A. Rollins
With an Introduction by the editors, this book collects many prowar propaganda pieces written after 9/11 by former socialist and critic of American imperialism Christopher Hitchens, along with various critiques of Hitchens's warmongering, Hitchens's previously-published responses to some of those critiques, and an Afterword by Hitchens with some further responses to some of his critics. (Among the critics of Hitchens included in this book are Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Dennis Perrin, Michael Kazin, Juan Cole, and Richard Seymour.)
Hitchens has been for years a prolific writer on a variety of topics, often dealing with literature, religion, or politics. His books have included For the Sake of Argument, The Missionary Position (about Mother Teresa), The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, No One Left to Lie To (about Bill Clinton), God is Not Great, andOrwell’s Victory.
Hitchens was for many years a columnist for the liberal-to-radical magazine The Nation. However, sometime after 9/11, he quit his column, apparently to express his disapproval of those who, unlike him, hadn't become gung-ho for war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and more generally, against "Islamic fascism."
Christopher Hitchens in 2007.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The editors have chosen a quotation from Hitchens's For the Sake of Argument as an epigraph for this book: "The real test of a radical or revolutionary is not the willingness to confront the orthodoxy and arrogance of the rulers but the readiness to contest the illusions and falsehoods among close friends and allies." In other words, the "real test" is not speaking truth to power, but speaking truth to the less powerful.
As a libertarian who has criticized libertarian illusions and falsehoods and a revisionist who has criticized revisionist illusions and falsehoods, I think I might pass Hitchens's "real test of a radical or revolutionary." However, I don't agree that contesting the illusions and falsehoods of one's friends and allies is the "real test of a radical or revolutionary," as important as that might be. Speaking truth to power is more important than speaking truth to the less powerful.
In any case, Hitchens presumably believes that he has passed the above-stated "real test" by vehemently and venomously attacking "Left-wing" opponents of the "War on Terror" and the invasion of Iraq. Meanwhile, Hitchens's critics, some of them his former friends, might claim that honor for themselves by virtue of their contesting of his alleged illusions and falsehoods.
So who is really contesting illusions and falsehoods, Hitchens or his critics? My impression is that it is Hitchens's critics more so than Hitchens.
Consider the invasion of Iraq. Hitchens supported the invasion, and to judge from his Afterword, still supports it. But Hitchens is an avowed secularist who advocates war against Islamic fundamentalism in support of secularism. So how does Hitchens deal with the fact that the toppling of Saddam Hussein's relatively secularist Baathist regime was, at least in some ways, a setback for secularism in Iraq?
For one thing, in "Bush's Secularist Triumph," from Slate, November 9, 2004, he asserts:
George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he--and the US armed forces--have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al Qaeda network, and the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries.
While Hitchens might have a point, however exaggerated,vis a vis the Taliban and al Qaeda, his reference to Iraq is absurd and ridiculous. The "confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq" has occurred only because of the power vacuum created by the toppling of the relatively secularist Baathist dictatorship. It does not represent a huge advance for secularism in Iraq.
Nowhere in this book will you find any mention by Hitchens of Iraqi women in post-Saddam Iraq threatened with death, and in some cases apparently killed, for not "covering up" ala Muslim mode. Nor is there any mention by Hitchens of the violent attacks on booze makers and booze sellers in post-Saddam Iraq. (Booze, of course, is taboo for devout Muslims.) This omission is particularly telling given Hitchens's notorious taste for alcohol, a matter mentioned many times in this book. (Full disclosure: I wrote this entire review while blind, stinking, staggering, asshole drunk.) If Hitchens is such a great Orwellian truth teller as he likes to pose, why does he lie by omission about such matters?
In any case, Hitchens also tries to rationalize the war in Iraq as a war for secularism by depicting Saddam Hussein as having become a religious nut in his final years. For example, Hitchens tells us (p.116): "...gigantic mosques began to be built in Saddam's own name." Through a Google search I found reports of the building of a "Mother-of-All-Battles" mosque. However, the writers of those reports regarded Saddam's mosque-building as a cynical use of religion for political purposes, and not as evidence of a sincere religious conversion on Saddam's part. Furthermore, Hitchens may be lying by omission once again. A Google search confirmed that as late as 2003 Saddam was still promoting the rebuilding of Babylon, a project that would be of no interest to a Muslim fanatic. (Babylon was center of civilization back in the days of "ignorance," as ignorant Muslims refer to pre-Islamic times.) Hitchens makes no mention of Saddam's rebuilding of Babylon. Ignorance? Or lying by omission?
Speaking of lying by omission, why is it that, although Hitchens discusses the civil war in Algeria in the 1990s between Islamic fundamentalists and the secularist government, nowhere does he explicitly state that the 1992 elections in Algeria were cancelled by the government to prevent Islamists from coming to power democratically, legally, and peacefully? Could it be that Hitchens wants to avoid acknowledging that sometimes in the Muslim world democracy, which Hitchens purports to support, could lead to the triumph of Islamic fundamentalism and the defeat of secularism? Could it be that Hitchens wants to avoid honestly admitting the existence of such a dilemma for someone such as himself who supposedly advocates war against Islamic fundamentalism in the name of both secularism and democracy?
In any case, I'd like to point out that by advocating war, i.e., the killing of people, inevitably including innocent bystanders, to advance secularism, Hitchens reveals himself to be a secularist fanatic, almost the mirror image of the religious fanatics he wants to destroy.
Hitchens might reply by bleating about "moral equivalence." Well, for the record, I'm not asserting that George W. Bush (or Christopher Hitchens) is "morally equivalent" to Osama bin Laden (or Saddam Hussein). However, I deny there is a night-and-day difference between them. Contrary to the casuistry of warmongers such as Hitchens and Sam Harris (The End of Faith), those who intentionally start a war knowing full well that innocent civilians will inevitably be killed (even if they are never specifically targeted), intentionally kill innocent civilians by so doing. Like the "terrorists" who directly target civilians, the warmongers have got innocent blood on their hands. They might not be "morally equivalent" to the "terrorists," but they're not the absolute opposite of them either.
Speaking of Hitchens's desire to destroy people, as I did a little bit ago, it is an irony, or maybe a hypocrisy, that Hitchens is purportedly an opponent of the death penalty. In an interview with Reason Online, November 2001, included in this book, Hitchens says that the first political issue he ever took a stand on was the question of capital punishment, which outraged him because it seemed to arrogate too much power to the government. And one of Hitchens's critics in this book, Michael Kazin, says that Hitchens continues to oppose the death penalty.
However, here is a passage from Hitchens's "Saving Islam from bin Laden," from The Age, September 5, 2002:
It is impossible to compromise with the proponents of sacrificial killings of civilians, the disseminators of anti-Semitic filth, the violators of women and the cheerful murderers of children.
It is also impossible to compromise with the stone-faced propagandists for Bronze Age morality: morons and philistines who hate Darwin and Einstein and managed, during their brief rule in Afghanistan, to ban and erase music and art while cultivating the skills of germ warfare. If they could do that to Afghans, what might they not have in mind for us? In confronting such people, the crucial thing is to be willing and able, if not in fact eager, to kill them without pity before they get started.
Kill them without pity before they get started. Sure as hell sounds like a death penalty to me; indeed it sounds like a preemptive death penalty.
If, as seems to be the case, Hitchens advocates capital punishment for "the disseminators of anti-Semitic filth," then there is another irony, or hypocrisy, here, given that Hitchens, according to the editors of this book, is a believer in freedom of expression as a universal value that always must be defended everywhere without compromise.
Back to Hitchens's lying by omission. Consider his romanticizing of the Kurds. The picture he paints of them is utterly without warts. They were brave fighters against Saddam's tyranny and defenders of democracy and "civil society." That's all. In this regard, it is useful to take Hitchens up on his recommendation of Kenneth M. Pollack's book, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. There you can find information about the infighting between the two major Kurdish political groups, a subject never mentioned by Hitchens. Furthermore, according to Pollack, the group he calls Ansar-i-Islam and Hitchens calls Ansar-al-Islam was a Kurdish group. There's no mention of that by Hitchens in his denunciation of this group of "bin Laden clones." And Hitchens never mentions Kurdish terrorism in Turkey.
More on lying by omission. In "Why Ask Why?" fromSlate, October 3, 2005, Hitchens asks why “so many genial Australians" had to die in a terrorist bombing in Bali. (As we all know, all Australians are genial. G'day, mate. Put another Pommie bastard on the barbie.) He answers: "Well, is it not the case that Australia sent troops to help safeguard the independence of East Timor and the elections that followed it? A neighboring country that assists the self-determination of an Indonesian Christian minority must expect to have the lives of its holidaymakers taken." Well, maybe so. But conspicuous by its absence from Hitchens's explanation is any mention of Australia's participation in "Operation Iraqi Freedom." But Hitchens doesn't want to admit that the invasion and occupation of Iraq could possibly be a reason for any subsequent terrorist attacks.
No, to admit that would be to admit that opponents of the Iraq invasion might have been right in predicting that it would provoke more terrorism. And Hitchens simply will not admit that.
Thus, after bombings in London, Hitchens, in "We Cannot Surrender," from Mirror, July 8, 2005, laid down the law regarding what was thinkable and what was not:
I know perfectly well there are people thinking, and even saying, that Tony Blair brought this
upon us by his alliance with George Bush. A word of advice to them: try and keep it down, will you? Or wait at least until the funerals are over. And beware of the non-sequitur: You can be as opposed to the Iraq operation as much as you like, but you can't get from this "grievance" to the detonating of explosives at rush hour on London buses and tubes. Don't even try to connect the two. By George Galloway's logic, British squaddies in Iraq are the root cause of dead bodies at home. How can anyone bear to be so wicked and stupid? How can anyone bear to act as a megaphone for psychotic killers?
For Hitchens, there is only one permissible explanation for such actions: the innate and incorrigible aggressiveness of fundamentalist Muslims who are at war with all culture and all civilization. Hitchens seems to be somewhat simpleminded. He seems to think that if some violent actions by Muslims are motivated by religious fanaticism, then all violent actions by Muslims must be so motivated and there cannot possibly be any other reasons for any violent actions by Muslims.
Hitchens repeatedly depicts jihadists as religious fanatics who, because they are religious fanatics, cannot be appeased or negotiated with. The only thing to do is kill them. However, in "Inside the Islamic Mafia," from Slate, September 25, 2003, he includes a quotation, taken from Bernard-Henri Levy's Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, of a Saudi lawyer who specializes in financial transactions:
"Islam is a business," he explains to me with a big smile. "I don't say that because it's my job, or because I see proof of it in my office ten times a day, but because it's a fact. People hide behind Islamism. They use it like a screen saying 'Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!' But we know that here. We see the deals and the movements behind the curtain. In one way or another it all passes through our hands. We do the paperwork. We write the contracts. And I can tell you that most of them couldn't care less about Allah. They enter Islamism because it's nothing other than a source of power and wealth, especially in Pakistan....
Is this Saudi lawyer right? Maybe so. I don't know. But my point is that Hitchens seems to accept this testimony, even though it contradicts the view of Islamists he expresses throughout the rest of his writings in this book, thereby casting doubt on the veracity of his usual war propaganda. Is Hitchens too much of a retard to realize this? Or just too brazenly deceitful to care?
Hitchens, as a supporter of the Iraq war, wanted to discredit former ambassador Joseph Wilson, the Joe Wilson who, in effect, shouted "You lie!" at George W. Bush from the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. Wilson had investigated some documents purporting to show that Saddam had tried to acquire uranium yellowcake from Niger, and he concluded, as did international inspectors, that they were forgeries.
Hitchens, in a piece published in The Weekly Standard but not included in this book and which I found by a Google search, admits to the existence of only one forged document. Meanwhile, in this book, he claims that an Iraqi ambassador visited Niger in 1999, and the only plausible explanation for this visit was to acquire uranium yellowcake. Well, maybe so. I don't know. The first time I've heard about this was in Hitchens’s Afterword to this book.
In any case, Hitchens is brazenly lying when (p. 334) he says Wilson "...wasted an enormous amount of time on his now-disproven assertion that members of the Bush administration approached Robert Novak (a strong opponent of the war and admirer of Wilson's) in order to 'expose' his wife Valerie Plame." Novak reputedly opposed the Iraq war. Whether or not he admired Wilson, I don't know. In any case, Novak, by his own account, first received the information that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA from a "senior administration official," specifically Richard Armitage, then Undersecretary of State. (It was then confirmed for Novak by "Bush's Brain," Karl Rove. Meanwhile, other Bush administration members, such as Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Chief of Staff for Vice-President Dick Cheney, had been leaking the information about Plame's CIA position to other journalists. For example, Judith Miller late of The New York Times, testified about such a conversation with Libby, and produced her notes on it, at Libby's trial for perjury and obstruction of justice. So Hitchens was lying like a Republican rug when he claimed that Wilson's claim is now disproven.
There are indications in this book that Hitchens is a fan of--gasp! horrors!--Winston Churchill, the belligerent drunk, like Hitchens. (Regarding Churchill, see, for example, Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker.) I wonder if Hitchens agrees with the statement attributed to Churchill: "In wartime truth is so precious that it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies." (See Anthony Cave-Brown's Bodyguard of Lies.)
While Hitchens seems to be a fan of warmonger Churchill, he's apparently not a fan of Charles Lindbergh. Jeff Riggenbach's book, Why American History is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism, which I reviewed in the previous issue of Inconvenient History, includes a quotation from revisionist historian James J. Martin commenting favorably on Gore Vidal's recent political writings such as Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (a title which was used by revisionist Harry Elmer Barnes in the early 1950s as the title of an anthology of revisionist writings on World War II). Here's what Hitchens says about Vidal (p. 207): "Gore Vidal's admirers of whom I used to be one and to some extent remain one, hardly notice that his essential critique of America is based on Lindbergh and "America First"--the most conservative position available. And for Hitchens, despite his renunciation of socialism, his fond reminiscences of Margaret Thatcher, his buddying up with "neoconservatives" such as Paul Wolfowitz, etc., "conservative" is still a purely pejorative epithet. But "radical" is a good word. And of what does radicalism consist? The overthrowing of governments. Not the US government, but governments of countries in dire need of more secularism, such as Afghanistan under the Taliban or Iraq under Saddam Hussein (ha ha ha).
(Incidentally, America Firsters included liberals such as John T. Flynn and Oswald Garrison Villard, Progressives such as William Borah and Burton K. Wheeler, and Socialists such as Norman Thomas.)
Among Hitchens's fetishes is "antifascism." He absurdly labels al Qaeda et al. "Islamic Fascists," but what's fascism got to do with it? Hitchens uses the terms "fascist" and "fascism" frequently, but he never bothers to define them. Apparently, almost anyone that Hitchens strongly disapproves of and wants to drop bombs on is a "fascist." It's interesting to see an alleged disciple of George Orwell, author of the essay, "Politics and the English Language," abusing the English language so outrageously in his deceitful war propaganda. Hitchens even has the chutzpah to label Islamic fanatics as "nihilists."
Hitchens repeatedly stretches the truth via exaggeration. Thus, he refers to translators of Salman Rushdie's novelThe Satanic Verses who were "eviscerated." A Google search confirmed that translators of The Satanic Verses were stabbed, in one case to death. But as far as I can tell, Hitchens is the only one who uses the emotive and exaggerated word "eviscerated." Hitchens also refers to museums destroyed by the Bad Guys. A Google search produced reports that the Taliban might have destroyed thousands of non-Islamic statues in museums in Afghanistan, but not that they destroyed museums. On page 125, referring to the civil war in Algeria in the 1990s, Hitchens announces that "...if Algeria had fallen to the fundamentalists the bloodbath would have been infinitely worse...." Infinitely worse? Every living thing in the universe would have been killed? Hitchens also absurdly claims that "they" are opposed to all culture. And, recycling a bit of standard war propaganda, he claims that "they" are enemies of all civilization.
On page 340, Hitchens writes: "Professor Juan Cole writes that he believes the late Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi to be a fictitious character. And people think it is I who owe the explanation." Perhaps Hitchens should explain how he managed to confuse Richard Seymour with Juan Cole. It was Seymour, not Cole, who expressed doubt about al-Zarqawi's actual existence. And perhaps Hitchens should explain how he managed to twist Seymour's expression of doubt into a flat-out assertion that al-Zarqawi is fictional. Here's a direct quotation from Seymour's "The Genocidal Imagination of Christopher Hitchens": "There is considerable doubt about whether Zarqawi is alive, has two functioning legs, and is really in Iraq. Whether Zarqawi is a myth or a monster, the only story that obtains here is that there is no story. Saddam and Zarqawi never did have their Baghdad nuptials, however convenient the tale may be for pro-war storytelling."
There's plenty of evidence in this book that Hitchens needs to get himself a new crystal ball. Thus, for example, in "Ha Ha Ha to the Pacifists," published inGuardian, November 29, 2001, Hitchens predicted, "The Taliban will soon be history." Hitchens, like other warmongers, is consistently pessimistic about peace and optimistic about war. But more than eight years later the Taliban are still not history.
In "The Literal Left," from Slate, December 4, 2003, Hitchens told us, vis a vis the Iraq invasion, "There has been no refugee exodus, for example, of the kind [the "peaceniks"] promised." Would Bitchin’ Hitchens care, or dare, to repeat that statement now? (Nowhere in this book do I see any subsequent admission by Hitchens that there was indeed a refugee exodus.)
According to Dennis Perrin, in "Obituary for a Former Contrarian," from Minneapolis City Pages, July 9, 2003:
In several pieces, including an incredibly condescending blast at Nelson Mandela, Hitch went on and on about WMD, chided readers with "Just you wait!" and other taunts, fully confident that once the US took control of Iraq, tons of bio/chem weapons and labs would be all over the cable news nets—with him dancing a victory jig in the foreground. Now he says WMD were never a real concern and that he'd always said so. It's amazing that he'd dare to state this while his earlier pieces can be read at his website. But then, when you side with massive state power and the cynical fucks who serve it you can pretty much say anything and the People Who Matter won't care.
The "earlier pieces" referred to Perrin are not included in this book. The only prewar claim by Hitchens related to Iraqi WMD in the pieces by Hitchens included in this book is a claim that it was absolutely certain that Saddam had acquired some of the "weapons of genocide" and wanted to acquire more.
It's true, as Perrin says, that after the invasion Hitchens claimed he'd never believed Saddam had much WMD at the time of the invasion. Thus, in "Weapons and Terror," from Slate, May 28, 2003, Hitchens wrote:
...I did write before the war, and do state again (in my upcoming book, The Long Short War) that obviously there couldn't have been very many weapons in Saddam's hands, nor can the coalition have believed there to be. You can't station tens of thousands of men and women in uniform on the immediate borders of Iraq for several months if you think that a mad dictator might be able to annihilate them with a pre-emptive strike.
But wasn't there a massive buildup of American and other troops around Iraq's borders in 1990 when Saddam was known to have, and still did have, chemical and biological weapons? Thus, this argument by Hitchens is questionable, yet the implication is interesting. Here Hitchens is clearly implying that Bush and Blair lied about Iraqi WMD. And yet the man who wrote a book about Bill Clinton's lies never explicitly says Bush lied. Perhaps he just didn't want to give opponents the satisfaction of reading that. ("Bush lied. People died.")
Despite his poor track record as a prophet, Hitchens tenaciously clings to a rationalization for supporting the Iraq invasion on the basis that a "confrontation" with Saddam was "inevitable." Of course, thanks to the invasion that Hitchens advocated, there's no way this dogma can ever be put to an empirical test.
Speaking of dogma, it should be noted that Hitchens makes many claims in this book for which he provides no evidence. And, unlike many of his critics in this book, his writings contain few references to sources that a skeptic can double-check.
Hitchens brags about his ability to recognize a lethal threat when he sees one. But Hitchens sees only one lethal threat--Islamic fanaticism. It's true, for instance, that a Muslim fanatic killed Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. (But, contrary to Hitchens, van Gogh was not a descendant of the great artist, i.e., Vincent van Gogh. He was a descendant of Vincent's brother, Theo, the great art dealer.) It's also true that it was probably Jewish fanatics who killed Francois Duprat and Alex Odeh. And it was a Christian fanatic who tried to kill Larry Flynt. But Hitchens doesn't seem to know or care about such examples of non-Islamic fanaticism in action. Furthermore, Hitchens seems not to recognize the lethal threats of neoconservatism and "Armageddon Theology." (Regarding the latter, see, for example, Pastor John Hagee's book,Jerusalem Countdown.) But perhaps Hitchens is too simpleminded to comprehend a world with a variety of threats, or perhaps his war propaganda is aimed at such simpleminded people, people inclined toward what Lawrence Dennis called "monodiabolism," the belief that there is one, and only one, "devil" at any particular time. (One last comment about this: In my opinion, Hitchens is a lethal threat, but presumably he doesn't see a lethal threat when he looks in the mirror.)
My time and space for this review are running out, so I'll have to finish up without discussing many aspects of Hitchens' war propaganda. But Hitchens' critics in this book make many points that I haven't made in this review.
Among the things Hitchens claims to love is skepticism. However, my satirical definition of "skeptic" seems to fit Hitchens: "One who doubts what he does not want to believe and believes what he does not want to doubt." (This definition can be found in the "Lucifer's Lexicon" section of my book, The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays.) Readers of Christopher Hitchens and His Criticsshould have lots of salt on hand when reading it, especially when reading Hitchens’ incoherent and deceitful war propaganda.
As I mentioned before, one of the books by Hitchens was titled Orwell’s Victory. If I could put a title on this review, it would be Hitchens’ Waterloo.
Christopher Hitchens and His Critics:
Terror, Iraq and the Left
edited by Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman, New York University Press, 365 pages, 2008.
L.A. Rollins
With an Introduction by the editors, this book collects many prowar propaganda pieces written after 9/11 by former socialist and critic of American imperialism Christopher Hitchens, along with various critiques of Hitchens's warmongering, Hitchens's previously-published responses to some of those critiques, and an Afterword by Hitchens with some further responses to some of his critics. (Among the critics of Hitchens included in this book are Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Dennis Perrin, Michael Kazin, Juan Cole, and Richard Seymour.)
Hitchens has been for years a prolific writer on a variety of topics, often dealing with literature, religion, or politics. His books have included For the Sake of Argument, The Missionary Position (about Mother Teresa), The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, No One Left to Lie To (about Bill Clinton), God is Not Great, andOrwell’s Victory.
Hitchens was for many years a columnist for the liberal-to-radical magazine The Nation. However, sometime after 9/11, he quit his column, apparently to express his disapproval of those who, unlike him, hadn't become gung-ho for war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and more generally, against "Islamic fascism."
Christopher Hitchens in 2007.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The editors have chosen a quotation from Hitchens's For the Sake of Argument as an epigraph for this book: "The real test of a radical or revolutionary is not the willingness to confront the orthodoxy and arrogance of the rulers but the readiness to contest the illusions and falsehoods among close friends and allies." In other words, the "real test" is not speaking truth to power, but speaking truth to the less powerful.
As a libertarian who has criticized libertarian illusions and falsehoods and a revisionist who has criticized revisionist illusions and falsehoods, I think I might pass Hitchens's "real test of a radical or revolutionary." However, I don't agree that contesting the illusions and falsehoods of one's friends and allies is the "real test of a radical or revolutionary," as important as that might be. Speaking truth to power is more important than speaking truth to the less powerful.
In any case, Hitchens presumably believes that he has passed the above-stated "real test" by vehemently and venomously attacking "Left-wing" opponents of the "War on Terror" and the invasion of Iraq. Meanwhile, Hitchens's critics, some of them his former friends, might claim that honor for themselves by virtue of their contesting of his alleged illusions and falsehoods.
So who is really contesting illusions and falsehoods, Hitchens or his critics? My impression is that it is Hitchens's critics more so than Hitchens.
Consider the invasion of Iraq. Hitchens supported the invasion, and to judge from his Afterword, still supports it. But Hitchens is an avowed secularist who advocates war against Islamic fundamentalism in support of secularism. So how does Hitchens deal with the fact that the toppling of Saddam Hussein's relatively secularist Baathist regime was, at least in some ways, a setback for secularism in Iraq?
For one thing, in "Bush's Secularist Triumph," from Slate, November 9, 2004, he asserts:
George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he--and the US armed forces--have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al Qaeda network, and the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries.
While Hitchens might have a point, however exaggerated,vis a vis the Taliban and al Qaeda, his reference to Iraq is absurd and ridiculous. The "confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq" has occurred only because of the power vacuum created by the toppling of the relatively secularist Baathist dictatorship. It does not represent a huge advance for secularism in Iraq.
Nowhere in this book will you find any mention by Hitchens of Iraqi women in post-Saddam Iraq threatened with death, and in some cases apparently killed, for not "covering up" ala Muslim mode. Nor is there any mention by Hitchens of the violent attacks on booze makers and booze sellers in post-Saddam Iraq. (Booze, of course, is taboo for devout Muslims.) This omission is particularly telling given Hitchens's notorious taste for alcohol, a matter mentioned many times in this book. (Full disclosure: I wrote this entire review while blind, stinking, staggering, asshole drunk.) If Hitchens is such a great Orwellian truth teller as he likes to pose, why does he lie by omission about such matters?
In any case, Hitchens also tries to rationalize the war in Iraq as a war for secularism by depicting Saddam Hussein as having become a religious nut in his final years. For example, Hitchens tells us (p.116): "...gigantic mosques began to be built in Saddam's own name." Through a Google search I found reports of the building of a "Mother-of-All-Battles" mosque. However, the writers of those reports regarded Saddam's mosque-building as a cynical use of religion for political purposes, and not as evidence of a sincere religious conversion on Saddam's part. Furthermore, Hitchens may be lying by omission once again. A Google search confirmed that as late as 2003 Saddam was still promoting the rebuilding of Babylon, a project that would be of no interest to a Muslim fanatic. (Babylon was center of civilization back in the days of "ignorance," as ignorant Muslims refer to pre-Islamic times.) Hitchens makes no mention of Saddam's rebuilding of Babylon. Ignorance? Or lying by omission?
Speaking of lying by omission, why is it that, although Hitchens discusses the civil war in Algeria in the 1990s between Islamic fundamentalists and the secularist government, nowhere does he explicitly state that the 1992 elections in Algeria were cancelled by the government to prevent Islamists from coming to power democratically, legally, and peacefully? Could it be that Hitchens wants to avoid acknowledging that sometimes in the Muslim world democracy, which Hitchens purports to support, could lead to the triumph of Islamic fundamentalism and the defeat of secularism? Could it be that Hitchens wants to avoid honestly admitting the existence of such a dilemma for someone such as himself who supposedly advocates war against Islamic fundamentalism in the name of both secularism and democracy?
In any case, I'd like to point out that by advocating war, i.e., the killing of people, inevitably including innocent bystanders, to advance secularism, Hitchens reveals himself to be a secularist fanatic, almost the mirror image of the religious fanatics he wants to destroy.
Hitchens might reply by bleating about "moral equivalence." Well, for the record, I'm not asserting that George W. Bush (or Christopher Hitchens) is "morally equivalent" to Osama bin Laden (or Saddam Hussein). However, I deny there is a night-and-day difference between them. Contrary to the casuistry of warmongers such as Hitchens and Sam Harris (The End of Faith), those who intentionally start a war knowing full well that innocent civilians will inevitably be killed (even if they are never specifically targeted), intentionally kill innocent civilians by so doing. Like the "terrorists" who directly target civilians, the warmongers have got innocent blood on their hands. They might not be "morally equivalent" to the "terrorists," but they're not the absolute opposite of them either.
Speaking of Hitchens's desire to destroy people, as I did a little bit ago, it is an irony, or maybe a hypocrisy, that Hitchens is purportedly an opponent of the death penalty. In an interview with Reason Online, November 2001, included in this book, Hitchens says that the first political issue he ever took a stand on was the question of capital punishment, which outraged him because it seemed to arrogate too much power to the government. And one of Hitchens's critics in this book, Michael Kazin, says that Hitchens continues to oppose the death penalty.
However, here is a passage from Hitchens's "Saving Islam from bin Laden," from The Age, September 5, 2002:
It is impossible to compromise with the proponents of sacrificial killings of civilians, the disseminators of anti-Semitic filth, the violators of women and the cheerful murderers of children.
It is also impossible to compromise with the stone-faced propagandists for Bronze Age morality: morons and philistines who hate Darwin and Einstein and managed, during their brief rule in Afghanistan, to ban and erase music and art while cultivating the skills of germ warfare. If they could do that to Afghans, what might they not have in mind for us? In confronting such people, the crucial thing is to be willing and able, if not in fact eager, to kill them without pity before they get started.
Kill them without pity before they get started. Sure as hell sounds like a death penalty to me; indeed it sounds like a preemptive death penalty.
If, as seems to be the case, Hitchens advocates capital punishment for "the disseminators of anti-Semitic filth," then there is another irony, or hypocrisy, here, given that Hitchens, according to the editors of this book, is a believer in freedom of expression as a universal value that always must be defended everywhere without compromise.
Back to Hitchens's lying by omission. Consider his romanticizing of the Kurds. The picture he paints of them is utterly without warts. They were brave fighters against Saddam's tyranny and defenders of democracy and "civil society." That's all. In this regard, it is useful to take Hitchens up on his recommendation of Kenneth M. Pollack's book, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. There you can find information about the infighting between the two major Kurdish political groups, a subject never mentioned by Hitchens. Furthermore, according to Pollack, the group he calls Ansar-i-Islam and Hitchens calls Ansar-al-Islam was a Kurdish group. There's no mention of that by Hitchens in his denunciation of this group of "bin Laden clones." And Hitchens never mentions Kurdish terrorism in Turkey.
More on lying by omission. In "Why Ask Why?" fromSlate, October 3, 2005, Hitchens asks why “so many genial Australians" had to die in a terrorist bombing in Bali. (As we all know, all Australians are genial. G'day, mate. Put another Pommie bastard on the barbie.) He answers: "Well, is it not the case that Australia sent troops to help safeguard the independence of East Timor and the elections that followed it? A neighboring country that assists the self-determination of an Indonesian Christian minority must expect to have the lives of its holidaymakers taken." Well, maybe so. But conspicuous by its absence from Hitchens's explanation is any mention of Australia's participation in "Operation Iraqi Freedom." But Hitchens doesn't want to admit that the invasion and occupation of Iraq could possibly be a reason for any subsequent terrorist attacks.
No, to admit that would be to admit that opponents of the Iraq invasion might have been right in predicting that it would provoke more terrorism. And Hitchens simply will not admit that.
Thus, after bombings in London, Hitchens, in "We Cannot Surrender," from Mirror, July 8, 2005, laid down the law regarding what was thinkable and what was not:
I know perfectly well there are people thinking, and even saying, that Tony Blair brought this
upon us by his alliance with George Bush. A word of advice to them: try and keep it down, will you? Or wait at least until the funerals are over. And beware of the non-sequitur: You can be as opposed to the Iraq operation as much as you like, but you can't get from this "grievance" to the detonating of explosives at rush hour on London buses and tubes. Don't even try to connect the two. By George Galloway's logic, British squaddies in Iraq are the root cause of dead bodies at home. How can anyone bear to be so wicked and stupid? How can anyone bear to act as a megaphone for psychotic killers?
For Hitchens, there is only one permissible explanation for such actions: the innate and incorrigible aggressiveness of fundamentalist Muslims who are at war with all culture and all civilization. Hitchens seems to be somewhat simpleminded. He seems to think that if some violent actions by Muslims are motivated by religious fanaticism, then all violent actions by Muslims must be so motivated and there cannot possibly be any other reasons for any violent actions by Muslims.
Hitchens repeatedly depicts jihadists as religious fanatics who, because they are religious fanatics, cannot be appeased or negotiated with. The only thing to do is kill them. However, in "Inside the Islamic Mafia," from Slate, September 25, 2003, he includes a quotation, taken from Bernard-Henri Levy's Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, of a Saudi lawyer who specializes in financial transactions:
"Islam is a business," he explains to me with a big smile. "I don't say that because it's my job, or because I see proof of it in my office ten times a day, but because it's a fact. People hide behind Islamism. They use it like a screen saying 'Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!' But we know that here. We see the deals and the movements behind the curtain. In one way or another it all passes through our hands. We do the paperwork. We write the contracts. And I can tell you that most of them couldn't care less about Allah. They enter Islamism because it's nothing other than a source of power and wealth, especially in Pakistan....
Is this Saudi lawyer right? Maybe so. I don't know. But my point is that Hitchens seems to accept this testimony, even though it contradicts the view of Islamists he expresses throughout the rest of his writings in this book, thereby casting doubt on the veracity of his usual war propaganda. Is Hitchens too much of a retard to realize this? Or just too brazenly deceitful to care?
Hitchens, as a supporter of the Iraq war, wanted to discredit former ambassador Joseph Wilson, the Joe Wilson who, in effect, shouted "You lie!" at George W. Bush from the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. Wilson had investigated some documents purporting to show that Saddam had tried to acquire uranium yellowcake from Niger, and he concluded, as did international inspectors, that they were forgeries.
Hitchens, in a piece published in The Weekly Standard but not included in this book and which I found by a Google search, admits to the existence of only one forged document. Meanwhile, in this book, he claims that an Iraqi ambassador visited Niger in 1999, and the only plausible explanation for this visit was to acquire uranium yellowcake. Well, maybe so. I don't know. The first time I've heard about this was in Hitchens’s Afterword to this book.
In any case, Hitchens is brazenly lying when (p. 334) he says Wilson "...wasted an enormous amount of time on his now-disproven assertion that members of the Bush administration approached Robert Novak (a strong opponent of the war and admirer of Wilson's) in order to 'expose' his wife Valerie Plame." Novak reputedly opposed the Iraq war. Whether or not he admired Wilson, I don't know. In any case, Novak, by his own account, first received the information that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA from a "senior administration official," specifically Richard Armitage, then Undersecretary of State. (It was then confirmed for Novak by "Bush's Brain," Karl Rove. Meanwhile, other Bush administration members, such as Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Chief of Staff for Vice-President Dick Cheney, had been leaking the information about Plame's CIA position to other journalists. For example, Judith Miller late of The New York Times, testified about such a conversation with Libby, and produced her notes on it, at Libby's trial for perjury and obstruction of justice. So Hitchens was lying like a Republican rug when he claimed that Wilson's claim is now disproven.
There are indications in this book that Hitchens is a fan of--gasp! horrors!--Winston Churchill, the belligerent drunk, like Hitchens. (Regarding Churchill, see, for example, Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker.) I wonder if Hitchens agrees with the statement attributed to Churchill: "In wartime truth is so precious that it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies." (See Anthony Cave-Brown's Bodyguard of Lies.)
While Hitchens seems to be a fan of warmonger Churchill, he's apparently not a fan of Charles Lindbergh. Jeff Riggenbach's book, Why American History is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism, which I reviewed in the previous issue of Inconvenient History, includes a quotation from revisionist historian James J. Martin commenting favorably on Gore Vidal's recent political writings such as Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (a title which was used by revisionist Harry Elmer Barnes in the early 1950s as the title of an anthology of revisionist writings on World War II). Here's what Hitchens says about Vidal (p. 207): "Gore Vidal's admirers of whom I used to be one and to some extent remain one, hardly notice that his essential critique of America is based on Lindbergh and "America First"--the most conservative position available. And for Hitchens, despite his renunciation of socialism, his fond reminiscences of Margaret Thatcher, his buddying up with "neoconservatives" such as Paul Wolfowitz, etc., "conservative" is still a purely pejorative epithet. But "radical" is a good word. And of what does radicalism consist? The overthrowing of governments. Not the US government, but governments of countries in dire need of more secularism, such as Afghanistan under the Taliban or Iraq under Saddam Hussein (ha ha ha).
(Incidentally, America Firsters included liberals such as John T. Flynn and Oswald Garrison Villard, Progressives such as William Borah and Burton K. Wheeler, and Socialists such as Norman Thomas.)
Among Hitchens's fetishes is "antifascism." He absurdly labels al Qaeda et al. "Islamic Fascists," but what's fascism got to do with it? Hitchens uses the terms "fascist" and "fascism" frequently, but he never bothers to define them. Apparently, almost anyone that Hitchens strongly disapproves of and wants to drop bombs on is a "fascist." It's interesting to see an alleged disciple of George Orwell, author of the essay, "Politics and the English Language," abusing the English language so outrageously in his deceitful war propaganda. Hitchens even has the chutzpah to label Islamic fanatics as "nihilists."
Hitchens repeatedly stretches the truth via exaggeration. Thus, he refers to translators of Salman Rushdie's novelThe Satanic Verses who were "eviscerated." A Google search confirmed that translators of The Satanic Verses were stabbed, in one case to death. But as far as I can tell, Hitchens is the only one who uses the emotive and exaggerated word "eviscerated." Hitchens also refers to museums destroyed by the Bad Guys. A Google search produced reports that the Taliban might have destroyed thousands of non-Islamic statues in museums in Afghanistan, but not that they destroyed museums. On page 125, referring to the civil war in Algeria in the 1990s, Hitchens announces that "...if Algeria had fallen to the fundamentalists the bloodbath would have been infinitely worse...." Infinitely worse? Every living thing in the universe would have been killed? Hitchens also absurdly claims that "they" are opposed to all culture. And, recycling a bit of standard war propaganda, he claims that "they" are enemies of all civilization.
On page 340, Hitchens writes: "Professor Juan Cole writes that he believes the late Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi to be a fictitious character. And people think it is I who owe the explanation." Perhaps Hitchens should explain how he managed to confuse Richard Seymour with Juan Cole. It was Seymour, not Cole, who expressed doubt about al-Zarqawi's actual existence. And perhaps Hitchens should explain how he managed to twist Seymour's expression of doubt into a flat-out assertion that al-Zarqawi is fictional. Here's a direct quotation from Seymour's "The Genocidal Imagination of Christopher Hitchens": "There is considerable doubt about whether Zarqawi is alive, has two functioning legs, and is really in Iraq. Whether Zarqawi is a myth or a monster, the only story that obtains here is that there is no story. Saddam and Zarqawi never did have their Baghdad nuptials, however convenient the tale may be for pro-war storytelling."
There's plenty of evidence in this book that Hitchens needs to get himself a new crystal ball. Thus, for example, in "Ha Ha Ha to the Pacifists," published inGuardian, November 29, 2001, Hitchens predicted, "The Taliban will soon be history." Hitchens, like other warmongers, is consistently pessimistic about peace and optimistic about war. But more than eight years later the Taliban are still not history.
In "The Literal Left," from Slate, December 4, 2003, Hitchens told us, vis a vis the Iraq invasion, "There has been no refugee exodus, for example, of the kind [the "peaceniks"] promised." Would Bitchin’ Hitchens care, or dare, to repeat that statement now? (Nowhere in this book do I see any subsequent admission by Hitchens that there was indeed a refugee exodus.)
According to Dennis Perrin, in "Obituary for a Former Contrarian," from Minneapolis City Pages, July 9, 2003:
In several pieces, including an incredibly condescending blast at Nelson Mandela, Hitch went on and on about WMD, chided readers with "Just you wait!" and other taunts, fully confident that once the US took control of Iraq, tons of bio/chem weapons and labs would be all over the cable news nets—with him dancing a victory jig in the foreground. Now he says WMD were never a real concern and that he'd always said so. It's amazing that he'd dare to state this while his earlier pieces can be read at his website. But then, when you side with massive state power and the cynical fucks who serve it you can pretty much say anything and the People Who Matter won't care.
The "earlier pieces" referred to Perrin are not included in this book. The only prewar claim by Hitchens related to Iraqi WMD in the pieces by Hitchens included in this book is a claim that it was absolutely certain that Saddam had acquired some of the "weapons of genocide" and wanted to acquire more.
It's true, as Perrin says, that after the invasion Hitchens claimed he'd never believed Saddam had much WMD at the time of the invasion. Thus, in "Weapons and Terror," from Slate, May 28, 2003, Hitchens wrote:
...I did write before the war, and do state again (in my upcoming book, The Long Short War) that obviously there couldn't have been very many weapons in Saddam's hands, nor can the coalition have believed there to be. You can't station tens of thousands of men and women in uniform on the immediate borders of Iraq for several months if you think that a mad dictator might be able to annihilate them with a pre-emptive strike.
But wasn't there a massive buildup of American and other troops around Iraq's borders in 1990 when Saddam was known to have, and still did have, chemical and biological weapons? Thus, this argument by Hitchens is questionable, yet the implication is interesting. Here Hitchens is clearly implying that Bush and Blair lied about Iraqi WMD. And yet the man who wrote a book about Bill Clinton's lies never explicitly says Bush lied. Perhaps he just didn't want to give opponents the satisfaction of reading that. ("Bush lied. People died.")
Despite his poor track record as a prophet, Hitchens tenaciously clings to a rationalization for supporting the Iraq invasion on the basis that a "confrontation" with Saddam was "inevitable." Of course, thanks to the invasion that Hitchens advocated, there's no way this dogma can ever be put to an empirical test.
Speaking of dogma, it should be noted that Hitchens makes many claims in this book for which he provides no evidence. And, unlike many of his critics in this book, his writings contain few references to sources that a skeptic can double-check.
Hitchens brags about his ability to recognize a lethal threat when he sees one. But Hitchens sees only one lethal threat--Islamic fanaticism. It's true, for instance, that a Muslim fanatic killed Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. (But, contrary to Hitchens, van Gogh was not a descendant of the great artist, i.e., Vincent van Gogh. He was a descendant of Vincent's brother, Theo, the great art dealer.) It's also true that it was probably Jewish fanatics who killed Francois Duprat and Alex Odeh. And it was a Christian fanatic who tried to kill Larry Flynt. But Hitchens doesn't seem to know or care about such examples of non-Islamic fanaticism in action. Furthermore, Hitchens seems not to recognize the lethal threats of neoconservatism and "Armageddon Theology." (Regarding the latter, see, for example, Pastor John Hagee's book,Jerusalem Countdown.) But perhaps Hitchens is too simpleminded to comprehend a world with a variety of threats, or perhaps his war propaganda is aimed at such simpleminded people, people inclined toward what Lawrence Dennis called "monodiabolism," the belief that there is one, and only one, "devil" at any particular time. (One last comment about this: In my opinion, Hitchens is a lethal threat, but presumably he doesn't see a lethal threat when he looks in the mirror.)
My time and space for this review are running out, so I'll have to finish up without discussing many aspects of Hitchens' war propaganda. But Hitchens' critics in this book make many points that I haven't made in this review.
Among the things Hitchens claims to love is skepticism. However, my satirical definition of "skeptic" seems to fit Hitchens: "One who doubts what he does not want to believe and believes what he does not want to doubt." (This definition can be found in the "Lucifer's Lexicon" section of my book, The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays.) Readers of Christopher Hitchens and His Criticsshould have lots of salt on hand when reading it, especially when reading Hitchens’ incoherent and deceitful war propaganda.
As I mentioned before, one of the books by Hitchens was titled Orwell’s Victory. If I could put a title on this review, it would be Hitchens’ Waterloo.
Actually, it's NONE down. Dershowitz was accused of plagiarism by notorious moon bat Norman Finklestein, however, a Harvard investigation cleared him of the charge.
Horowitz is a respected writer. Our friend Head Muscle is unable to bring himself to accept that because he disagrees with his politics, but that in no way means he's not credible. Horowitz is especially despised by the radical left because he's an apostate, having spent his early life as a Marxist and outspoken member of the left before becoming a conservative. Horowitz, however, has done good work, particularly with Students for Academic Freedom and the Academic Bill of Rights.
Nice try though.
So because he liked to drink, and, according to you, at least, was unable to "ties his own shoes TOGETHER," that makes him not credible? ROTFLMFAO
Your UNCITED articles aren't worth a response. That's twice now that you've omitted your source. To say Hitchens isn't credible shows your ignorance and naivete, or, and I'm leaning this way, an extreme pro-Muslim bias. Your reliance on ad hominems, as well as your inability to use logic and reason in an argument suggests that you are an intellectual lightweight or are being deceptive to further an agenda. IOW, you fit right in with Meso's other three moon bats.
So a Harvard investigation cleared a Harvard employed professor of wrongdoing? Yea.....
What ever happened with his sexual abuse charge, the one where the woman claimed she was underage when she was forced to have sex with Dershowitz? Was that the work or Finklestein as well?
What ever happened with his sexual abuse charge, the one where the woman claimed she was underage when she was forced to have sex with Dershowitz? Was that the work or Finklestein as well?
I will always question a drunk's credibility. No two ways about it. It's not that he liked to drink as you paint the picture with your own biases, the same you claim I do, he was an alcoholic. Alcoholic's credibility is always in question whether you wish to believe that or not is on you.
Don't forget your own ad hominems or are you the only one able to make those kinds of remarks?
To blindly believe a drunk "shows your ignorance and naïveté, or, and I'm leaning this way, an extreme pro-Israel bias. Your ad hominems and proclivity to reference the same type of material, just on the opposite side of the fence, you jump on others for in an argument suggests that you also are an intellectual lightweight or being deceptive to further an agenda"
Alan Dershowitz? Isn't he a professor at Harvard? Don't know much about charges of plagiarism, but I would think that being cleared by Harvard isn't saying Much.
Cite your evidence.
The argument is about Heady Muscle's statement that NO ONE with scruples would equate Chomsky with The Nation Examiner. HM's statement was essentially an invitation to FIND someone with scruples who questions Chomsky's CREDIBILITY. Therefore, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that the references I provided would be discussing Chomsky's credibility. Or did you miss that in your frenzy to play the Islamophobia card?
To support my contention that Chomsky is a fraud, I provided several articles from credible writers - writers with scruples - from BOTH sides of the political spectrum that used evidence to make their case.
You, on the other hand, made no attempt to refute any of the allegations raised by the writers. Instead, you attacked their credibility. You failed to use reason to make your case. You failed to use logic to make your case. And you failed to construct a proper argument to make your case. What you did use were ad hominems. And for that reason, you FAILED to make your case.
How is referring to Hitchens an example of my "pro-Israel bias?" You do know Hitch was very critical of Israel and very sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, yes?
You cannot find one example of me referencing the "same type of material, just on the other side of the fence" that I "jump on others for in an argument." I don't post UNREFERENCED fiction that I've pulled from blog sites like Global Research to make my case. I post articles from credible news sources and periodicals that are on the left and the right. You can reject unreferenced fiction with ad hominems because unreferenced fiction is worthy of nothing but ridicule. But you don't get to reject credible references just because you don't agree with them.
The game you're playing by trying to draw an equivalence between credible sources and blogs that are written by conspiratorial moon bats isn't fooling anyone. NO reasonable person would ever conclude that there is an equivalence between the two. No one except for Meso's conspiracy theorists, that is.
Just wanted to say, even though reading this thread every day sometimes gives me a headache, but the discourse is entertaining as hell. Good show by all!
This http://inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_1/christopher_hitchens_and_his_critics.phpon Christopher Hitchens that Docd posted was taken from a pro Nazi, anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial website called inconvenienthistory.com.
It's obvious that you withheld your source for this article because you knew it would destroy your credibility, not to mention get you accused of anti-Semitism. But one wonders why you were reading a hate site like this in the first place. And what does it say about the two idiots that 'liked' your post?
What a fucking joke.
Lieberman: Disloyal Israeli Arabs should be beheaded
MK Ahmad Tibi compares Yisrael Beiteinu head's vision to a 'Jewish ISIS'; foreign minister also reiterates support for transfer.
By Haaretz | Mar. 9, 2015 | 9:45 PM |
1
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman speaks at a conference in Tel Aviv on December 24, 2014. Photo by Moti Milrod
Israeli Arabs who are disloyal to the State of Israel should have their heads chopped off, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said at an elections conference at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya this week.
"Whoever's with us should get everything – up to half the kingdom," Lieberman said Sunday, in a reference to King Ahaseurus' pledge to Queen Esther as described in the Book of Esther, which tells the story of thePurim holiday celebrated last week.
But Israeli Arabs who are disloyal to the state deserve a different fate, the chairman of Yisrael Beiteinu said at the "Voting for Democracy – 2015 Elections" election conference, Channel 2 News reported.
"Those who are against us, there's nothing to be done – we need to pick up an ax and cut off his head," Lieberman said. "Otherwise we won't survive here."
Prominent Israeli Arab MK http://www.haaretz.com/meta/Tag/Ahmed%20Tibi, who is No. 4 on the Arab parties' Joint List ticket, suggested a situation like that described by Lieberman would result in a Jewish version of the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
Joint List "will remove racists' and fascists' heads only through democratic means – bringing as many [Knesset] seats as possible and active participation in the election," The Jerusalem Post quoted Tibi as saying Monday. "The stronger we are, the weaker the Jewish Islamic State will be."
Lieberman also reiterated his position advocating the transfer of at least some of Israel's Arab citizens.
"There is no reason for Umm al-Fahm to be part of the State of Israel," Lieberman said about a northern Israeli town populated by Arab citizens of Israel, according to the Channel 2 report. "Citizens of the State of Israel who raise a black flag on Nakba Day – from my perspective, they can leave, and I'm very happily willing to donate them to Abu Mazen," he said, referring to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
MK Ahmad Tibi compares Yisrael Beiteinu head's vision to a 'Jewish ISIS'; foreign minister also reiterates support for transfer.
By Haaretz | Mar. 9, 2015 | 9:45 PM |
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman speaks at a conference in Tel Aviv on December 24, 2014. Photo by Moti Milrod
Israeli Arabs who are disloyal to the State of Israel should have their heads chopped off, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said at an elections conference at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya this week.
"Whoever's with us should get everything – up to half the kingdom," Lieberman said Sunday, in a reference to King Ahaseurus' pledge to Queen Esther as described in the Book of Esther, which tells the story of thePurim holiday celebrated last week.
But Israeli Arabs who are disloyal to the state deserve a different fate, the chairman of Yisrael Beiteinu said at the "Voting for Democracy – 2015 Elections" election conference, Channel 2 News reported.
"Those who are against us, there's nothing to be done – we need to pick up an ax and cut off his head," Lieberman said. "Otherwise we won't survive here."
Prominent Israeli Arab MK http://www.haaretz.com/meta/Tag/Ahmed%20Tibi, who is No. 4 on the Arab parties' Joint List ticket, suggested a situation like that described by Lieberman would result in a Jewish version of the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
Joint List "will remove racists' and fascists' heads only through democratic means – bringing as many [Knesset] seats as possible and active participation in the election," The Jerusalem Post quoted Tibi as saying Monday. "The stronger we are, the weaker the Jewish Islamic State will be."
Lieberman also reiterated his position advocating the transfer of at least some of Israel's Arab citizens.
"There is no reason for Umm al-Fahm to be part of the State of Israel," Lieberman said about a northern Israeli town populated by Arab citizens of Israel, according to the Channel 2 report. "Citizens of the State of Israel who raise a black flag on Nakba Day – from my perspective, they can leave, and I'm very happily willing to donate them to Abu Mazen," he said, referring to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
What I find funny is how right he probably is about not surviving. Demographics may eventually crush the "Jewish State".
LOL It was just a mater of time until some idiot brought this up.
Accepting Al Qaeda
The Enemy of the United States' Enemy
By Barak Mendelsohn
March 9, 2015
Since 9/11, Washington has considered al Qaeda the greatest threat to the United States, one that must be eliminated regardless of cost or time. After Washington killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, it made Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s new leader, its next number one target. But the instability in the Middle East following the Arab revolutions and the meteoric rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) require that Washington rethink its policy toward al Qaeda, particularly its targeting of Zawahiri. Destabilizing al Qaeda at this time may in fact work against U.S. efforts to defeat ISIS.
There is no doubt that relentless U.S. strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan weakened al Qaeda by taking out the group’s central command and making it extremely difficult for it to plot attacks in the West. Pulverizing al Qaeda central also exacerbated difficulties it was already having in communicating with and supervising its various outposts. As a result, these branches either diverged from the parent organization’s strategy by fighting local regimes or overreached by targeting Muslim civilians, particularly Shiites. For example, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, formerly the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, carried out an unapproved attack in November 2005 that killed numerous civilians in Amman, which was also outside his area of responsibility. These distractions prevented the various branches from contributing much to al Qaeda’s overarching goal of fighting the West, or the “far enemy.” With the exception of its Yemeni subsidiary, al Qaeda’s franchises were largely limited to targeting the “near enemy” in their designated zones. And so, notwithstanding their contribution to the spread of al-Qaeda, its franchises were more of a liability than an asset to the brand name.
But today, al Qaeda, although still a grave threat, is only one of several emanating from the Middle East. Washington must not only contain Iran’s hegemonic aspirations, which threaten U.S. allies, but also fight ISIS’ expansion. Washington’s failure to balance these diverging interests became apparent when it made the mistake of coupling the bombing of ISIS targets in Syria with attacks on al Qaeda’s Khorasan group—operational cells affiliated with Jabhat al-Nusra (al Qaeda in Syria) that are planning attacks in the West. The double assault reinforced the jihadist narrative that Washington is hostile to Sunni Muslims and ready to bargain with the murderous Alawite regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Not only did the strikes give al-Nusra a boost in popularity—the Sunnis saw how a group focused primarily on fighting Assad was attacked by the United States—they also made it harder for Washington to persuade Sunni rebels to fight the Islamic State and prompted al-Nusra to attack U.S.-backed rebel factions in northern Syria. Earlier this month, Harakat Hazm, one of the main moderate rebel groups in Syria supported by the United States, announced it was disbanding after suffering defeats from al-Nusra.
Washington’s reluctance to deploy combat forces against ISIS has limited its options to airpower and a reliance on allies’ ground forces. There are some merits to this strategy and signs that it is indeed bearing fruit: ISIS’ astounding advance has been rolled back in some locations, such as in Sinjar, Iraq, and Kobani, Syria. But the unwillingness to invest greater American resources comes with a price: the United States is settling for limited and gradual progress, which is not enough to destroy ISIS.
Consequently, ISIS has adjusted to the U.S. air campaign by expanding beyond the Iraqi and Syrian theaters. It recently announced the creation of new wilayat (governorates) in Afghanistan, Algeria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen and introduced a new slogan: “Remaining and Expanding.” A series of attacks by its agents in the Sinai Peninsula and in Libya gave credibility to its drive to grow and helped soften the blows from air strikes in Iraq and Syria.
In order for U.S. President Barack Obama to fulfill his promise to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS, he must weaken ISIS’ control of Mosul, Raqqa, and other large population centers, as well as stop its expansion. Inadvertently, the administration’s cautious approach to military intervention makes al Qaeda—which views ISIS as a renegade offshoot—an important player in curtailing ISIS’ growth.
This advantage may not last long. ISIS’ surprising territorial gains and its ability to recruit an estimated 20,000 fighters (more than any terrorist organization since the 1980s, according to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence) are putting pressure on al Qaeda, particularly its various branches, to defect and jump on the ISIS bandwagon. By announcing himself as caliph, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has revealed that his ambitions extend beyond capturing Iraq and Syria. He has essentially demanded that all other jihadist groups pledge their allegiance to him. If Baghdadi were to succeed, he would command a much more powerful force, with assets throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. The pressure for all terrorist groups to unite under one camp only increased after the United States joined the fight against ISIS in August, when leading jihadists—such as Abdallah Muhammad al-Muhaysini in Syria, as well as Abu Qatada al-Filistini and Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi in Jordan—called for all factions to overcome their differences and unify against American “aggression.”
Although al Qaeda agrees that jihadists should collaborate against their shared enemy the United States, it nevertheless refuses to join ISIS by following Baghdadi. Notwithstanding the fact that Zawahiri is less influential than his predecessor, he has so far been able to keep all of al Qaeda’s branches on his side. Although all the branches renewed their pledges to al Qaeda after Baghdadi announced his plans to create a caliphate, there was a leadership change in al Shabab (al Qaeda’s Somali branch), which made it more susceptible to defecting. However, Ahmed Umar, who in September 2014 succeeded Ahmed Godane, chose to renew his pledge to al Qaeda. As long as Zawahiri is alive, the leaders of al Qaeda’s branches who are beholden to him by personal oath are less likely to shift allegiances and join ISIS.
But if and when Washington succeeds in killing Zawahiri, the leaders of al Qaeda’s branches would have the opportunity to reassess whether to remain with al Qaeda or join Baghdadi’s caliphate. It is possible that Zawahiri’s successor will be able to hold al Qaeda together, particularly if it is Nasir al-Wuhayshi, al Qaeda’s so-called general manager and the head of its Yemeni branch. But it is more likely that in Zawahiri’s absence, al Qaeda would drift into ISIS’ camp, offering it manpower, resources, and access to arenas such as Algeria and Yemen where al Qaeda’s dominance has so far hindered ISIS’ expansion.
More so than during the bin Laden era, al Qaeda’s cohesiveness depends on the ability of its leadership to hold the various franchises together, and it is unclear whether al Qaeda can endure another succession since al Qaeda’s veteran leaders have dwindled considerably in recent years, making it more dependent on old guard figures such as Zawahiri to maintain unity. As such, the group’s fate may depend on Zawahiri’s personal survival. It is certainly ironic that at this point, when the United States is the closest it has ever been to destroying al Qaeda, its interests would be better served by keeping the terrorist organization afloat and Zawahiri alive.
Accepting Al Qaeda
The Enemy of the United States' Enemy
By Barak Mendelsohn
March 9, 2015
Since 9/11, Washington has considered al Qaeda the greatest threat to the United States, one that must be eliminated regardless of cost or time. After Washington killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, it made Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s new leader, its next number one target. But the instability in the Middle East following the Arab revolutions and the meteoric rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) require that Washington rethink its policy toward al Qaeda, particularly its targeting of Zawahiri. Destabilizing al Qaeda at this time may in fact work against U.S. efforts to defeat ISIS.
There is no doubt that relentless U.S. strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan weakened al Qaeda by taking out the group’s central command and making it extremely difficult for it to plot attacks in the West. Pulverizing al Qaeda central also exacerbated difficulties it was already having in communicating with and supervising its various outposts. As a result, these branches either diverged from the parent organization’s strategy by fighting local regimes or overreached by targeting Muslim civilians, particularly Shiites. For example, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, formerly the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, carried out an unapproved attack in November 2005 that killed numerous civilians in Amman, which was also outside his area of responsibility. These distractions prevented the various branches from contributing much to al Qaeda’s overarching goal of fighting the West, or the “far enemy.” With the exception of its Yemeni subsidiary, al Qaeda’s franchises were largely limited to targeting the “near enemy” in their designated zones. And so, notwithstanding their contribution to the spread of al-Qaeda, its franchises were more of a liability than an asset to the brand name.
But today, al Qaeda, although still a grave threat, is only one of several emanating from the Middle East. Washington must not only contain Iran’s hegemonic aspirations, which threaten U.S. allies, but also fight ISIS’ expansion. Washington’s failure to balance these diverging interests became apparent when it made the mistake of coupling the bombing of ISIS targets in Syria with attacks on al Qaeda’s Khorasan group—operational cells affiliated with Jabhat al-Nusra (al Qaeda in Syria) that are planning attacks in the West. The double assault reinforced the jihadist narrative that Washington is hostile to Sunni Muslims and ready to bargain with the murderous Alawite regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Not only did the strikes give al-Nusra a boost in popularity—the Sunnis saw how a group focused primarily on fighting Assad was attacked by the United States—they also made it harder for Washington to persuade Sunni rebels to fight the Islamic State and prompted al-Nusra to attack U.S.-backed rebel factions in northern Syria. Earlier this month, Harakat Hazm, one of the main moderate rebel groups in Syria supported by the United States, announced it was disbanding after suffering defeats from al-Nusra.
Washington’s reluctance to deploy combat forces against ISIS has limited its options to airpower and a reliance on allies’ ground forces. There are some merits to this strategy and signs that it is indeed bearing fruit: ISIS’ astounding advance has been rolled back in some locations, such as in Sinjar, Iraq, and Kobani, Syria. But the unwillingness to invest greater American resources comes with a price: the United States is settling for limited and gradual progress, which is not enough to destroy ISIS.
Consequently, ISIS has adjusted to the U.S. air campaign by expanding beyond the Iraqi and Syrian theaters. It recently announced the creation of new wilayat (governorates) in Afghanistan, Algeria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen and introduced a new slogan: “Remaining and Expanding.” A series of attacks by its agents in the Sinai Peninsula and in Libya gave credibility to its drive to grow and helped soften the blows from air strikes in Iraq and Syria.
In order for U.S. President Barack Obama to fulfill his promise to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS, he must weaken ISIS’ control of Mosul, Raqqa, and other large population centers, as well as stop its expansion. Inadvertently, the administration’s cautious approach to military intervention makes al Qaeda—which views ISIS as a renegade offshoot—an important player in curtailing ISIS’ growth.
This advantage may not last long. ISIS’ surprising territorial gains and its ability to recruit an estimated 20,000 fighters (more than any terrorist organization since the 1980s, according to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence) are putting pressure on al Qaeda, particularly its various branches, to defect and jump on the ISIS bandwagon. By announcing himself as caliph, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has revealed that his ambitions extend beyond capturing Iraq and Syria. He has essentially demanded that all other jihadist groups pledge their allegiance to him. If Baghdadi were to succeed, he would command a much more powerful force, with assets throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. The pressure for all terrorist groups to unite under one camp only increased after the United States joined the fight against ISIS in August, when leading jihadists—such as Abdallah Muhammad al-Muhaysini in Syria, as well as Abu Qatada al-Filistini and Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi in Jordan—called for all factions to overcome their differences and unify against American “aggression.”
Although al Qaeda agrees that jihadists should collaborate against their shared enemy the United States, it nevertheless refuses to join ISIS by following Baghdadi. Notwithstanding the fact that Zawahiri is less influential than his predecessor, he has so far been able to keep all of al Qaeda’s branches on his side. Although all the branches renewed their pledges to al Qaeda after Baghdadi announced his plans to create a caliphate, there was a leadership change in al Shabab (al Qaeda’s Somali branch), which made it more susceptible to defecting. However, Ahmed Umar, who in September 2014 succeeded Ahmed Godane, chose to renew his pledge to al Qaeda. As long as Zawahiri is alive, the leaders of al Qaeda’s branches who are beholden to him by personal oath are less likely to shift allegiances and join ISIS.
But if and when Washington succeeds in killing Zawahiri, the leaders of al Qaeda’s branches would have the opportunity to reassess whether to remain with al Qaeda or join Baghdadi’s caliphate. It is possible that Zawahiri’s successor will be able to hold al Qaeda together, particularly if it is Nasir al-Wuhayshi, al Qaeda’s so-called general manager and the head of its Yemeni branch. But it is more likely that in Zawahiri’s absence, al Qaeda would drift into ISIS’ camp, offering it manpower, resources, and access to arenas such as Algeria and Yemen where al Qaeda’s dominance has so far hindered ISIS’ expansion.
More so than during the bin Laden era, al Qaeda’s cohesiveness depends on the ability of its leadership to hold the various franchises together, and it is unclear whether al Qaeda can endure another succession since al Qaeda’s veteran leaders have dwindled considerably in recent years, making it more dependent on old guard figures such as Zawahiri to maintain unity. As such, the group’s fate may depend on Zawahiri’s personal survival. It is certainly ironic that at this point, when the United States is the closest it has ever been to destroying al Qaeda, its interests would be better served by keeping the terrorist organization afloat and Zawahiri alive.
Is anybody watching the elections in Israel? Do you think it will make a difference if the center-left Zionist union gets in power? Considering what's happening now in the middle East,and in Israel, I think it really won't make much of a difference. To little, to late....and it's all spun out of control. What a hell of a mess..
No difference. Maybe some impact on Congress. A shift left could get some Democrats to be less critical of their settlement policies. The policies themselves won't change.
Just wanted to resurrect this thread for some of our friends From the Trump thread to comment on. A lot of very well articulated points of view from the usual suspects 
it's funny how many years goes by points of view mature and the open minded keeps getting educated. Which I believe applies to all members in his thread if I agree with them or not.
So respecting dissenting points of view seems to make us better educated and allow us to be able to develop our thoughts with time and still be relevant in current climate. I still view CNN and other cable news to be entertainment more than journalists. But they do report news from news organizations like Reuters,Associated Press ,BBC, NPR, real journalist outlets. When you start barring news org from white house breefing room you are limiting information and that's authoritarian!!
it's funny how many years goes by points of view mature and the open minded keeps getting educated. Which I believe applies to all members in his thread if I agree with them or not. So respecting dissenting points of view seems to make us better educated and allow us to be able to develop our thoughts with time and still be relevant in current climate. I still view CNN and other cable news to be entertainment more than journalists. But they do report news from news organizations like Reuters,Associated Press ,BBC, NPR, real journalist outlets. When you start barring news org from white house breefing room you are limiting information and that's authoritarian!!
ddp7
Banned
I dont believe in massmedia bro
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