Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.
Christopher HitchensTags: islam war-on-terror islamofascism september-11-attacks
[T]his is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life.
Christopher HitchensTags: terrorism jihad september-11-attacks islamism
Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about 'the West,' to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content.
Christopher HitchensTags: terrorism extremism pat-robertson masochism jihad september-11-attacks islamism falwell
As he defended the book one evening in the early 1980s at the Carnegie Endowment in New York, I knew that some of what he said was true enough, just as some of it was arguably less so. (Edward incautiously dismissed 'speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings or sabotage commercial airliners' as the feverish product of 'highly exaggerated stereotypes.') Covering Islam took as its point of departure the Iranian revolution, which by then had been fully counter-revolutionized by the forces of the Ayatollah. Yes, it was true that the Western press—which was one half of the pun about 'covering'—had been naïve if not worse about the Pahlavi regime. Yes, it was true that few Middle East 'analysts' had had any concept of the latent power of Shi'ism to create mass mobilization. Yes, it was true that almost every stage of the Iranian drama had come as a complete surprise to the media. But wasn't it also the case that Iranian society was now disappearing into a void of retrogressive piety that had levied war against Iranian Kurdistan and used medieval weaponry such as stoning and amputation against its internal critics, or even against those like unveiled women whose very existence constituted an offense?
Christopher HitchensTags: women media new-york womens-rights human-rights theocracy iran middle-east edward-said september-11-attacks khomeini women-and-religion women-in-iran women-in-islam 1980s amputation carnegie-endowment covering-islam iranian-kurdistan iranian-revolution mohammed-reza-pahlavi shiism stoning
Then all at once our personal and political quarrels were made very abruptly to converge. In the special edition of the London Review of Books published to mark the events of September 11, 2001, Edward painted a picture of an almost fascist America where Arab and Muslim citizens were being daily terrorized by pogroms, these being instigated by men like Paul Wolfowitz who had talked of 'ending' the regimes that sheltered Al Quaeda. Again, I could hardly credit that these sentences were being produced by a cultured person, let alone printed by a civilized publication.
Christopher HitchensTags: politics friendship united-states fascism arabs muslims quarrel edward-said september-11-attacks 2001 al-quaeda lrb paul-wolfowitz pogroms
September 11, 2001: Citizens of the U.S., besieged by terror’s sting,
rose up, weeping glory, as if on eagles’ wings.--from the poem Angel of Remembrance: Candles for September 11, 2001
Tags: angels iraq-war terrorism world-trade-center september-11-attacks peace-movement war-in-afghanistan-2001 angel-poetry national-history-day
At least two important conservative thinkers, Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss, were unbelievers or nonbelievers and in any case contemptuous of Christianity. I have my own differences with both of these savants, but is the Republican Party really prepared to disown such modern intellectuals as it can claim, in favor of a shallow, demagogic and above all sectarian religiosity?
Perhaps one could phrase the same question in two further ways. At the last election, the GOP succeeded in increasing its vote among American Jews by an estimated five percentage points. Does it propose to welcome these new adherents or sympathizers by yelling in the tones of that great Democrat bigmouth William Jennings Bryan? By insisting that evolution is 'only a theory'? By demanding biblical literalism and by proclaiming that the Messiah has already shown himself? If so, it will deserve the punishment for hubris that is already coming its way. (The punishment, in other words, that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson believed had struck America on Sept. 11, 2001. How can it be that such grotesque characters, calling down divine revenge on the workers in the World Trade Center, are allowed a respectful hearing, or a hearing at all, among patriotic Republicans?).
[. . . And Why I'm Most Certainly Not! -- The Wall Street Journal, Commentary Column. May 5, 2005]
Tags: politics christianity religion atheism united-states jesus evolution fundamentalism jews ayn-rand creationism pat-robertson world-trade-center democratic-party-united-states william-jennings-bryan september-11-attacks american-jews leo-strauss 2001 sectarianism 2000 republican-party-united-states 2003 biblical-literalism christian-fundamentalism christian-right jerry-falwell us-elections-2000
I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
Tags: majority minority science global-warming evolution 9-11 scientific-method darwinism intelligent-design consensus scientific-process macro-evolution macroevolution scientific-theory scientific-research id september-11-attacks scientific-discovery excitotoxins msg fluoride scientific-inquiry scientific-revolution bisphenol-a bpa dr-jack-cohen-podiatrist majority-view man-made-global-warming manmade-global-warming minority-view monosodium-glutamate
I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.
Michael CrichtonTags: majority minority science global-warming evolution 9-11 scientific-method darwinism intelligent-design consensus scientific-process macro-evolution macroevolution scientific-theory scientific-research id september-11-attacks scientific-discovery excitotoxins msg fluoride scientific-inquiry scientific-revolution bisphenol-a bpa majority-view man-made-global-warming manmade-global-warming minority-view monosodium-glutamate
As the cleansing ocean closes over bin Laden's carcass, may the earth lie lightly on the countless graves of those he sentenced without compunction to be burned alive or dismembered in the street.
Christopher HitchensTags: fascism osama-bin-laden obituary september-11-attacks mass-murder 2011 death-of-osama-bin-laden
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