Hitchens: Recent writers on Islam need to be more stringent in their criticism

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/04/hitchens.htm ^ | April 2003 | Christopher Hitchens

[risk]

Hitchens tears into Islam and its apologists, who writing in the name of criticism, don't go nearly far enough.

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[Cacique]

ping

[risk]

Hitchens ping. I haven't finished reading this whole thing yet, but it has some biting comments. Here he quotes V.S. Naipaul:

There probably has been no imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs. The Gauls, after five hundred years of Roman rule, could recover their old gods and reverences; those beliefs hadn't died; they lay just below the Roman surface. But Islam seeks as an article of the faith to erase the past; the believers in the end honor Arabia alone; they have nothing to return to.

Hitchens complains, "But not only does Naipaul fail to give an account of the multifaceted nature of the Muslim world; his books contain no sense of the impending menace that was, all this time, readying and gathering itself for September 11. He didn't visit Saudi Arabia or the Gulf states either. And he skipped Jerusalem."

[philetus]

Ping&#8212

[aruanan]

...John le Carré, who declared that Rushdie was the author of his own victimhood. He had offended the adherents of a great religion that was a voice of the poor and downtrodden.

John le Carré is a dope if he believes a. that Islam is a "great religion" or b. that it is a voice of the poor and downtrodden.

[risk]

Yes, le Carre was highly opposed to the Iraq war and trotted out all number of quagmire arguments. If you think back on his writing about the Cold War, he seemed to be thrilled that it would go on indefinitely. I think it's partly due to reading "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" that I didn't have faith that we could tear down the Iron Curtain in my own lifetime.

Hitchens is a razor-sharp wit, and I'm glad he's on our side against Islamic theofascism.

[BunnySlippers]

We need a Hitchens ping list. :)

[risk]

I believe keri is taking on that chore. But we trade off depending on who spots the writings first. I don't have a list of people that I've saved yet; can ping lists be managed here in some software-like way?

[BunnySlippers]

I would love to be on the list. I have never compiled a list ... but I suspect it is rather low tech.

[aruanan]

Yes, le Carre was highly opposed to the Iraq war and trotted out all number of quagmire arguments. If you think back on his writing about the Cold War, he seemed to be thrilled that it would go on indefinitely. I think it's partly due to reading "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" that I didn't have faith that we could tear down the Iron Curtain in my own lifetime.

I remember his arguments. I enjoyed his books a lot, but I was hopeful that the USSR would come crashing down. From his point of view, though, the Cold War and the USSR had to continue in order to continue to give his life the meaning he depended on, both as an ex-spy and as a novelist. I'm sure that upon the fall of the Berlin Wall, he felt not unlike buggy whip manufacturers did when they realized that automobiles were not a fad but the end of life as they knew it. A successful American attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan turned the Soviet Afghanistan quagmire on its head. A successful American attack on Saddam Hussein in Iraq turned the American quagmire in Vietnam on its head and established a slope of success upon which one can now imagine other things like North Korea having to readjust itself to a non-Carter U.S., a different quantity than it had considered the U.S. to be, like Iran and Syria seeing Afghanistan and Iraq and realizing that, oh, crap, things are fundamentally different from anything they'd ever known, like Castro and Chavez and Lula considering--well, no. I think these three are part of a last shudder of deluded communism, incapable of seeing that they're anachronisms, the cooling ejaculates of an already dead monster.

[risk]

The irony: the current world is fraught with intrigue and inter-agency mystery, all of which le Carre could have adopted as the next "never ending global combat."

As with the Cold War, a critical mass of Americans are determined to end Islamic extremism, and the sooner the better. There is a fire burning in us, hotter than a billion industrial lasers, fashioned by the 444 days of our Iranian hostage crisis, crafted by a thousand and one cuts including the 241 Marines being killed in Lebonon, our embassies being bombed in Africa, and the Cole; our patience evaporated when bin Laden sparked us into ignition on 9/11. Heaven help them now.

Anyone who miscalculates our wrath had best think again.

[The Red Zone]

But it is a religion of peace.

[risk]

And conquest.

[tictoc]

Odd how the "em dash" shows up fine in my browser when I read the article on the Atlantic website, but comes out as ampersand etc. code on FreeRepublic.

Maybe some HTML genius can explain this.

[FreedomPoster]

>>can ping lists be managed here in some software-like way

It's pretty low-tech, but I think most just keep *.txt files in Notepad. It's simple, and it does work.

One of the first things I do to a new Windows machine is put a shortcut to Notepad in the Taskbar Quick Launch area. And get rid of the Media Player link that MS puts there.

[Allan]

"(Islam's) founder is more of a historical figure than a mythical one"

Not true.

[shhrubbery!]

I might add that they are much keener on daily ablutions than many of their happy-go-lucky Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Celtic hosts. (The injunction to wash is actually in the stipulations of Islam ...)

That is rich, coming from the famously untidy Hitchens.

[Allan]

One would rather be a Jew or a Christian in Pakistan
than a member of the heretic Ahmadi sect
which is assiduously persecuted.

Pakistan's Nobel Prize winning Physicist
Abdus Salam
was an Ahmadi.

[Allan]

Hitchen's claims he bathes every day.