Free Republic

LAS VEGAS – It was billed in jest as a Friday Night Fight in the city known for epic bouts, but a libertarian conference's headliner debate last night featuring "God is not Great" author Christopher Hitchens offered much more, reflecting the growing visibility and muscle of a new breed of atheists spreading their message with evangelical fervor. The debate was one of eight at this year's FreedomFest, which describes itself as the tradeshow for liberty and the world's largest gathering of free minds. With his trademark wicked wit, the British-born journalist Hitchens, now an American citizen, took on political writer...

Neither faith nor science can answer the most important questions. So why are believers and atheists still bickering? I went to a debate recently in New York between a rabbi and the famous polemicist Christopher Hitchens, on the question "Does God exist?" Hitchens was called on to speak first, and he won the debate with his first two sentences: "I don't know why I have to speak first. He has the burden of proof." The mostly secular ... audience heartily applauded this sally, which was based on the premise -- never challenged by the rabbi -- that science provides an...

If you want to read a serious book about the intervention in Iraq, look to Douglas Feith. When Bush's Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill defected from the Cabinet in 2002 and Ron Suskind told O'Neill's story of being surrounded by fools, Michael Kinsley observed that the president deserved all he got from the book. Anyone dumb enough to hire a fool like O'Neill in the first place ought to have known what to expect. So it goes with the ludicrous figure of Scott McClellan. I used to watch this mooncalf blunder his way through press conferences and think, Exactly where do...

The other night, I was having dinner with some friends in a fairly decent restaurant and was at the very peak of my form as a wit and raconteur. But just as, with infinite and exquisite tantalizations, I was approaching my punch line, the most incredible thing happened. A waiter appeared from nowhere, leaned right over my shoulder and into the middle of the conversation, seized my knife and fork, and started to cut up my food for me. Not content with this bizarre behavior, and without so much as a by-your-leave, he proceeded to distribute pieces of my entree...

It's been more than a month since I began warning Sen. Barack Obama that he would become answerable for his revolting choice of a family priest. But never mind that; the astonishing thing is that it's at least 11 months since he himself has known precisely the same thing. "If Barack gets past the primary," said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the New York Times in April of last year, "he might have to publicly distance himself from me. I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen." Pause just for a moment, if...

-- snip --And that assumption (widely shared but seldom if ever articulated) is that our engagement with Iraq was somehow "a war of choice" -- to use a favorite catchphrase from a few years ago -- and thus that all of its costs, ranging from the physical damage to Iraqi infrastructure to the moral damage to our warriors, could have been avoided by abstention. I don't know anybody who knows anything about the subject who believes anything so frivolous...

When Christopher Hitchens came on today's Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough began by inviting him to comment on "last night's" results. Quipped the famously hard-living Hitchens: "I'm still thinking of it as this morning's result. I hope it doesn't show." Unfortunately for Christopher, it did. See screencap. But whatever price Hitchens was paying for indulgences of the night before did nothing to blunt his acerbic wit. The quondam Englishman turned naturalized American offered acid observations about both Dem contenders. Hillary was first in his sights. He described as "slightly sinister" her listing during last night's victory speech of Florida and...

One of the great moments among many in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is when we find the young Albert Brooks manning the phones in the campaign office of the man we know (and he does not) to be a double-dyed phony. On behalf of the empty and grinning Sen. Palantine, he is complaining to a manufacturer of lapel buttons. "We asked for buttons that said, 'We Are the People.' These say, 'We Are the People.'… Oh, you don't think there's a difference? Well, we will not pay for the buttons. We will throw the buttons away." Part of the joke...

"At his desk," wrote Christopher Buckley in his email to friends, "in Stamford this morning." Well, one had somehow known that it would have to be at his desk. The late William F. Buckley Jr. was a man of incessant labor and productivity, with a slight allowance made for that saving capacity for making it appear easy. But he was driven, all right, and restless, and never allowed himself much ease on his own account. There was never a moment, after taping some session at Firing Line, where mere recourse to some local joint was in prospect. He was always...

A sour old joke from prewar Germany has two elderly Jews sitting in a Berlin park, with one of them reading a Yiddish paper and the other one scanning the pages of Der Stürmer. The latter Jew is laughing. This proves too much for the former Jew, who says: “It’s not enough you read that Nazi rag, but you find it funny?” “Look,” replies the other. “If I read your paper, what do I see? Jews deported, Jews assaulted, Jews insulted, Jewish property confiscated. But I read Der Stürmer, and there’s finally some good news. It seems that we Jews...

Mr. President, Don't Forget Iran February 19, 2008 WallStreetJournal Christopher Hitchens Dear Mr. President: A few months ago, it became possible to hear members and supporters of your administration going around Washington and saying that the question of a nuclear-armed Iran "would not be left to the next administration." As a line of the day, this had the advantage of sounding both determined and slightly mysterious, as if to commit both to everything and to nothing in particular. That slight advantage has now, if you will permit me to say so, fallen victim to diminishing returns. The absurdly politicized finding...

What is the point of a paper of record that decides the untarnished record is too much for readers? Do you ever wonder what is the greatest enemy of the free press? One might mention a few conspicuous foes, such as the state censor, the monopolistic proprietor, the advertiser who wants either favorable coverage or at least an absence of unfavorable coverage, and so forth. But the most insidious enemy is the cowardly journalist and editor who doesn't need to be told what to do, because he or she has already internalized the need to please—or at least not to...

Rowan Williams' dangerous claptrap about "plural jurisdiction." In December 1931, George Orwell got himself arrested in the slums of East London in order to find out about conditions "inside," and then he wrote an essay about the people he met while in detention. One of them was a buyer for a kosher butcher who had embezzled some of his boss's money. To Orwell's surprise, the man told him that "his employer would probably get into trouble at the synagogue for prosecuting him. It appears that the Jews have arbitration courts of their own, and a Jew is not supposed to...

A few weeks ago, I wrote slightly disobligingly about Jay Lefkowitz, the man who holds the new congressionally mandated post of U.S. special envoy for human rights in North Korea. The North Korean state does not recognize the concept of human rights and considers every one of its citizens to be the property of the ruling family, so Lefkowitz’s job is admittedly an extremely difficult one, but I tried to call attention to the way in which he (in his rather slender annual report to Congress), and the administration in general, had gone somewhat quiet on the subject of North...

Not all atheists are supercilious, of course. Many are content to live and let live, and some even grant that religion (which, in America, basically means Christianity) does some good. But atheism as an organized, evangelizing movement has been on the offensive lately. Witness the "New Atheists" such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, with their aggressive stance against God and their bestselling books attempting to debunk religion. So, assuming you are a theist, what do you say to the atheist who asks, "You don't (chuckle) actually believe in God, do you (snicker)?" The natural response would be...

Reportedly, Christopher Hitchens has just given up smoking. Apparently, this has had no effect on his curmudgeonly tone, but then again, Hitchens could hardly get more pointed in his criticisms. Today he rightly sets his sights on identity politics and exposes it as a trade for one bigotry over another: People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of "race" or "gender" alone, then by the exact same token I would...

(snip) Those of us who follow politics seriously rather than view it as a game show do not look at Hillary Clinton and simply think "first woman president." We think -- for example -- "first ex-co-president" or "first wife of a disbarred lawyer and impeached former incumbent" or "first person to use her daughter as photo-op protection during her husband's perjury rap." One might come up with other and kinder distinctions (I shall not be doing so) but the plain fact about the senator from New York is surely that she is a known quantity who has already been in...

Tell Abbas to stop educating for war THE JERUSALEM POST Jan. 9, 2008 www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1198517337771&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull In his meeting today with Mahmoud Abbas, President George Bush will likely urge the Palestinian Authority president to implement his responsibilities under the road map, such as eliminating the infrastructure of terrorism. Abbas will claim that he is doing the best he can, and respond by demanding that Israel dismantle outposts and freeze settlements. And nothing will change. This sort of pointless, circular maneuvering has, at best, continued for the past 14 years, since the signing of the Oslo principles in 1993. At worst it...

There's something pathetic and embarrassing about our obsession with Barack Obama's race ___ To put it squarely and bluntly, is it because he is or is it because he isn't? To phrase it another way, is it because of what he says or what he doesn't say? Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois is the current beneficiary of a tsunami of drool. He sometimes claims credit on behalf of all Americans regardless of race, color, creed, blah blah blah, though his recent speeches appear also to claim a victory for blackness while his supporters—most especially the white ones—sob happily that at...

One of the biggest obstacles facing what’s called the “New Atheism” is the issue of morality. Writers like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens have to convince people that morals and values are possible in a society that does not believe in God. It’s important to understand what is not in doubt: whether an individual atheist or agnostic can be a “good” person. Of course they can, just as a professing Christian can do bad things. The issue is whether the secular worldview can provide a basis for a good society. Can it motivate and inspire people to be...

Christopher Hitchens has achieved for himself quite a strong position as the American center-right's favorite Trotskyite. To a large extent this is well-earned. Hitch has stood fast in his adamant support for the War on Terror in all its aspects when plenty of fainter hearts far to rightward have fallen into equivocation, second thoughts, and whining. But there is another Hitch, one who defends his remaining hard-left convictions with a vituperation hard to match in the English-speaking media. We usually see this Hitchens when he's writing about religion. Hitch the Rabid was in full display in "Bah, Hannukah" in the December...

It seems flabbergastingly improbable that President George W. Bush learned of the National Intelligence Estimate concerning Iranian nuclear ambitions only a few days before the rest of us did, but the haplessness of his demeanor suggested that he might, in fact, have been telling the truth. After all, had the administration known for any appreciable length of time that the mullahs had hit the pause button on their program in late 2003, it would have been in a position to make a claim that is quite probably true, namely, that our overthrow of Saddam Hussein had impressed the Iranians in...

A few weeks ago, in Britain's Prospect magazine, the paper's foreign editor, Bartle Bull, published a bold essay saying that the high tide of violence in Iraq was essentially behind us and that the ebb had disclosed some interesting things. First, the Iraqi people as a whole had looked into the abyss of civil war and had drawn back from the brink. Second, the majority of Sunni Arabs had realized that their involvement with al-Qaida forces was not a patriotic "insurgency" but was instead a horrific mistake and had exposed their society to the most sadistic and degraded element in...

Jihadists aren't in Afghanistan—or Iraq—because we are there. ___ I call your attention to the front-page report in the Oct. 30 New York Times in which David Rohde, writing from the Afghan town of Gardez, tells of a new influx of especially vicious foreign fighters. Describing it as the largest such infiltration since 2001, Rohde goes on to say, "The foreign fighters are not only bolstering the ranks of the insurgency. They are more violent, uncontrollable and extreme than even their locally bred allies." They also, it seems, favor those Taliban elements who are more explicitly allied with al-Qaida, and...

The attempt by David Horowitz and his allies to launch "Islamofascism Awareness Week" on American campuses has been met with a variety of responses. One of these is a challenge to the validity of the term itself. It's quite the done thing, in liberal academic circles, to sneer at any comparison between fascist and jihadist ideology. People like Tony Judt write to me to say, in effect, that it's ahistorical and simplistic to do so. And in some media circles, another kind of reluctance applies: Alan Colmes thinks that one shouldn't use the word Islamic even to designate jihad, because...

Hitchens: Islamofascism a Valid Term At Slate, Christopher Hitchens defends the use of the term “Islamofascism� to good effect.Hitchens first takes on the faux-intellectuals who refuse to make the obvious connection between modern, radical Islam and manner of life that imposes on those unlucky enough to fall under its sway: It’s quite the done thing, in liberal academic circles, to sneer at any comparison between fascist and jihadist ideology. People like Tony Judt write to me to say, in effect, that it’s ahistorical and simplistic to do so. And in some media circles, another kind of reluctance applies: Alan Colmes...

A Death in the Family The Death of a soldier, Second Lieutenant Mark Daily, who enlisted after reading pro-war articles written by Christopher Hitchens, and the impact it had on Hitchens. - article can't be posted on FR, but it's worth the read - http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/11/hitchens200711?currentPage=1

Why men like Larry Craig continue to court danger in public places

We're fighting at least three of them. When people say that they want to end the war in Iraq, I always want to ask them which war they mean. There are currently at least three wars, along with several subconflicts, being fought on Iraqi soil. The first, tragically, is the battle for mastery between Sunni and Shiite. The second is the campaign to isolate and defeat al-Qaida in Mesopotamia. The third is the struggle of Iraq's Kurdish minority to defend and consolidate its regional government in the north.

How do I dislike President George Bush? Let me count the ways. Most of them have to do with his contented assumption that 'faith' is, in and of itself, a virtue. This self-satisfied mentality helps explain almost everything, from the smug expression on his face to the way in which, as governor of Texas, he signed all those death warrants without losing a second's composure. SNIP Then, addressing the convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars last week, the President came thundering down the pike to announce that a defeat in Iraq would be - guess what? - another Vietnam....

During the greater part of last week, Slate's sister site On Faith (it is jointly produced by Newsweek and washingtonpost.com, both owned by the Washington Post Co., which also owns Slate) gave itself over to a discussion about the religion of Islam. As usual in such cases, the search for "moderate" versions of this faith was under way before the true argument had even begun. If I were a Muslim myself, I think that this search would be the most "offensive" part of the business. Why must I prove that my deepest belief is compatible with moderation? Unless I am...

During the greater part of last week, Slate's sister site On Faith (it is jointly produced by Newsweek and washingtonpost.com, both owned by the Washington Post Co., which also owns Slate) gave itself over to a discussion about the religion of Islam. As usual in such cases, the search for "moderate" versions of this faith was under way before the true argument had even begun. If I were a Muslim myself, I think that this search would be the most "offensive" part of the business. Why must I prove that my deepest belief is compatible with moderation? Unless I am...

In July 1941, a political prisoner escaped from Auschwitz. As a punishment, ten others were chosen by the Nazis to be killed in a starvation bunker. One of these men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, began lamenting what his death would mean for his wife and children. Upon hearing these cries, another prisoner, a Franciscan friar named Maksymilian Kolbe—who had run afoul of the Nazis after sheltering refugees, including hundreds of Jews, at his friary—volunteered to take Gajowniczek’s place and was sent to the starvation bunker in his stead. In the bunker, Kolbe became the leader of those awaiting death, whom he was...

Why on earth do people keep saying, "There but for the grace of God …"? If matters had been very slightly different over the past weekend, the streets of London and the airport check-in area in Glasgow, Scotland, would have been strewn with charred body parts. And this would have been, according to the would-be perpetrators, because of the grace of God. Whatever our own private theology or theodicy, we might at least agree to take this vile belief seriously. Instead, almost every other conceivable explanation was canvassed. The June 30 New York Times report managed to quote three people,...

Best-selling atheist authors are riding a wave of ignorance and illiteracy. The latest offering, God Is Not Great, comes from a bon vivant with a British accent, an attribute that lends sophistication in the eyes of the pseudo-intellectuals whose vision of the Christian is the Bible-thumping backwoodsman. But Christians on the far right and on the far left, fundamentalists, or literalists of both stripes, have given Christopher Hitchens much to work with. For example, Memorial Day saw the opening of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where Genesis comes alive with Adam and Eve alongside animatronic dinosaurs from 6,000 years ago....

Maybe this afternoon's oppressive heat and humidity on the Hardball Plaza in DC was getting to Chris Matthews. I'm not sure how else to explain his complaint, to the effect that it is wrong of the Roman Catholic Church to apply its rules to politicians as it does to other adherents.His remark came in the course of a debate on religion on this afternoon's edition of "Hardball" between Christopher Hitchens, author of the atheist polemic "God Is Not Great", and the Reverend Al Sharpton. HARDBALL HOST CHRIS MATTHEWS: Today you have the Roman Catholic church through its bishops challenging the...

If Scooter Libby goes to jail, it will be because he made a telephone call to Tim Russert and because Tim Russert has a different recollection of the conversation. Can this really be the case? And why is such a nugatory issue a legal matter in the first place? Before savoring the full absurdity of the thing, please purge your mind of any preconceptions or confusions. Mr. Libby was not charged with breaking the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Nobody was ever charged with breaking that law, designed to shield the names of covert agents. Indeed, the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, determined...

Some of you may know that I have a brother, Christopher, who disagrees with me about almost everything. Some of those who read his books and articles also know that I exist, though they often dislike me. But in general we inhabit separate worlds – in more ways than one. He is of the Left, lives in the United States and recently became an American citizen. I am of the Right and, after some years in Russia and America, live in the heart of England. Occasionally we clash in public. Family differences: Christopher Hitchens and Peter have disagreed about politics...

Atheist Christopher Hitchens, author of the new book, "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," told CNN's Anderson Cooper last night he wishes there were a Hell just for Jerry Falwell. Asked if he thought Falwell were in heaven, Hitches, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, replied: "No. And I think it's a pity there isn't a hell for him to go to." In answer to the question of what stirred such vitriol in his heart, Hitches said: "The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing, that you can get away with the most extraordinary...

The Marxist views of Christopher Hitchens have long been evident. His simple, logical support for a strong response to 9/11 had earned him as bestowed by his fellow leftists the label "necon" which he steadfastly refutes. In reality Christopher Hitchens is an angry man whose anger - while many times is justifiable - is also misplaced. The promotional tour he has embarked upon in the marketing of his newest book Why God Is Not Great demonstrates it. When asked why he begrudged people the right to seek comfort in the thought of the Almighty he responded: "Well, I say in...

It's difficult to see why George Tenet would be so incautious as to write his own self-justifying apologia, let alone give it the portentous title At the Center of the Storm. There is already a perfectly good pro-Tenet book written by a man who knows how to employ the overworked term storm. Bob Woodward's 2002 effort, Bush at War, was, in many of its aspects, almost dictated by George Tenet. How do we know this? Well, Tenet is described on the opening page as "a hefty, outgoing son of Greek immigrants," which means that he talked to Woodward on background....

Christopher Hitchens is an essayist and pundit who loves a good fight and is never afraid to pick on someone his own size; but this time he's outdone himself. He's picked on God. The title of his new book, "God Is Not Great," is an intentionally inflammatory twist on "Allah Akbar." Indeed, he lambasts Islam as "not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms" from Judaism and Christianity. But Hitchens is an equal opportunity atheist. His reviles all religions and scorns anyone foolish enough to accept any idea on faith. A spate of atheist screeds has...

fighting wordsMesopotamia Split?Considering Peter Galbraith's proposal for Iraq.By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, March 26, 2007, at 11:18 AM ET Wised-up opinion in Washington holds that the Republicans are being unsmart in opposing the Democratic attempt to impose a timeline on American withdrawal from Iraq. By resisting this demand, it is argued, the GOP insists on assuming the whole responsibility for the war, when it could have said to the opposition: All right, have it your own way; we will adopt your timetable and be ready to blame you if it goes wrong. But by opposing the proposal, the president's supporters...

Four years after the first coalition soldiers crossed the Iraqi border, one can attract pitying looks (at best) if one does not take the view that the whole engagement could have been and should have been avoided. Those who were opposed to the operation from the beginning now claim vindication, and many of those who supported it say that if they had known then what they know now, they would have spoken or voted differently. What exactly does it mean to take the latter position? At what point, in other words, ought the putative supporter to have stepped off the...

Of all of the utterly foolish positions taken by some people (banning DDT, banning nuclear power, banning domestic oil drilling, stopping the Tellico Dam to save the snail darter, etc.), perhaps the most foolish is exemplified by the cry, “no blood for oil”. The economy of the United States and of the entire developed and developing world depends entirely on a steady and growing supply of reasonably-priced oil. Without oil, we would fall into a depression that would be even worse than the Great Depression of the 1930’s, and many of us would lose our jobs and our homes. We...

Facing the Islamist Menace - Christopher Hitchens Mark Steyn’s new book is a welcome wake-up call. In the prologue to his new book, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, Mark Steyn sarcastically alludes to two people whom, in different ways, I know well. The first is novelist Martin Amis, ridiculed by Steyn for worrying about environmental apocalypse when the threat to civilization is obviously Islamism; the second is Jack Straw, formerly Tony Blair’s foreign secretary, mocked for the soft and conciliatory line he took over the affair of the Danish cartoons. The dazzling fiction writer...

"See how the Christians love each other!" This used to be the secular response to the fratricide between Catholics and Protestants, let alone the schisms within the Catholic Church and the vicious quarrels between different schools of Calvinism. (When the Baptists of Danbury, Conn., wrote to Thomas Jefferson, asking for his assurance against persecution and generating his famous "wall of separation" response, it was the Congregationalists of Connecticut of whose intolerance they were apprehensive.) Within Islam, these lines of division are many times more acute. Ahmadi Muslims are considered impossibly heretical by most other followers of the Prophet, and Ismaili...

Replying to Fareed Zakaria's observation in Newsweek, about Iraq and the Iraqis—that "We did not give them a republic. We gave them a civil war."—Charles Krauthammer, in our common sister paper the Washington Post, expressed a fine contempt: Did Britain "give" India the Hindu-Muslim war of 1947-48 that killed a million souls and ethnically cleansed 12 million more? The Jewish-Arab wars in Palestine? Alas, the answer to the above sarcastic questions is "yes." (In the first instance by staying several decades too long and then compounding the mistake by leaving much too fast—even unilaterally advancing the date of independence so...

A review of The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina, by Frank Rich A small but significant sentence occurs in one of the early chapters of this book: "Like the 'lovely war' the British foresaw in the early going of World War I, the illusion of a painless engagement in Iraq was short-lived." Now, it is true that some British jingoists believed that the combat begun on August 4, 1914, would be "all over by Christmas," and that this early euphoria forms a small part of the tragic sense with which that...

Newly elected Representative Keith Ellison is being watched closely, not for his Muslim religion, but for the combination of his religion with activities that might indicate a certain sympathy for various forms of jihad, from imposing the Sharia to terrorism. When enough Canadian-Muslims got themselves into positions of leadership to try to push through the adoption of Sharia law, a province in Canada narrowly escaped coming under its rule. Sharia law, of course, is Muslim religious law, with harsh justice that is administered by imams and not by our civil courts.