Spencer interviewed about Oriana Fallaci

multiculuralism is dying a slow death, lets pickup the pace.

Spencer is awesome in a debate. So far, no interviewer or Islamic apologist has been able to find weakness in his stated arguments.

True freedom of religion is the freedom to assent AND the freedom to dissent.

multiculuralism is dying a slow death, lets pickup the pace.

Posted by: Ruebacca

If we don't, it may take western civilization with it.

Well done, Robert. Bravo!

"Cathy Young (also a journalist) states “that book The Rage and the Pride makes hardly any distinction between radical Islamic terrorists and Somali street vendors who supposedly urinate on the corners of Italy’s great cities”. What do you think of this statement?"
-- from the interviewer above

A bit more comment on Cathy Young:

Fitzgerald: Last thoughts on Cathy Young

Don't Infidels do what Believers do, asks Cathy Young? Don't Infidels urinate and micturate in public sometimes, just as Believers do? And Robert answers, as I did before, that there is a difference between those who deliberately, even though there are alternatives, defecate on the floors in churches that they squat in, where they have been given refuge, or urinate -- as they have, on the walls of the Battistero in Florence, which is what an enraged Oriana Fallaci, as she mentioned in The Rage and the Pride.

Young appears not to know very much about the behavior of Muslims in Europe, and especially in Italy, where every corner of every Umbrian or Tuscan village, and in every city, appears to be the site of a work of Western art, differing only in what layer of the palimpsest -- Etruscan here (in Perugia or Viterbo or other of the Twelve Cities), Greek there (in Magna Graecia), Roman all over, and then finally Christian -- the work of Western man, sculpting and painting and drawing the human form.

She does the same with this business of Muslims simply "snapping." [How often is it merely a matter of "snapping"?] Here is how she puts it:

Because, as we all know, non-Muslims never snap and go on shooting sprees at work or at school. But, of course, when Muslims do it, it's different.
Well, in fact it is different. And let us explain why. When non-Muslims, Infidels, "snap," they have any number of people or things to blame, and they may, or may not, seek to wreak revenge, to "even the score," with all kinds of people.

But Muslims have been provided the mental grid of Islam, and on that grid the world is laid, uncompromisingly divided between Believer and Infidel, between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. And if a Muslim "snaps," or is simply depressed, then he has the Infidel to blame, to find fault with. For the Nazis, it was Treitschke's "Die Juden sind unser Ungluck." For Muslims, it is, in a less hideously violent key, the Infidels who are "unser Ungluck." Cathy Young, knowing almost nothing of Islam, but presumably having plausible, friendly, affable, possibly ignorant-of-Islam Muslim friends (raised in the United States, unfamiliar with the texts, unfamiliar with what effect those texts ordinarily have on people who take them seriously and are raised in Muslim societies where nothing else gets through), prefers not to see this.

The problem is that in any society, millions and millions of people at one time or another fall into depressions. In the United States, more than 15 million people at any one time are said to be severely depressed. When this happens to Infidels, they can blame all sorts of things: their parents, their children, their siblings, Amerika, The System, the Republicans, the Democrats, immigration, affirmative action, lack of affirmative action, crooked financial analysts, Wall Street speculators, Chinese and Indian competition, Fate, the stars in their alignment, their cholesterol level, their serotonin level -- even, at times, themselves.

What happens when a Muslim finds himself in disarray? You are Muhammad Atta, and things are not working out in Hamburg, where you set off to study urban planning, and you are not the great success you were supposed to be, and the Western world is so baffling, so confusing. You are Albanna, dancing the night away in cocaine-soaked clubs of West Hollywood, and you are piling failure upon failure, for you failed to establish a practice as a lawyer in Jordan, and you need to find a solution more permanent and steady than that offered by that cocaine, those girls, that music by Nine Inch Nails.

When "Mike" Hawash, an Intel engineer with an American wife and three American children, earning $360,000 a year and the respect of his colleagues, turned to Islam, and more Islam, and then to deed over his house to his wife, and to make plans to fight the Americans in Afghanistan, after the Al Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington, was he a "nut case"? Or was he someone who, in his recent return to Islam, only reflecting his need for Islam and more Islam as a stay against confusion and depression? And if the Answer for Muslims, even those who are not especially observant, those who seem to be thoroughly Westernized and to have been the recipients of the best the West has to offer, is Islam and more Islam, then the Western world, the world of Infidels, owes it to itself to protect its own legacy, and to keep out those who, in moments of the kind of doubt or depression that come on all of us, will always and everywhere turn, or re-turn, to Islam.

And who are these Muslims who, in Cathy Young's phrase, simply "snap"? Did "Mike" Hawash "snap"? Or did he over a very long time become more religious, and then systematically deed over his house to his wife, write his will, and make other plans before going off, hoping to kill Americans in Afghanistan? Did Richard Reid simply "snap"? Did Jose Padilla? Did the people in Lackawanna, or in Texas, or in Oregon, or in Virginia, "snap" in their plotting? How many of the attacks planned, or then carried out, are those of Muslims who simply "snapped"? Did Taheri-azar, the student who had been raised in the United States by parents who had fled Iran, and who by all accounts were largely indifferent to Islam? Taheri-azar in his mental disarray and ill-digested bits of philosophizing (in his pages of handwritten explanation explaining his motivation, in between his perfectly doctrinaire citing of Islamic tenets and Qur'anic passages, he also manages to repeat, as if to show he was a deep thinker, a single phrase from Descartes, no doubt picked up in some Intro to Western Phil. course -- "clear and distinct ideas.") Did he "snap"? No. He planned for quite a while.

But let us posit that the single case Cathy Young describes as unfair to mention -- that of the man who killed fellow workers because they teased him about being a Muslim. Does this tell us anything? How many people are teased about this or that, and how many of them "snap" and then try to kill those teasing them? And is it not important to note that the target of Muslim blame for all possible setbacks, of the kind we all experience, is always and everywhere the Infidel?

This is one point that Cathy Young fails to grasp. There are so many others.

[Posted by Hugh at July 8, 2006]

Robert comments briefly on Christopher Hitchens, but there was no space or place for a link, in the interview above, for Robert's more extensive comment on the "brave" "speaking-truth-to-power" man, the new Orwell, the one unafraid to stick with his enthusiasm for the war in Iraq and, at the same time, to stick with his fondness for Edward Said and for the views that Said helped inculcate in Hitchens about Israel, whose plight as the victim of a Lesser Jihad, and a permanent siege, Hitchens refuses to understand. may have forgotten his own more extensive comment on Christopher Hitchens.

So here is that piece by Robert, titled "Hitchens Can't Be This Stupid":

"I wrote my book Religion of Peace? to try to make a case for Western civilization as worth defending. The fundamentally most misunderstood and overlooked aspect of the defense against the global jihad is the challenge that the jihadists make to Western values, which are in large part Judeo-Christian. This is combined with a historical critique which relentlessly portrays the West as the aggressors against the rest of the world, and as uniquely responsible for its evils -- thus sapping our will to defend something as rotten as Western civilization. This myopia about slavery is just part of this problem.

From "Bad Faith Bestseller," Jeremy Lott's review of Christopher Hitchens' book god is Not Great in The American Spectator:

It's not a rhetorical question. Some assumption of good faith by the author is an important part of how critics operate, but Hitchens simply cannot be this stupid.
Exhibit A: In his discussion of slavery, Hitchens focuses entirely on the American experience so that he can damn Christianity for the peculiar institution. He overlooks the role of the Catholic Church in abolishing slavery in Europe and gives scant attention to the role of the Muslim slave trade in starting it up again in the new world, and he manages to gloss over the fact that slavery predates organized religion.

One of the most common criticisms of Christianity centers on its posture toward slavery. Taken at face value, the Bible condones the practice. The Apostle Paul says flatly: “Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ” (Ephesians 6:5). In his time, he wasn’t saying anything remotely controversial (and of course has been criticized for apparently accepting the cultural status quo instead of challenging it). No culture on earth, Christian or otherwise, ever questioned the morality of slavery until relatively recent times.

But Hitchens reflects the popular view, which is that the onus for slavery is squarely on the West. When Britain commemorated the two hundredth anniversary of its abolition of the slave trade in March 2007, Prime Minister Tony Blair called it “an opportunity for the United Kingdom to express our deep sorrow and regret for our nation’s role in the slave trade and for the unbearable suffering, individually and collectively, it caused.”

Britain’s role in the slave trade? Some Americans might be surprised to learn that the British, or anyone besides American southerners, ever owned slaves, since after coming through American schools as they stand today many people no doubt have the impression that slavery was invented in Charleston and Mobile. “The American education system,” observes Mark Steyn, “teaches it as such -- as a kind of wicked perversion the Atlantic settlers had conjured out of their own ambition.”

However, as Steyn details, it was a cross-cultural fact of life for centuries: “In reality, it was more like the common cold -- a fact of life. The institution predates the word’s etymology, from the Slavs brought from eastern Europe to the glittering metropolis of Rome. It predates by some millennia the earliest laws, such as the Code of Hammurabi in Mesopotamia. The first legally recognized slave in the American colonies was owned by a black man who had himself arrived as an indentured servant. The first slave owners on the North American continent were hunter-gatherers. As Metaxas puts it, ‘Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for 5,000 years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable.’”

Likewise unacknowledged has been the role that Christian principles played in the abolition of slavery in the West, which was an enterprise unprecedented in the annals of human history. The roots of abolitionism can be traced to the Church’s practice of baptizing slaves and treating them as human beings equal in dignity to all others. St. Isidore of Seville (560-636) declared that “God has made no difference between the soul of the slave and that of the freedman.” His statement was rooted in what St. Paul told the slaveowner Onesimus about his runaway slave Philemon: “Perhaps this was why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, as a beloved brother” (Philemon 15-16).

Once it was recognized that the slave had a soul just as did the master, it could not forever be justified that he be another person’s chattel. In the year 649, Clovis II, king of the Franks, married a slave – who later began a campaign to halt the traffic in slaves. The Catholic Church now honors her as St. Bathilda. Charlemagne and others later also opposed the practice in Christian Europe. According to historian Rodney Stark, “slavery ended in medieval Europe only because the church extended its sacraments to all slaves and then managed to impose a ban on the enslavement of Christians (and of Jews). Within the context of medieval Europe, that prohibition was effectively a rule of universal abolition.” And in the New World, when the Spanish conquistadors were energetically enslaving South American Indians, and importing black Africans as slaves as well, their chief opponent was a Catholic missionary and bishop, Bartolome de las Casas (1474-1566), who was instrumental in compelling the Spanish crown to enact a law in 1542 prohibiting the enslavement of the Indians.

Still, there was no consensus about slavery within Christendom. Slavery persisted, and was at times even given ecclesiastical sanction. In the antebellum United States, there was no shortage of Southerners who used Scripture to support the morality of slavery. Typical of such expositions was one delivered in 1822 by the Rev. Dr. Richard Furman, President of the South Carolina Baptist State Convention, to South Carolina Governor John Lyde Wilson. Although slavery was not in 1822 the nation-rending controversy it would become in the succeeding decades, Furman was already feeling pressure from the arguments against slavery that abolitionists were advancing on Christian principles. He complained that “certain writers on politics, morals and religion, and some of them highly respectable, have advanced positions, and inculcated sentiments, very unfriendly to the principle and practice of holding slaves,” and had even attributed those positions “to the Holy Scriptures, and to the genius of Christianity.” On the contrary, Furman affirmed that “the right of holding slaves is clearly established by the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example. In the Old Testament, the Israelites were directed to purchase their bond-men and bond-maids of the Heathen nations; except they were of the Canaanites, for these were to be destroyed. And it is declared, that the persons purchased were to be their ‘bond-men forever;’ and an ‘inheritance for them and their children.’”

Furman goes on to assert that “had the holding of slaves been a moral evil, it cannot be supposed, that the inspired Apostles, who feared not the faces of men, and were ready to lay down their lives in the cause of their God, would have tolerated it, for a moment, in the Christian Church.” And moreover, “in proving this subject justifiable by Scriptural authority, its morality is also proved; for the Divine Law never sanctions immoral actions.”

Such arguments held no water for the abolitionists, who read from the same Bible as did the slaveholders. The abolitionist movement was predicated upon the Christian principle of the dignity of all the redeemed in Christ. The pioneering English abolitionists Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846) and William Wilberforce (1759-1833) were both motivated to work for an end to slavery by their deep Christian faith; so was the American anti-slavery crusader William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), who remarked in a speech in Charleston, South Carolina on the day Abraham Lincoln was shot: “Abolitionism, what is it? Liberty. What is liberty? Abolitionism. What are they both? Politically, one is the Declaration of Independence; religiously, the other is the Golden Rule of our Savior.”

Abraham Lincoln was himself much preoccupied with Genesis 3:19, “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.” In May 1864 he wrote to a delegation of Baptists, “To read in the Bible, as the word of God himself, that ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,’ and to preach there-from that, ‘In the sweat of other mans faces shalt thou eat bread,’ to my mind can scarcely be reconciled with honest sincerity.” Later that same year he replied to the wife of a Confederate prisoner who had appealed to him for the release of her husband: “You say your husband is a religious man; tell him when you meet him, that I say I am not much of a judge of religion, but that, in my opinion, the religion that sets men to rebel and fight against their government, because, as they think, that government does not sufficiently help some men to eat their bread on the sweat of other men’s faces, is not the sort of religion upon which people can get to heaven!” He gave this theme its most lapidary formulation in his Second Inaugural Address, saying of the opposing sides in the Civil War:

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.
This is, of course, the view that has prevailed in the Christian world: that it is indeed “strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” And this was the view that was instrumental in the global abolition of slavery.

In the Islamic world, however, the situation is very different. Muhammad owned slaves, and like the Bible, the Qur’an takes the existence of slavery for granted, even as it enjoins the freeing of slaves under certain circumstances, such as the breaking of an oath: “Allah will not call you to account for what is futile in your oaths, but He will call you to account for your deliberate oaths: for expiation, feed ten indigent persons, on a scale of the average for the food of your families; or clothe them; or give a slave his freedom” (5:89). Jihad theorist Sayyid Qutb adduces this as evidence that in Islam “there is no difference between a prince and a pauper, a seigneur and a slave.” Nevertheless, while the freeing of a slave or two here and there is encouraged, the institution itself is never questioned. The Qur’an even gives a man permission to have sexual relations with his slave girls as well as with his wives: “The believers must (eventually) win through, those who humble themselves in their prayers; who avoid vain talk; who are active in deeds of charity; who abstain from sex, except with those joined to them in the marriage bond, or (the captives) whom their right hands possess, for (in their case) they are free from blame…” (23:1-6). A Muslim is not to have sexual relations with a woman who is married to someone else – except a slave girl: “And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess. It is a decree of Allah for you” (4:24).

Why should such passages be any more troubling to anyone than passages in the Bible such as Exodus 21:7-11, which gives regulations for selling one’s daughter as a slave? Because in Islam there is no equivalent of the Golden Rule, as articulated by Jesus: “So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets” (Matthew 7:12). The closest Islamic tradition comes to this is one hadith in which Muhammad says, “None of you will have faith till he likes for his (Muslim) brother what he likes for himself.” The parenthetical “Muslim” in that sentence was added by the Saudi translator, and does not appear in the original Arabic; however, “brother” is generally not used in Islamic tradition to refer to anyone but fellow Muslims. Also mitigating against a universal interpretation of this maxim is the sharp distinction between believers and unbelievers that runs through all of Islam. The Qur’an says that the followers of Muhammad are “ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another” (48:29), and that the unbelievers are the “worst of created beings” (98:6). One may exercise the Golden Rule in relation to a fellow Muslim, but according to the worldview presented by such verses and others like them, the same courtesy is not properly to be extended to unbelievers.

That is one principal reason why the primary source of slaves in the Islamic world has been non-Muslims, whether Jews, Christians, Hindus or pagans. Most slaves in Islam were non-Muslims who had been captured during jihad warfare. The pioneering scholar of the treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic societies, Bat Ye’or, explains the system that developed out of jihad conquest:

The jihad slave system included contingents of both sexes delivered annually in conformity with the treaties of submission by sovereigns who were tributaries of the caliph. When Amr conquered Tripoli (Libya) in 643, he forced the Jewish and Christian Berbers to give their wives and children as slaves to the Arab army as part of their jizya [tax on non-Muslims]. From 652 until its conquest in 1276, Nubia was forced to send an annual contingent of slaves to Cairo. Treaties concluded with the towns of Transoxiana, Sijistan, Armenia, and Fezzan (Maghreb) under the Umayyads and Abbasids stipulated an annual dispatch of slaves from both sexes. However, the main sources for the supply of slaves remained the regular raids on villages within the dar-al-harb [House of War, i.e., non-Islamic regions] and the military expeditions which swept more deeply into the infidel lands, emptying towns and provinces of their inhabitants.
Historian Speros Vryonis observes that “since the beginning of the Arab razzias [raids] into the land of Rum [the Byzantine Empire], human booty had come to constitute a very important portion of the spoils.” The Turks, as they steadily conquered more and more of Anatolia, reduced many of the Greeks and other non-Muslims there to slave status: “They enslaved men, women, and children from all major urban centers and from the countryside where the populations were defenseless.” The Indian historian K. S. Lal states that wherever jihadists conquered a territory, “there developed a system of slavery peculiar to the clime, terrain and populace of the place.” When Muslim armies invaded India, “its people began to be enslaved in droves to be sold in foreign lands or employed in various capacities on menial and not-so-menial jobs within the country.”
Slaves faced pressure to convert to Islam. Patricia Crone, in an analysis of Islamic political theories, notes that after a jihad battle was concluded, “male captives might be killed or enslaved…Dispersed in Muslim households, slaves almost always converted, encouraged or pressurized by their masters, driven by a need to bond with others, or slowly, becoming accustomed to seeing things through Muslim eyes even if they tried to resist.” Thomas Pellow, an Englishman who was enslaved in Morocco for twenty-three years after being captured as a cabin boy on a small English vessel in 1716, was tortured until he accepted Islam. For weeks he was beaten and starved, and finally gave in after his torturer resorted to “burning my flesh off my bones by fire, which the tyrant did, by frequent repetitions, after a most cruel manner.”

Slavery was taken for granted throughout Islamic history, as it was, of course, in the West as well up until relatively recent times. Yet while the European and American slave trade get lavish attention from historians (as well as from mau-mauing reparations advocates and their marks, guilt-ridden contemporary politicians), the Islamic slave trade actually lasted longer and brought suffering to a larger number of people. It is exceedingly ironic that Islam has been presented to American blacks as the egalitarian alternative to the “white man’s slave religion” of Christianity, since Islamic slavery operated on a larger scale than did the Western slave trade, and lasted longer. While historians estimate that the transatlantic slave trade, which operated between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, involved around 10.5 million people, the Islamic slave trade in the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean areas began in the seventh century and lasted into the nineteenth, and involved 17 million people.

Also, the pressure to end it moved from Christendom into Islam, not the other way around. There was no Muslim Clarkson, Wilberforce or Garrison. In fact, when the British government in the nineteenth century adopted the view of Wilberforce and the other abolitionists as its own and thereupon began to put pressure on pro-slavery regimes, the Sultan of Morocco was incredulous precisely because of the audacity of the innovation that the British were proposing: “The traffic in slaves,” he noted, “is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam...up to this day.” He said that he was “not aware of its being prohibited by the laws of any sect” and that the very idea that anyone would question its morality was absurd: “no one need ask this question, the same being manifest to both high and low and requires no more demonstration than the light of day.”

However, it was not the unanimity of human practice, but the plain words of the Qur’an and Muhammad that were decisive in stifling abolitionist movements within the Islamic world. Slavery was abolished under Western pressure; the Arab Muslim slave trade in Africa was ended by the force of British arms in the nineteenth century.

There is evidence that slavery still continues beneath the surface in some majority-Muslim countries as well -- notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962, Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970, and Niger, which didn’t abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored, and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred, often raped, and generally treated like animals.

Some of the evidence that Islamic slavery still goes on consists of a spate of slavery cases involving Muslims in the United States. A Saudi named Homaidan Al-Turki was sentenced in September 2006 to 27 years to life in prison, for keeping a woman as a slave in his home in Colorado. For his part, Al-Turki claimed that he was a victim of anti-Muslim bias. He told the judge: “Your honor, I am not here to apologize, for I cannot apologize for things I did not do and for crimes I did not commit. The state has criminalized these basic Muslim behaviors. Attacking traditional Muslim behaviors was the focal point of the prosecution.” The following month, an Egyptian couple living in Southern California received a fine and prison terms, to be followed by deportation, after pleading guilty to holding a ten-year-old girl as a slave. And in January 2007, an attaché of the Kuwaiti embassy in Washington and his wife were charged with keeping three Christian domestic workers from India in slave-like conditions in al-Saleh’s Virginia home. One of the women remarked: “I believed that I had no choice but to continue working for them even though they beat me and treated me worse than a slave.”

Slavery is still practiced openly today in two Muslim countries, Sudan and Mauritania. In line with historical practice, Muslim slavers in the Sudan primarily enslave non-Muslims, and chiefly Christians. According to the Coalition Against Slavery in Mauritania and Sudan (CASMAS), a human rights and abolitionist movement founded in 1995, “The current Khartoum government wants to bring the non-Muslim Black South in line with Sharia law, laid down and interpreted by conservative Muslim clergy. The Black animist and Christian South remembers many years of slave raids by Arabs from the north and east and resists Muslim religious rule and the perceived economic, cultural, and religious expansion behind it.”

One modern-day Sudanese Christian slave, James Pareng Alier, was kidnapped and enslaved when he was twelve years old. Religion was a major element of his ordeal: “I was forced to learn the Koran and re-baptised Ahmed. They told me that Christianity was a bad religion. After a time we were given military training and they told us we would be sent to fight.” Alier has no idea of his family’s whereabouts. The BBC reported in March 2007 that slave raids “were a common feature of Sudan’s 21-year north-south war, which ended in 2005….According to a study by the Kenya-based Rift Valley Institute, some 11,000 young boys and girls were seized and taken across the internal border -- many to the states of South Darfur and West Kordofan….Most were forcibly converted to Islam, given Muslim names and told not to speak their mother tongue.” Yet even today, while non-Muslims were enslaved and often forcibly converted to Islam, their conversion does not lead to their freedom. Mauritanian anti-slavery campaigner Boubacar Messaoud explains that “it’s like having sheep or goats. If a woman is a slave, her descendants are slaves.”

Anti-slavery crusaders like Messaoud have great difficulty working against this attitude, because it is rooted in the Qur’an and Muhammad’s example. Particularly when the slaves are non-Muslims, there is no verse of the Qur’an corresponding to Lincoln’s favored Bible verse, Genesis 3:19, that anti-slavery Muslims can invoke against those who continue to approve of and even to practice slavery.

Hitchens isn't this stupid, and neither are his readers. But they have not troubled to learn this history, and no one is telling them about it."

[Posted by Robert at December 22, 2007]

A day later, on December 23, 2007, I took my own whack at the same plump pinata:

Fitzgerald: Hitchens and Said

"Christopher Hitchens likes to think of himself as a brave iconoclast, speaking-truth-to-power and all that I'm-George-Orwell-of-this-age-and-I-take-no-prisoners sort of thing. I've mocked him before at this site, many times, quand il fait son petit Orwell. But the longest whack at him, with Hitchens providing the evidence against himself, is the piece "Hitchens and Said." It appeared on February 21, 2007, and is here re-presented, lightly edited for clarity:

There are many examples that one can find on-line of the work of this "good egg" who "writes like a dream." [These were phrases used about Hitchens by someone who objected to some previous mocking of Hitchens by me].

A great friend and unctuous admirer of Edward Said, and though his tribute to Said does not reach the bathetic depths, or yawning heights, of Hamid Dabashi's tribute (google "Hamid Dabashi" and "Edward Said" -- you won't regret it), Hitchens own tribute to Said is memorable, for the same reasons, on a slightly different scale:

The loss of Professor Edward Said, after an arduous battle with demoralizing illness that he bore very bravely, will be unbearable for his family, insupportable to his immense circle of friends, upsetting to a vast periphery of admirers and readers who one might almost term his diaspora, and depressing to all those who continue hoping for a decent agreement in his birthplace of Jerusalem.
To address these wrenching thoughts in their reverse order, one could commence by saying quite simply that if Edward's personality had been the human and moral pattern or example, there would be no "Middle East" problem to begin with. His lovely, intelligent, and sensitive memoir Out of Place was a witness to the schools and neighborhoods in Jerusalem and Cairo where fraternity between Arabs, Jews, Druses, Armenians, and others was a matter of course. (His memory also comprised a literary Beirut where the same could be said.) He took an almost aesthetic interest in the details, eccentricities, and welfare of his own particular confession—the Anglican Christians of Jerusalem and especially St. Georges school in the eastern part of the city—but it's hard if not impossible to imagine anyone with less sectarian commitment. When talking to him about the various types of sacred rage that poison the region, one gained the impression of someone to whom this sort of fanaticism was, in every declension of the word, quite foreign.

Indeed, if it had not been for the irruption of abrupt force into the life of his extended family and the ripping apart of the region by partition and subpartition, I can easily imagine Edward evolving as an almost apolitical person, devoted to the loftier pursuits of music and literature. To see and hear him play the piano was to be filled with envy as well as joy: One was witnessing a rather angst-prone person who had developed the perfect recreation to an extraordinary pitch. To ask him for a tutorial and a reading list, as I more than once did, was to be humbled by the sheer reach of his erudition. I can still hear the doors that opened in my mind as he explicated George Eliot's rather recondite Daniel Deronda.

On one occasion in New York, after giving us a tremendous tour of the Metropolitan Museum during its show on the art of Andalusia (and filling out the most exquisite details on the syntheses and paradoxes of Islamic, Moorish, and Jewish Spain), he took my own wife on a tour of the shops to advise her expertly on the best replacement for a mislaid purse. I never met a woman who did not admire him, and I never knew him to be anything but gallant. As I look back, I am inclined to be overcome at the number of such occasions, where his bearing and address were so exemplary and his companionship such a privilege.

His feeling for the injustice done to Palestine was, in the best sense of this overused term, a visceral one. He simply could not reconcile himself to the dispossession of a people or to the lies and evasions that were used to cover up this offense. He was by no means simple-minded or one-sided about this: In a public dialogue with Salman Rushdie 15 years ago, he described the Palestinians as "victims of the victims," an ironic formulation that hasn't been improved upon. But nor did he trust those who introduced pseudo-complexities as a means of perpetuating the status quo. I know a shocking number of people who find that they can be quite calm about the collective punishment of Palestinians yet become wholly incensed at the symbolic stone he once threw—from Lebanon! Personally, I preferred his joint enterprise with Daniel Barenboim to provide musical training for Israeli and Palestinian children. But for Edward, injustice was to be rectified, not rationalized. I think that it was, for him, surpassingly a matter of dignity. People may lose a war or a struggle or be badly led or poorly advised, but they must not be humiliated or treated as alien or less than human. It was the downgrading of the Palestinians to the status of a "problem" (and this insult visited upon them in their own homeland) that aroused his indignation. That moral energy, I am certain, will outlive him.

I knew and admired him for more than a quarter-century, and I hope I will not be misunderstood if I say that his moral energy wasn't always matched by equivalent political judgment. Indeed, it should be no criticism of anyone to say that politics isn't their best milieu, especially if the political life has been forced upon them. Edward had a slight tendency to self-pity, and the same chord was struck even in the best of his literary work, which often expressed a too-highly developed sense of injury and victimhood. (I am thinking of certain passages in his Orientalism and some of the essays in Culture and Imperialism as well.) He was sometimes openly alarmed at the use made of his scholarship by younger academic poseurs who seemed to despise the classical canon of literature that he so much revered. Yet he was famously thin-skinned and irascible, as I have good reason to remember, if any criticism became directed at himself. Some of that criticism was base and outrageous and sordidly politicized—I have just finished reading the obituary in the New York Times, which in a cowardly way leaves open the question as to whether Edward, or indeed any other Palestinian, lost a home in the tragedy of 1947-48—but much of it deserved more patience than he felt he had to spare. And he was capable of stooping to mere abuse when attacking other dissidents—particularly other Arab dissidents, and most particularly Iraqi and Kurdish ones—with whom he did not agree. I simply had to stop talking to him about Iraq over the past two years. He could only imagine the lowest motives for those in favor of regime change in Baghdad, and he had a vivid tendency to take any demurral as a personal affront.

But it can be admirable in a way to go through life with one skin too few, to be easily agonized and upset and offended. Too many people survive, or imagine that they do, by coarsening themselves and by protectively dulling their sensitivity to the point of acceptance. This would never be Edward's way. His emotional strength—one has to resort to cliché sometimes—was nonetheless also a weakness.

I was astonished, when reading his memoirs, to learn that such a polished and poised fellow had never lost the sense that he was awkward and clumsy. And yet this man of enviable manners could be both those things when he chose. He did come, as a member of Yasser Arafat's Palestine National Council, to meet at Reagan's State Department with George Shultz. (Indeed, he could claim to have been the intellectual and moral architect of the "mutual recognition" policy of the PLO at the Algiers conference in 1988.) When invited to the summit between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in Washington in 1993, however—which I happen to know that he was earnestly entreated to attend by the Clinton White House—he told me that it was quite simply beneath his dignity to take part in such a media farce. Now, by no standard did the 1993 meeting sink below the level of the Shultz one, and by no means had Arafat become on that day any more contemptible than Edward later discovered him to be. But it wasn't just that inconsistency that distressed me: It was the feeling that Edward was on the verge of extreme dudgeon before I could press the matter one inch further. I can't shake the feeling that a microcosm of the Israeli-Palestinian agony is contained in this apparently negligible anecdote.

There is at present a coalition, named the Palestinian National Initiative, which never gets reported about. It is an alliance of secular and democratic forces among the Palestinians that rejects both clerical fundamentalism and the venality of the Palestinian "Authority." It was partly launched by Edward Said, and its main spokesman is Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, a distinguished physician and very brave individual, to whom Edward introduced me last year. In our final conversation a few weeks ago, Edward challenged me angrily about my failure to write enough on this neglected group, which certainly enjoys a good deal of popular support and which deserves a great deal more international attention. Perhaps then I can do a last service, and also dip a flag in salute to a fine man, if I invite you to direct your browsers toward the sites for Barghouthi and the PNI.

From first to last, this is unbearable, stupid and sentimental and in many places, flatly false. As for that writing "like a dream" -- it would take about two minutes to edit the piece, cutting here and there, to make the prose, awful as it is (there's nothing to be done about the thoughts and feelings of this "good egg"), much better.

Said was dismembered in feline fashion by Bernard Lewis in "The Question of 'Orientalism'." Last year Robert Irwin's "For Lust of Knowledge," a refutation of Said, essentially a book-length footnote to Lewis' article, appeared. Irwin demonstrates conclusively what many (but not Christopher Hitchens) knew: that Said's misrepresentations of several centuries of distinguished Orientalists was comical in the things he got wrong, the things he left out, his inability to comprehend disinterested curiosity or disinterested scholarship, so foreign were they to the mind and even imagination of Edward Said. Everything that he could get wrong, Edward Said got wrong.

A few months from now Ibn Warraq's "Defending the West: A Response to Edward Said" will be published. [Update: it's available now.] I have read the manuscript. That book deals with how Edward Said, and his acolytes and worshippers and epigones, have so crudely misconceived and misrepresented the nature of the Western world and its art, its literature, its scholarship, its openness to what Said and friends like to call "the Other" and to then claim for that "Other" a long history of victimisation. At long last, here is an end to that Saidian wind that kills, and has had chilling and killing effects for nearly thirty years on innocent students and on fearful or careerist teachers. They have been bullied by Saidism in how they learn about, how they write about, how they teach about, how they comprehend or fail to, works of lasting artistic and literary value produced in the maligned West, works that always and everywhere, in the impoverished and thoroughly politicized mental universe of Edward Said were always reduced to ideological counters, and playthings, and weapons. For one example, consider only Said's comments on Jane Austen, and the reasons for his dismissal of her. Is that the work of a critic? Is that what Samuel Johnson, or Coleridge, or Matthew Arnold, or Jacques Barzun, or Vladimir Nabokov, or anyone of sense at all, would regard as legitimate literary criticism? Said did, and so did his worshippers. And among those worshippers was, for several decades, Christopher Hitchens, who is a "good egg" and who "writes like a dream." And Said did the same in his treatment -- not exactly reminiscent of Gombrich or Panofsky, is Edward Said -- of painters on Oriental themes (and this, too, is dealt with magnificently by Ibn Warraq).

Said's "Orientalism" gave license not only for him but for others to offer the same approach to books and paintings, and the results we see, circumspectly, all about us. And "Orientalism" was not the only ludicrous work that Said produced. There is his work of blatant propaganda, "The Question of Palestine," which a week in the library would cure anyone of taking seriously. It is so full of falsity, so easily rebutted -- but apparently a great many people never took the trouble to rebut it, the same people who go about prating about the "Palestinian people" who since time immemorial have been tilling the soil of a place called "Palestine." One wishes that those who took Said's work seriously, as Hitchens did, would have the decency, before continuing to spout off, to read something sober on the matter, such as the studies by the Australian scholar of jurisprudence Julius Stone, and then the nonsense would stop.

But Christopher Hitchens never had time to spare, and still doesn't, to engage in such reading, though he continues to hold all kinds of self-assured views on the "Palestinians" and on Israel, views entirely unaffected, one might note, by the glimmer of understanding he is beginning to show -- but just a glimmer -- about Islam. Nor would he likely to engage in a thorough study of the demographic and cadastral history of the area known as "Israel" or "Palestine," over the past two millennia or over the past few centuries, or even during the period from the establishment of the Mandate for Palestine. Why should Christopher Hitchens, at any time during the past three decades of pontificating about "Palestine" and the "Palestinians," ever have bothered to study the exact terms and intentions of the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations in establishing that particular Mandate, and how the Charter of the U.N. requires it to honor those terms and intentions, not to change them? That's too much for Christopher Hitchens. He's got a column to write. He's got lectures to give. He's got appearances on television to get ready for. He's got to have opinions on so many things. So many opinions to give, so little time. It would be like asking him to discuss Resolution 242, what those who carefully crafted it intended that Resolution to mean, and who opposed its adoption, or tried before its adoption to change its wording, or who afterwards deliberately denied that it meant what they knew perfectly well it meant (which is why they had tried so long to change it), and endowed it with a different meaning, one which they then convinced many others to accept. Does Christopher Hitchens have the time to find out Lord Caradon said, and Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, and British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart, about Resolution 242, or such "details" and that little phrase "secure and defensible borders"? Of course he doesn't. It's too complicated, for the broad sweep of that truth-to-power legitimate heir to Orwell, Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens never saw through Edward Said -- but Edward Said was a collection of things that could be seen through, and were seen through, by those whose, such as Bernard Lewis or Clive Dewey or Keith Windschuttle or a thousand other historians, art historians, literary scholars, were not for one minute taken in by, or inveigled to agreeing with, the primitive notions of art and literature and history that Edward Said held, and put into practice, and preached.

This should not be forgotten or forgiven just because more recently Hitchens has properly denounced George Galloway (is that an achievement?) and others of that ilk. If the bar is to be set that low, then all should win the glittering prizes.

What is offered here is just a sample of the quality of the thought, and of the prose, of Christopher Hitchens. Some are apparently satisfied with little here below -- Norman Mailer, say, rather than Nabokov or Joyce. Some may find Hitchens is perfectly acceptable, a "good egg" who even, another someone suggests, "writes like a dream." But I allow myself to believe that not everyone is so easily pleased, and that many not-easily-pleased souls come to this website because they expect something better, from those not so easily pleased.

Much more might be offered into evidence, but I don't have the time. All kinds of things have come up. But for now that is enough. That is more than enough."

[Posted by Hugh at December 23, 2007]

"I think that Christopher Hitchens has in this and other statements provided us with a sort of primer on how not to write about the defense of the Western civilizational and cultural patrimony"

Excellent response !

What is according to you more important, the freedom of speech, or the freedom of religion?

How important is the freedom of a religion that denies freedom of religion and freedom of speech?

That's the irony that some people have not caught on to yet. They are protecting, in the name of tolerance and multiculturalism, Arab supremacism and religious intolerance.

Any thoughts on whether Menno Ludriks is writing a pro- or anti- Fallaci piece?

Oriana Fallaci is not a racist or islamophobic, she is just a person who understands the virulence of the malign ideology of islam. I do not think that she objected to Islam's religious aspect. She just revolted against islam's vicious supremacist political culture that preaches hatred and intolerance. She saw Islam degrading and destroying her homeland and Europe. God bless her soul and give us more like her.

Thank you Mr. Spencer for your brilliant answers to this student's questions. Oriana Fallaci reminds me so much of the feisty, brave, brilliant and beautiful (Southern) Italian women of mia famiglia and those I have been fortunate enough to call friends. "F**k you. I say what I want." What spirit.

"Oriana Fallaci was not Islamophobic. She was Islamorealistic."

Hear! Hear!

An altogether excellent series of rejoinders.

Robert, would you say this Dutch student Menno Ludriks was particularly clueless, hostile or lefty indoctrinated?

It is the naiveté in his questions that spook me, in fact remind me of this 'anthropologist' and closet Muslim Marranci who kept us occupied a while ago.

Why is it that people are so totally clueless when it comes to our thousand year old enemy?

Question:

Christopher Hitchens (also a journalist and author) who described the book The Rage and the Pride on The Atlantic as “a sort of primer in how not to write about Islam”. What do you think of this statement?

Answer:

"I think that Christopher Hitchens has in this and other statements provided us with a sort of primer on how not to write about the defense of the Western civilizational and cultural patrimony."

Absolute Brilliance!

Thanks Robert for deftly avoiding traps with a flick of the tongue; " I haven't read every book in the world." And thanks to Hugh for thoughtful expansions. I love you guys.

"Is the Quran the “most stupid and dangerous book in the world” (The Force of Reason p. 63)?

I haven’t read all the books in the world."

You're good, Robert. Very good.

A couple of years ago - while she was still alive - I wrote and recorded a tribute to Oriana Fallaci called "Oriana is Right."

I confer it anonymously to the public domain. Anyone who wants to hear it or even post it on Youtube (perhaps with a photo of Oriana) is free to do so.

Email me at oriana_tribute@yahoo. com and I'll send it to you.

I am an atheist, though not your typical modern leftist/atheist. I have a huge problem with Islam, because I believe it is an evil religion. Otherwise, however, I have no problem with any other religion, and I deeply respect devoutly religious people. My morality/ethos, whether subconsciously or intentionally, is largely influenced by and based on a generally Judeo-Christian ethic.
To me there is one observation about Christopher Hitchens and others like him, which is most enlightening. Hitchens and others are of the opinion that religion is a "crutch" for the weak-willed or weak-minded. Let's for a moment assume that he's correct: He, and others like him, have essentially dedicated their lives to kicking the crutches out from under people. It would never surprise me to hear news that Hitchens had dumped a paraplegic out of his wheel-chair, because that type of activity is what Hitchens, and others like him, perceive as their goal in life: kicking the crutches out from under cripples.
Now, obviously the initial presumption is false; but that doesn't change the fact that Hitchens and his ilk get no greater pleasure than kicking the crutches out from under those they perceive as "cripples".
In short, Hitchens is a douchebag whose opnions on ANY subject are utterly worthless. He's simply not a decent human being -- and because he's a "neo-atheist" he doesn't feel any need to be a decent human being.
His ideas and arguments simply aren't worth acknowledging, he's a totally unrepentant scumbag.

I am an atheist, though not your typical modern leftist/atheist. I have a huge problem with Islam, because I believe it is an evil religion. Otherwise, however, I have no problem with any other religion, and I deeply respect devoutly religious people. My morality/ethos, whether subconsciously or intentionally, is largely influenced by and based on a generally Judeo-Christian ethic.
To me there is one observation about Christopher Hitchens and others like him, which is most enlightening. Hitchens and others are of the opinion that religion is a "crutch" for the weak-willed or weak-minded. Let's for a moment assume that he's correct: He, and others like him, have essentially dedicated their lives to kicking the crutches out from under people. It would never surprise me to hear news that Hitchens had dumped a paraplegic out of his wheel-chair, because that type of activity is what Hitchens, and others like him, perceive as their goal in life: kicking the crutches out from under cripples.
Now, obviously the initial presumption is false; but that doesn't change the fact that Hitchens and his ilk get no greater pleasure than kicking the crutches out from under those they perceive as "cripples".
In short, Hitchens is a douchebag whose opnions on ANY subject are utterly worthless. He's simply not a decent human being -- and because he's a "neo-atheist" he doesn't feel any need to be a decent human being.
His ideas and arguments simply aren't worth acknowledging, he's a totally unrepentant scumbag.

Saith Hugh: "For the Nazis, it was Treitschke's "Die Juden sind unser Ungluck." For Muslims, it is, in a less hideously violent key, the Infidels who are "unser Ungluck."

I'd like to think we are double-plus-ungluck".

"I reject the terms “Islamophobia” and “Islamophobe.” They are manipulative coinages designed to suggest that resistance to the global jihad and Islamic supremacism is not a matter of love for Western (or any other non-Muslim) culture and the defense of universal human rights, but is instead a pathology, a manifestation of bigotry that is fundamentally irrational and must be rejected."

Excellent description of a manufactured politically correct term used to close down any debate... by not having one! A way of taking the moral high ground with an underhandedly low tactic.

You can see the use of other such terms in other contexts for the same reason as above. Find a one or two word term for your cause and you can win any debate you will ever have. Muslims did not invent the tactic, it is well and sucessfully used by others. Consequently should be rejected in all its forms as it is verbal fascism. Interesting that the best exponents of the practice are the liberal/left.

"Oriana Fallaci was not Islamophobic. She was Islamorealistic."

Hear! Hear! --posted by Papa Whiskey

Great! That's the new word - "Islamorealistic."

Sheik Yer'mami asked "would you say this Dutch student Menno Ludriks was particularly clueless, hostile or lefty indoctrinated?".

I think Menno's all of the above. I was struck by how hostile the questions were. So this comes across more as a debate than an interview.

Special Guest asked "Any thoughts on whether Menno Ludriks is writing a pro- or anti- Fallaci piece?"

I don't expect Oriana or Robert to be given fair treatment in Menno's piece.

Not about Qaradawi alone, but about the menace of demographic conquest is the following, just posted at www.newenglishreview.org by Rebecca Bynum:

"Don Morris writes at Doc's Talk (thanks to Janet Levy):

...As long as the Muslim population remains around 1% of any given country they will be regarded as a peace-loving minority and not as a threat to anyone. In fact, they may be featured in articles and films, stereotyped for their colorful uniqueness:

United States -- Muslim 1.0%
Australia -- Muslim 1.5%
Canada -- Muslim 1.9%
China -- Muslim 1%-2%
Italy -- Muslim 1.5%
Norway -- Muslim 1.8%

At 2% and 3% they begin to proselytize from other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups with major recruiting from the jails and among street gangs:

Denmark -- Muslim 2%
Germany -- Muslim 3.7%
United Kingdom -- Muslim 2. 7%
Spain -- Muslim 4%
Thailand -- Muslim 4.6%

From 5% on they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population.

They will push for the introduction of halaal (clean by Islamic standards) food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims. They will increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature it on their shelves -- along with threats for failure to comply. (United States).

France -- Muslim 8%
Philippines -- Muslim 5%
Sweden -- Muslim 5%
Switzerland -- Muslim 4.3%
The Netherlands -- Muslim 5.5%
Trinidad & Tobago -- Muslim 5.8%

At this point, they will work to get the ruling government to allow them to rule themselves under Sharia, the Islamic Law. The ultimate goal of Islam is not to convert the world but to establish Sharia law over the entire world.

When Muslims reach 10% of the population, they will increase lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions (Paris -- car-burnings). Any non-Muslim action that offends Islam will result in uprisings and threats (Amsterdam -- Mohammed cartoons).

Guyana -- Muslim 10%
India -- Muslim 13.4%
Israel -- Muslim 16%
Kenya -- Muslim 10%
Russia -- Muslim 10-15%

After reaching 20% expect hair-trigger rioting, jihad militia formations, sporadic killings and church and synagogue burning:

Ethiopia -- Muslim 32.8%

At 40% you will find widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks and ongoing militia warfare:

Bosnia -- Muslim 40%
Chad -- Muslim 53.1%
Lebanon -- Muslim 59.7%

From 60% you may expect unfettered persecution of non-believers and other religions, sporadic ethnic cleansing (genocide), use of Sharia Law as a weapon and Jizya, the tax placed on infidels:

Albania -- Muslim 70%
Malaysia -- Muslim 60.4%
Qatar -- Muslim 77.5%
Sudan -- Muslim 70%

After 80% expect State run ethnic cleansing and genocide:

Bangladesh -- Muslim 83%
Egypt -- Muslim 90%
Gaza -- Muslim 98.7%
Indonesia -- Muslim 86.1%
Iran -- Muslim 98%
Iraq -- Muslim 97%
Jordan -- Muslim 92%
Morocco -- Muslim 98.7%
Pakistan -- Muslim 97%
Palestine -- Muslim 99%
Syria -- Muslim 90%
Tajikistan -- Muslim 90%
Turkey -- Muslim 99.8%
United Arab Emirates -- Muslim 96%

100% will usher in the peace of "Dar-es-Salaam" -- the Islamic House of Peace -- there's supposed to be peace because everybody is a Muslim:

Afghanistan -- Muslim 100%
Saudi Arabia -- Muslim 100%
Somalia -- Muslim 100%
Yemen -- Muslim 99.9%

Of course, that's not the case. To satisfy their blood lust, Muslims then start killing each other for a variety of reasons.

"Before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world. And all of us against the infidel. -- Leon Uris, "The Haj"...

Adapted from Dr. Peter Hammond's book: Slavery, Terrorism and Islam: The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat"

Posted by: Hugh at March 21, 2008 6:20 PM

WHOOPS. I had copied that stuff about statistics and tipping points, to tuck aside for future reference, and it was still lurking on my clipboard, alas. Somebody please delete!

Anyway - as regards the Spencer interview and Signora Fallaci.

Well said, Robert! - loud applause, stamping and whistling.

Long ago, while still an undergrad, I joined the Dante Alighieri Society and learned Italian. At the time I did it so I could read the Divina Commedia in the original language. And I have done so; which is why I roll on the floor laughing with irrepressible laughter, whenever earnest Muslims try to tell us, here, that the Quran is the best poetry in the world.

But having learned Italian, I was able to read La Rabbia e L'Orgoglio in the original language. One should not sit down to read it in silence; it demands that one stand, and declaim aloud. It was like swallowing a long, long draught of neat whiskey, except that it induced white clarity, not befuddlement, for it united fiery passion with the iron ring of truth.

(The other piece by Fallaci that cries out to be shouted aloud today, this year, month by month, week by week, at the top of an orator's well-trained voice, in the streets and the squares, and from the steps of cathedrals and in the middle of university quadrangles, all over the western world, is her Corriere article 'On Jew Hatred in Europe', perhaps better titled 'I Stand With Israel, I Stand With the Jews!')

If I may borrow an image from J K Rowlings, I must say that Oriana, like other great journalists before her - I think of G K Chesterton, or of the inimitable and unfoolable Martha Gellhorn demolishing Arab Muslim 'mad-hattery' - wielded with vigour the Sword of Godric Griffindor.