"Christopher Hitchens: The White Man Teaches and Preaches
Former leftists in the West were subpoenaed to hearings in Congress in order to assist «McCarthyism ». These left-wingers excelled in assisting the campaigns of «McCarthyism » so much that they were practically racing to rat out on their former comrades. They wore the best of their clothes and jewellery to curse Communism in the media, and to declare their repentance (in our part of the world, repentance is declared in the exclusively male Janadiryah Festival). This defection in the ranks of the left wing into the ranks of the right began in the forties and fifties and is not yet over. Film director Elia Kazan was one of those. He is of Greek origin but was still celebrated by the L.B.C as being a Lebanese Genius- and is there a Lebanese who is not a genius in the Lebanese media? Some principled leftists have never forgiven him this, even when he won the prize of that body that organizes the Academy Awards. Rupert Murdoch, the founder of the right wing Fox network, used to have a statue of Lenin in his college dorm room, and David Horowitz (who represents the maximum degree attainable of right wing Zionist extremism in America) was a member of a radical Marxist organization in the sixties. The French minister of foreign affairs was also a leftist. In addition, It is widely known that the neo-conservatives came mostly from leftist and communist backgrounds.
While the Organization for Communist Action is the source for most ex-leftists in Lebanon (Why, Oh Mohsen Ibrahim? Would You Please Speak Out?), it is the Trotskyites in the West that are the source of ex-leftists there. Two Phenomena that require a lot of interpretation and analysis. Naturally, Lenin had written on corruption and apostasy, but that kind of literature was insular and rigid and does not live up to standards of systematic and methodological analysis.
Christopher Hitchens is one of these former leftists. As a university student, he was a pompous Trotskyite known for his love to show off and to attract attention. Our friend then immigrated to the United States where he began writing in the leftist press, such as the left-wing Nation magazine. He is well conversed with the English language and literature, and is no doubt exceptionally eloquent. Hitchens was then a bold critic of Israel. He has written a number of books one of which criticized Mother Theresa and exposed her financial involvement with corrupt people and tyrants as well as her regressive political views. But I was always suspicious of him ever since I heard his speech in Washington, when I was a university student there. His demeanour betrayed his tendency to be grandiose. He always put on a “revolutionary face” whether the situation warranted it or not. Then I noticed that he butts into every event brought up by the media. Abou Nidal once said that Fatah is a bunch of mercenaries, collaborators and corrupt thugs even if some honest patriots were in Fatah’s ranks, but then he a became a mercenary himself. When news of his terrorism was all over the western media in the 1980s, Hitchens sddenly started to claim in his articles that he met Abou Nidal in a cafe in Baghdad. I had suspicions about this, and about the credibility of the man ever since.
How can anyone with a minimal knowledge of Palestinian organizations, in particular that of Abu Nidal (which was infiltrated by Israeli, Jordanian and Iraqi intelligence services), imagine that Abu Nidal, who was obsessed with his personal security, could be wandering around in a cafe in Baghdad and drink beer with a Western journalist he had never met or seen? In the Clinton era, Hitchens claimed that he used to see Bill Clinton in Oxford University and that he was involved with a woman who’s had an affair with Clinton. Hitchens seems to want to be a part of every occasion, like Woody Allen’s Zelig.
During the Clinton administration, Hitchens started to obfuscate. He became obsessed with Bill Clinton’s sex life and wanted to appear as someone keen on defending women’s rights, even when he was widely known for ignoring women's issues and not really being bothered by them. At the height of the Salman Rushdie affair, he also started claiming that he is a close friend of Rushdie, and organized several reading sessions for Rushdie’s book “The Satanic Verses”. Now I am a staunch supporter of the writers’ freedom of expression, and without any restrictions (specially the medieval restrictions of Bishop Bshara Al Ra’i’), but still he managed to irritate me with his handling of the subject. He was keen on insulting the feelings of Muslims in a way that he would not dare do with the members of any other religion. This selective provocation, or call it selective secularism (it can also be called colonial secularism similar to Bush’s colonial feminism in his war on Afghanistan), is common in Western societies. Anti-Islamism and anti-Semitism were an integral part of the west’s religious and cultural doctrine. Hitchens exaggerated in browsing and exposing the subject and used to organize festivals of complaints against the “backwards” Muslims, as if he is preparing the grounds for anti-Islamic sentiments later on in the West. He did not try to discuss the historical context of the subject. He could have all too simply defended Rushdie’s freedom of expression and his freedom of insulting tastes and sentiments - exactly what is meant by the freedom of expression, no offence to Bshara el Ra’ri who would have made an excellent medieval witch hunter- while acknowledging the right of Muslims to peaceful expression of their anger and their resentment against the book in question.
Like Hitchens, many people were wandering: how can millions of Muslims protest against a book they haven’t even read? My answer is: Like many Jews object to anti Jewish books without reading them, it should be acceptable that Muslims do the same, but in the west, Muslims are prohibited from doing what others are entitled to do.
Hitchens took up the issue of Rushdie as if there were no other causes and injustices on earth. And in the time when he started altering his views and positions, he suddenly discovered – what a coincidence - that his mother was Jewish, similar to when Madeleine Albright, discovered by accident her Jewish origin. Hitchens opposition to Israel began to falter, affecting his friendship with the late Edward Said, who had stopped taking Hitchens’ calls. He avoided him and refused to speak to him, especially after his (cowardly) stances following September 11. But the bombings of September transformed Hitchens into another person, and gave him a golden opportunity in a society that adores the British accent.
Hitchens became one of most vocal voices against Islam and Muslims in the West. He became the most extremist anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian (cause) in America, and certainly the loudest one. Suddenly, he became a champion of George Bush’s cause becoming an instant success, desired in the forums of the extreme right-wing and of racism in America. Hawkish right-wingers found in him their knight in shining armour for his eloquence and oratory skills. The man, who for years refused to apply for and obtain American citizenship, went further than the American people in his “love” for the United States. He obtained the American citizenship and almost cried when he spoke of the moment he waved the American flag as an U.S. citizen. Hitchens established close relations with senior officials in the Bush administration and provided advisory services to Karl Rove, senior adviser in the Bush era. The man, who was a staunch left-wing opponent of the American empire, became an obnoxious propagandist of the same empire. Hitchens did not stop at cheering for the invasion of Afghanistan, but was also one of the most enthusiastic supporters for the invasion of Iraq.
As usual, Hitchens tries to paint his right-wing views with a liberal brush (in the same manner that the slogan «the civil state» in Lebanon is used to cover the regressive rule of the Hariri dynasty) by claiming, for instance, that the invasion of Iraq was to liberate the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam. But Hitchens seems to have forgotten his leftist days when he was in an apologetic for the Baath party rule in Iraq, and used to express his admiration for Iraq's progress and development. Thus, the man suddenly stopped criticizing Israel's crimes. On the contrary, he made amends with Israel's occupation, and started to lay all the blame of what is going on in Palestine on Hamas, just like Yasser Abed Rabbo, Muhammad Dahlan, and Benjamin Netanyahu; as if no injustice ever took place against the Palestinian people before the emergence of Hamas in the late eighties. He resigned from the “Nation”, or was probably fired from the magazine, but still tried to cover some of his new views by using his «friendship» with Edward Said. But Said’s widow exposed him and asked him to stop exploiting the memory of her husband in order to cover up his right wing and Zionist stances.
I agreed to debate Hitchens on a U.S. radio station over a period of one hour, and of course, it was very heated debate on both sides. It was strange that he was really proud in being the first to use the term “Islamic Fascism” to denote entire Muslim populations.
This connotation was used by Bush in his last days as president, while both Obama and Clinton refused to use it in their campaign rallies, even if there are among the Democrats some Zionists who do use it haphazardly.
In my debate with him, I reminded him that fascist and Nazi movements were popular movements that captured the minds of millions of people, while Al-Qaeda was not able to mobilize enough people to fit in a cave or two. There is no evidence to the ability of bin Laden or his monotonous deputy in influencing Arab and Muslim public opinion, other than Arab and Muslim extremists and fanatics on the fringes of fundamentalist groups, even if Mosbah Al-Ahdab finds himself allied with them, before the Lebanese parliamentary elections.
Hitchens considers that any Arab opposed to him is an Al-Qaeda sympathizer. His silence about the Bush administration and its crimes around the world was not a coincidence. Rather, it is because he became a Bush propagandist. Hitchens was famous for his exaggerations such as his continuous claim that he watched a group of Iraqis throwing flowers at the soldiers of the U.S. invasion. Even the scenes of torture in Abu Ghraib did not bother the man, who did not stop praising Bush and boasting that he voted for him in the presidential election.
But the man began to change his positions once again in the last days of Bush (similar to when Prince Salman‘s newspaper and Prince Khalid Bin Sultan’s newspapers dared to criticize Bush in the last week of his presidency- What courage!), and announced, though without much enthusiasm, his intention to vote for Obama while insisting on the soundness of Bush's policies and wars. The change in his positions started when he criticised a torture technique used by the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies after September 11. This technique is used in the prisons of the Arab world and is known as water boarding, where the prisoner is exposed to massive quantities of water until it seems to him that that he is really drowning. This is of course torture by any standard, even in military manuals. Hitchens then subjected himself to an experience of this torture technique, and wrote an article in «Vanity Fair» declaring his opposition to this torture technique in particular (he e-mailed a link to his article as if I would be pleased because the white man has declared his opposition to this torture technique, since he alone decides what’s okay and what’s not).
Hitchens is not an expert on the Middle East and cannot speak any Middle Eastern language. He pretends to support the Kurds because this is accepted in the west, although Hitchens did not seem to protest against the tribal parties that dominate political life in the Kurdistan region, since they have caused the deaths of thousands of Kurds in their wars (as a result of conflicts over extortion, theft and smuggling) in the nineties. Our friend here boasts his friendship with Jalal Talabani, who in his chameleonic changes in ideology surpasses everyone in the Arab world (except, perhaps, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, who moved from Baathism in his youth, to the Iraqi Communist Party before joining a dissenting Maoist party and then joined leftist groups in France. He then joined the student organization in Fatah, before settling in the Hakim family party, something equivalent of being loyal to Khamenei and Bush).
Hitchens recently visited the country of Cedars at the invitation of the «Lebanese Renaissance Foundation», headed by Lebanese Forces member Elie Khoury, who also runs the Quantum Company. Quantum was revealed by the journalist Art Levine in American prospect magazine, to have received contracts valued at millions of dollars from Al Hurra TV station. Quantum is also associated – as I was told by an employee there – with the “Now Lebanon” Website (or rather Hariri Now), as well as those crude propaganda ads about Iraq, broadcasted on some Arabic channels.
Hitchens was accompanied in his Hariri-paid trip by right wing journalists like himself, one of whom had written an article about Lebanon after his return and which included many factual errors. This would normally lead a respectable publication to fire him, for example he called the March 14 movement, March 15. But the magazine’s website rectified this error without announcing it (after I had mentioned this on my blog). The other journalist is the Zionist blogger Michael Totten who is an adamant supporter of Israeli invasions. The March 14 ruffians, in particular Walid Jumblatt who doesn’t like to miss an opportunity to meet every white man heralding from the west, welcomed their guests. Walid Jumblatt’s dinner table always has some white guests, as we read in the newspapers, even if the guest is the tenth undersecretary in any European embassy. The bad-tempered Walid Jumblatt always likes to tour his palace in front of his white guests, to prove his hospitality.
Hitchens was slightly beaten by a man in Hamra street while he was drunk. He had tried to deface a plaque dedicated to the hero Khalid Alwan, who deserves to be honoured with a statute bigger than the Basbous’ intrusive and ugly statue that stands nowadays in front of the St. Georges hotel.
One of the Hariri writers in Al-Mustaqbal Al Salafi wrote about Hitchens and it was clear he had not read a single word written by Hitchens. He wrote to readers about how Hitchens always defended the Palestinian cause, even when Hitchens is in reality more like Bush, Netanyahu and Bolton these days.
Perhaps the writer wanted to justify the invitation by Hariri and Elie Khoury, of a gang of Zionists to attend the annual sectarian ritual at the madness square in Beirut.
Hitchens did not forget in an interview with his host «Hariri Now», to praise the women of March 14 and compared them to the women of March 8 women, who were unattractive to Mr. Hitchens
The white man’s visits to Lebanon are considered there a great conquest, especially if the white man was a Zionist, because the era of reconciliation with Zionism has officially started and by a royal Saudi decree. Michael Young, a propagandist of the neo-conservatives in Lebanon, and the opinion page editor in the «Daily Star», wrote a long article defending Hitchens against his critics in his lecture at the American University of Beirut. Hitchens’ invitation to Beirut was officially from the Department of Middle Eastern studies, although I was told by Tarif Khalidi that he was not even aware of this.
Young reprimanded those who dared criticise Hitchens because he thinks that a backward people are not entitled to oppose or hold the white man accountable.
Young wanted the Arabs to support Bush's invasion of their countries because- in his opinion – he liberated them from a tyrant. But we don’t see Young or Hitchens calling for an American war of liberation against Israel, for example or Saudi Arabia although both countries did ask for American wars of liberation against America’s enemies in the Middle East.
Fortunately for the people of Lebanon, Christopher Hitchens visit to Beirut did not receive any fanfare and had little to no coverage. It deserves nothing more.
But March 14 political propagandists think they’re smart: they think that their firm alliance with hard line Zionists and right-wingers in America is still hidden and unknown to the public. Branching media networks and outlets in Lebanon, which receive funding from the Hariri family, are also linked with Western governments’ propaganda. Saad and Nader El-Hariri people would have us think that this link is innocent, like the love of Qays Ibn Al-Mullawah.
Hitchen’s invitation reflects a thirst to hear the views of the white man, by both March 8 March 14: Hezbollah’s media, for instance, long for the expectations of Franklin Lamb (which border on being astrological in nature) about the Middle East, although the man did not study the region and has no training in Middle Eastern studies.
