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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (4673)	9/25/2001 11:27:38 PM
From: Ilaine	Respond to of 23908

>>The very first step that we must take, therefore, is the acquisition of enough self-respect and self- confidence to say that we have met an enemy and that he is not us, but someone else.<< Well, I am glad to say that Hitchens gets it. Go 'head on!

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (4673)	9/26/2001 1:11:51 AM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

That is a good article, even if I don't agree with the point of view. The term "Islamic fascism" is worth the price of admission by itself. That is a great term, much better than "Islamic fundamentalism". The Taliban are fascists, plain and simple. Tom

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (4673)	9/26/2001 1:38:30 AM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 23908

Hitchens wrote a nice (but long-winded) piece on the inane Chomsky haters. abbc.com Hitchens also wrote a nice eulogy to the late, great Israel Shahak: thenation.com

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (4673)	9/26/2001 1:53:53 AM
From: Thomas M.	Respond to of 23908

I like this: LAMB: We can come back to Henry Kissinger possibly. There's so much to talk about, I want to move to Mother Teresa. You have a piece in here that was in The Nation in April 1992, called "Ghoul of Calcutta." Mother Teresa? HITCHENS: Mother Teresa, the ghoul of Calcutta. I always had real doubt in my mind as to whether there really was this saintly person. If you ask people why they think Mother Teresa's so great, they'll always say, "Isn't it true that she spends her time always helping out the poor of Calcutta?" But if you really push them, they don't know anything about her at all. They just take it on faith, as saints always are taken. So I went to Calcutta, actually for another reason. I thought while I was there I'd go and look her up, and I was rather appalled by what I found. She showed me around her mission and announced that the purpose of the mission is to run the campaign in Calcutta and Bengal against abortion and conception. As it happens, I have my doubts about abortion. I find I'm very squeamish on the subject, but one thing that Calcutta definitely does not need is a campaign waged by an Albanian Catholic missionary against the limitation of the population. It rather, to me, spoiled the effect of her charitable work. She was saying, actually, this is not charity; it's really just propaganda. I think the Vatican policy on population control is calamitous. So that aroused my curiosity anyway. It had been a bit of a disappointment meeting her then, and I didn't like her manners particularly, either, as she went around among the poor. Then I found her turning up as the defender of the Duvalier family in Haiti, saying how lovely they were and how gentle and beautiful. I found her turning up as Charles Keating's personal best friend in the Lincoln Savings & Loan scandal, taking a lot of money from his for a private plane, giving him blessings and crucifixes in return. I found her turning up in Albania where she's a supporter of a very extreme right nationalist party. And quite a few other such things. I thought, hey, I don't like any of these things singly or together, and, second, when does she ever get time for the poor old poor of Calcutta. She's forever on some, "scumbag's," Lear jet going around cashing in on everyone else's belief that she's a saint. I think this is probably how medieval religion was worked. You took the faithful as credulous, and you reckoned that they would believe whatever you said. LAMB: Let me just take her side for purposes of discussion. Let's say that she went to the Duvalier family and got money, went to Charles Keating and got money and moved it over to the poor. Wouldn't that be charity? HITCHENS: I don't think it's necessary for someone who is supposedly conse-crated to the mission of charity and who's world famous for it to ever have to beg for money. If she ever wanted it, she knows where to go for it. People would open their pockets and, I think, their hearts. The fact is, I don't know if she got any money from the Duvaliers. What she was doing was defending them as a dynasty in Haiti, and everyone knows what the record of the Duvalier family is. She did get money from Keating, and I actually ask in my piece, you know, would she care, would anyone care to say that they know where it's gone because she must have known or should have known that that money doesn't belong to Keating and doesn't belong to her. It's stolen money. But the fact is she was giving him in return various kinds of absolution in his campaigns, and I think this is because he started off life as morals cop. He was another of the prohibitionists who began his career as an anti-pornography person. She's evidently, it seems, on call for people with dubious characters of this kind. I just thought it was worth pointing out. I can't tell you the mail I got about it. If you touch the idea of sainthood, especially in this country, people feel you've taken something from them personally. I'm fascinated because we like to look down on other religious beliefs as being tribal and superstitious but never dare criticize our own. booknotes.org

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (4673)	10/10/2001 2:35:12 PM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 23908

Chomsky shreds Hitchens twice: zmag.org zmag.org Also, Hitchens is caught in this little trap: << In his two recent articles Hitchens is indignant at Sam Husseini and others for the "thought" (Hitchens puts it in quote marks to indicate its absurdity) that the attack on the WTC and Pentagon was rooted in U.S. policy. He quotes Sam's language that "The fascists like bin Laden could not get volunteers to stuff envelops if Israel had withdrawn from Jerusalem and...and the US stopped the sanctions and bombing of Iraq." This, Hitchens says, is not only "utterly rotten" but "rationalization" for the Islamic fascists. Actually, in an article written for the London Guardian in the immediate aftermath of the bombing (Sept. 13), and reprinted in In These Times, Hitchens himself wrote "It probably seems indecent to most people to ask if the United States has ever done anything to attract such awful hatred. Indeed, the very thought, for the present, is taboo" ("So This Is War," ITT, Oct. 15). In other words, asking such questions was not indecent and should not be taboo. But in the time between writing his Guardian/ITT piece and his Nation articles, Hitchens advanced to the view that even discussing such matters WAS "indecent," "taboo," and "utterly rotten." >> zmag.org Tom