Sam Harris: Letter to A Christian Nation (Entire Book) Pt. 1/12

This 'Letter' is a model of gentle, quiet, reasoned, well researched, rational, argument. It is open to challenge. In other words, the precise opposite, in every respect, of the 'wrath' of your 'God'.

The Global Psychois

On Holocaust Memorial Day 2008, a group of just under 100 people—Londoners and a few visitors —took a guided tour of the old Jewish East End. They visited, among other sites of interest, the birthplace of my old chum Lionel Bart, the author of Oliver! Three generations of schoolchildren have grown up singing Bart’s lyric:

Consider yourself

At ’ome!

Consider yourself

One of the family!

Those few dozen London Jews considered themselves at ’ome. But they weren’t. Not any more. The tour was abruptly terminated when the group was pelted with stones, thrown by “youths”—or to be slightly less evasive, in the current euphemism of Fleet Street, “Asian” youths. “If you go any further, you’ll die,” they shouted, in between the flying rubble.

A New Yorker who had just moved to Britain to start a job at the Metropolitan University had her head cut open and had to be taken to the Royal London Hospital at Whitechapel, causing her to miss the Holocaust Day “interfaith memorial service” at the East London Central Synagogue. Her friend, Eric Litwack from Canada, was also struck but did not require stitches. But if you hadn’t recently landed at Heathrow, it wasn’t that big a deal, not these days: Nobody was killed or permanently disfigured. And given the number of Jewish community events that now require security, perhaps Her Majesty’s Constabulary was right and these Londoners walking the streets of their own city would have been better advised to do so behind a police escort.

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A European Holocaust Memorial Day on which Jews are stoned sounds like a parody of the old joke that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. According to a 2005 poll by the University of Bielefeld, 62 percent of Germans “are sick of all the harping on about German crimes against the Jews”—which is a cheerfully straightforward way of putting it. Nevertheless, when it comes to “harping on,” these days it’s the Jews who are mostly on the receiving end. While we’re reprising old gags, here’s one a reader reminded me of a couple of years ago, during Israel’s famously “disproportionate” incursion into Lebanon: One day the U.N. Secretary General proposes that, in the interest of global peace and harmony, the world’s soccer players should come together and form one United Nations global soccer team.

“Great idea,” says his deputy. “Er, but who would we play?”

“Israel, of course.”

Ha-ha. It always had a grain of truth, now it’s the whole loaf.

“Israel is unfashionable,” a Continental foreign minister said to me a decade back. “But maybe Israel will change, and then fashions will change.” Fashions do change. But however Israel changes, this fashion won’t. The shift of most (non-American) Western opinion against the Jewish state that began in the 1970s was, as my Continental politician had it, simply a reflection of casting: Israel was no longer the underdog but the overdog, and why would that appeal to a post-war polytechnic Euro Left unburdened by Holocaust guilt?

Fair enough. Fashions change. But the new Judenhass is not a fashion, simply a stark reality that will metastasize in the years ahead and leave Israel isolated in the international “community” in ways that will make the first decade of this century seem like the good old days.

A few months after the curtailed Holocaust Day tour, I found myself in that particular corner of Tower Hamlets for the first time in years. Specifically, on Cable Street—the scene of a famous battle in 1936, when Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, in a crude exercise of political muscle, determined to march through the heart of Jewish East London. They were turned back by a mob of local Jews, Irish Catholic dockers, and Communist agitators, all standing under the Spanish Civil War slogan: “No Pasaran.” They shall not pass.

From “No Pasaran” to “If you go any further, you’ll die” is a story not primarily of anti-Semitism but of unprecedented demographic transformation. Beyond the fashionable “anti-Zionism” of the Euro Left is a starker reality: The demographic energy not just in Lionel Bart’s East End but in almost every Western European country is “Asian.” Which is to say, Muslim. A recent government statistical survey reported that the United Kingdom’s Muslim population is increasing ten times faster than the general population. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, and many other Continental cities from Scandinavia to the Côte d’Azur will reach majority Muslim status in the next few years.

Brussels has a Socialist mayor, which isn’t that surprising, but he presides over a caucus a majority of whose members are Muslim, which might yet surprise those who think we’re dealing with some slow, gradual, way-off-in-the-future process here. But so goes Christendom at the dawn of the third millennium: the ruling party of the capital city of the European Union is mostly Muslim.

There are generally two responses to this trend: The first is that it’s like a cast change in Cats or, perhaps more precisely, David Merrick’s all-black production of Hello, Dolly! Carol Channing and her pasty prancing waiters are replaced by Pearl Bailey and her ebony chorus, but otherwise the show is unchanged. Same set, same words, same arrangements: France will still be France, Germany Germany, Belgium Belgium.

The second response is that the Islamicization of Europe entails certain consequences, and it might be worth exploring what these might be. There are already many points of cultural friction—from British banks’ abolition of children’s “piggy banks” to the enjoining of public doughnut consumption by Brussels police during Ramadan. And yet on one issue there is remarkable comity between the aging ethnic Europeans and their young surging Muslim populations: A famous poll a couple of years back found that 59 percent of Europeans regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace.

Fifty-nine percent? What the hell’s wrong with the rest of you? Hey, relax: In Germany, it was 65 percent; Austria, 69 percent; the Netherlands, 74 percent. For purposes of comparison, in a recent poll of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—i.e., the “moderate” Arab world—79 percent of respondents regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. As far as I know, in the last year or two, they haven’t re-tested that question in Europe, possibly in case Israel now scores as a higher threat level in the Netherlands than in Yemen.

To be sure, there are occasional arcane points of dispute: one recalls, in the wake of the July 7 bombings, the then London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s somewhat tortured attempts to explain why blowing up buses in Tel Aviv is entirely legitimate whereas blowing up buses in Bloomsbury is not. Yet these are minimal bumps on a smooth glide path: The more Europe’s Muslim population grows, the more restive and disassimilated it becomes, the more enthusiastically the establishment embraces “anti-Zionism,” as if the sinister Jewess is the last virgin left to toss in the volcano—which, given the 13-year old “chavs” and “slappers” face down in pools of their own vomit in most British shopping centers of a Friday afternoon, may indeed be the case. For today’s Jews, unlike on Cable Street in 1936, there are no Catholic dockworkers or Communist agitators to stand shoulder to shoulder. In post-Christian Europe, there aren’t a lot of the former (practicing Catholics or practicing dockers), and as for the intellectual Left, it’s more enthusiastic in its support of Hamas than many Gazans.

To which there are many Israelis who would brusquely reply: So what? Pity the poor Jew who has ever relied on European “friends.” Yet there is a difference of scale between the well-established faculty-lounge disdain for “Israeli apartheid” and a mass psychosis so universal it’s part of the air you breathe. For a glimpse of the future, consider the (for the moment) bizarre circumstances of the recent Davis Cup First Round matches in Sweden. They had been scheduled long ago to be played in the Baltiska Hallen stadium in Malmo. Who knew which team the Swedes would draw? Could have been Chile, could have been Serbia. Alas, it was Israel.

Malmo is Sweden’s most Muslim city, and citing security concerns, the local council ordered the three days of tennis to be played behind closed doors. Imagine being Amir Hadad and Andy Ram, the Israeli doubles players, or Simon Aspelin and Robert Lindstedt, the Swedes. This was supposed to be their big day. But the vast stadium is empty, except for a few sports reporters and team officials. And just outside the perimeter up to 10,000 demonstrators are chanting, “Stop the match!” and maybe, a little deeper into the throng, they’re shouting, “We want to kill all Jews worldwide” (as demonstrators in Copenhagen, just across the water, declared just a few weeks earlier). Did Aspelin and Lindstedt wonder why they couldn’t have drawn some less controversial team, like Zimbabwe or Sudan? By all accounts, it was a fine match, thrilling and graceful, with good sportsmanship on both sides. Surely, such splendid tennis could have won over the mob, and newspapers would have reported that by the end of the match the Israeli players had the crowd with them all the way. But they shook ’em off at Helsingborg.

Do you remember the “road map” summit held in Jordan just after the U.S. invasion of Iraq? It seemed a big deal at the time: The leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the U.S. president, all the A-list dictators of the Arab League. Inside the swank resort, it was all very collegial, smiles and handshakes. Outside, flags fluttered—Jordan’s, America’s, Saudi Arabia’s, Egypt’s, Palestine’s. But not Israel’s. King Abdullah of Jordan had concluded it would be too provocative to advertise the Zionist Entity’s presence on Jordanian soil even at a summit supposedly boasting they were all on the same page. Malmo’s tennis match observed the same conventions: I’m sure the Swedish tennis wallahs were very gracious hosts behind the walls of the stockade, and the unmarked car to the airport was top of the line. How smoothly the furtive maneuvers of the Middle East transfer to the wider world.

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When Western governments are as reluctant as King Abdullah to fly the Star of David, those among the citizenry who choose to do so have a hard time. In Britain in January, while “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators were permitted to dress up as hook-nosed Jews drinking the blood of Arab babies, the police ordered counter-protesters to put away their Israeli flags. In Alberta, in the heart of Calgary’s Jewish neighborhood, the flag of Hizballah (supposedly a proscribed terrorist organization) was proudly waved by demonstrators, but one solitary Israeli flag was deemed a threat to the Queen’s peace and officers told the brave fellow holding it to put it away or be arrested for “inciting public disorder.” In Germany, a student in Duisburg put the Star of David in the window of an upstairs apartment on the day of a march by the Islamist group Milli Görüs, only to have the cops smash his door down and remove the flag. He’s now trying to get the police to pay for a new door. Ah, those Jews. It’s always about money, isn’t it?

Peter, the student in Duisberg, says he likes to display the Israeli flag because anti-Semitism in Europe is worse than at any other time since the Second World War. Which is true. But, if you look at it from the authorities’ point of view, it’s not about Jew-hatred; it’s a simple numbers game. If a statistically insignificant Jewish population gets upset, big deal. If the far larger Muslim population—and, in some French cities, the youth population (i.e., the demographic that riots) is already pushing 50 percent—you have a serious public-order threat on your hands. We’re beyond the anti-Semitic and into the ad hoc utilitarian: The King Abdullah approach will seem like the sensible way to avoid trouble. To modify the UN joke: Whom won’t we play? Israel, of course. Not in public.

One Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago, a group wearing “BOYCOTT ISRAEL” T-shirts entered a French branch of Carrefour, the world’s largest supermarket chain, and announced themselves. They then systematically advanced down every aisle examining every product, seizing all the items made in Israel and piling them into carts to take away and destroy. Judging from the video they made, the protesters were mostly Muslim immigrants and a few French leftists. But more relevant was the passivity of everyone else in the store, both staff and shoppers, all of whom stood idly by as private property was ransacked and smashed, and many of whom when invited to comment expressed support for the destruction. “South Africa started to shake once all countries started to boycott their products,” one elderly lady customer said. “So what you’re doing, I find it good.”

Others may find Germany in the ‘30s the more instructive comparison. “It isn’t silent majorities that drive things, but vocal minorities,” the Canadian public intellectual George Jonas recently wrote. “Don’t count heads; count decibels. All entities—the United States, the Western world, the Arab street—have prevailing moods, and it’s prevailing moods that define aggregates at any given time.” Last December, in a well-planned attack on iconic Bombay landmarks symbolizing power and wealth, Pakistani terrorists nevertheless found time to divert one-fifth of their manpower to torturing and killing a handful of obscure Jews helping the city’s poor in a nondescript building. If this was a territorial dispute over Kashmir, why kill the only rabbi in Bombay? Because Pakistani Islam has been in effect Arabized. Demographically, in Europe and elsewhere, Islam has the numbers. But ideologically, radical Islam has the decibels—in Turkey, in the Balkans, in Western Europe.

And the prevailing mood in much of the world makes Israel an easy sacrifice. Long before Muslims are a statistical majority, there will be three permanent members of the Security Council—Britain, France, Russia—for whom the accommodation of Islam is a domestic political imperative.

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On the heels of his call for the incorporation of Sharia within British law, the Archbishop of Canterbury gave an interview to the Muslim News praising Islam for making “a very significant contribution to getting a debate about religion into public life.” Well, that’s one way of putting it. The urge to look on the bright side of its own remorseless cultural retreat will intensify: Once Europeans have accepted a not entirely voluntary biculturalism, they will see no reason why Israel should not do the same, and they will embrace a one-state, one-man, one-vote solution for the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

The Muslim world has spent decades peddling the notion that the reason a vast oil-rich region stretching thousands of miles is politically deformed and mired in grim psychoses is all because of a tiny strip of turf barely wider than my New Hampshire township. It will make an ever more convenient scapegoat for the problems of a far vaster territory from the mountains of Morne to the Urals. There was a fair bit of this in the days after 9/11. As Richard Ingrams wrote on the following weekend in the London Observer: “Who will dare to damn Israel?”

Well, take a number and get in line. The dust had barely settled on the London Tube bombings before a reader named Derrick Green sent me a congratulatory e-mail: “I bet you Jewish supremacists think it is Christmas come early, don’t you? Incredibly, you are now going to get your own way even more than you did before, and the British people are going to be dragged into more wars for Israel.”

So it will go. British, European, and even American troops will withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, and a bomb will go off in Madrid or Hamburg or Manchester, and there will be nothing left to blame except Israeli “disproportion.” For the remnants of European Jewry, the already discernible migration of French Jews to Quebec, Florida, and elsewhere will accelerate. There are about 150,000 Jews in London today—it’s the thirteenth biggest Jewish city in the world. But there are approximately one million Muslims. The highest number of Jews is found in the 50-54 age group; the highest number of Muslims are found in the four-years-and-under category. By 2025, there will be Jews in Israel, and Jews in America, but not in many other places. Even as the legitimacy of a Jewish state is rejected, the Jewish diaspora—the Jewish presence in the wider world—will shrivel.

And then, to modify Richard Ingrams, who will dare not to damn Israel? There’ll still be a Holocaust Memorial Day, mainly for the pleasures it affords to chastise the new Nazis. As Anthony Lipmann, the Anglican son of an Auschwitz survivor, wrote in 2005: “When on 27 January I take my mother’s arm—tattoo number A-25466—I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah.” Jenin?

You can see why they’ll keep Holocaust Day on the calendar: In an age when politicians are indifferent or downright hostile to Israel’s “right to exist,” it’s useful to be able to say, “But some of my best photo-ops are Jewish.”

The joke about Mandatory Palestine was that it was the twice-promised land. But isn’t that Europe, too? And perhaps Russia and maybe Canada, a little ways down the line? Two cultures jostling within the same piece of real estate. Not long ago, I found myself watching the video of another “pro-Palestinian” protest in central London with the Metropolitan Police retreating up St. James’s Street to Piccadilly in the face of a mob hurling traffic cones and jeering, “Run, run, you cowards!” and “Allahu akbar!” You would think the deluded multi-culti progressives would understand: In the end, this isn’t about Gaza, this isn’t about the Middle East; it’s about them. It may be some consolation to an ever-lonelier Israel that, in one of history’s bleaker jests, in the coming Europe the Europeans will be the new Jews.

Martin Amis is No Racist

In his G2 cover story on Monday, Ronan Bennett was wrong to condemn Martin Amis for his comments about Islam, argues Christopher Hitchens

Wednesday November 21, 2007
The Guardian

Ronan Bennett's clumsy tirade against Martin Amis in G2 on Monday will not have been a complete waste of space if it allows us to revisit the words "discriminate" or "discrimination". In a public quarrel that originated between two professors of English (Amis and Terry Eagleton) it ought not to be necessary to remind people that these terms are, at root, complimentary. To have a discriminating palate, for example, is to enjoy good taste. I have argued for years that the concept is absurd when applied to racists. "Discrimination" is something that they just can't manage. Indeed, it is the very thing of all things that they cannot, by definition, manage. A racist is a racist precisely because he can't distinguish between a Jew and another Jew, or an Asian or West Indian or Chechen. The "out" groups are all made up of generalised amalgams and there can be no exceptions.

Thus to accuse Martin Amis of being a racist is to say that he can't tell the difference between, say, one Irishman and another. Now, a moment's thought on the part of his worst enemy would reveal that accusation to be silly and vicious, and baseless on its face. I am not writing as Amis's worst enemy. In fact, I am writing as a friend who also took issue with what he said, in unscripted conversation with a Times reporter, a short while after the ghastly assault by Muslim fanatics on our public transport system. (By the way, yes, I do think that the word "fanatic" requires that prefix in this case.) I wrote my article last autumn and it was published in the Manhattan City Journal last January, so Mr Bennett need not congratulate himself so warmly on being the only one apart from Eagleton with the nerve to raise the issue.

I grouped what Amis had said with two other statements that had been made by people I know less well. Jack Straw, a humane old social democrat from way back and a stern foe of racism, had said that he preferred his female constituents to be unveiled when they came to see him. Sam Harris, a Jewish warrior against theocracy and bigotry of all stripes, had written that it was often fascists who made the most sense when talking about immigration to Europe. The last statement had truly shocked me in the way that the Amis and Straw remarks had not, and I was therefore writing about the way in which the battle over Islamism was making good people wonder aloud about saying or thinking unpleasant or ungenerous things.

This is exactly the bull that Amis was taking by the horns. You don't have to know him, or for that matter to be an expert on Jonathan Swift, to see that the harshness Amis was canvassing was not in the least a recommendation, but rather an experiment in the limits of permissible thought. As he once wrote in another connection: "What am I to do with thoughts like these?" In that celebrated essay, he was rehearsing the idea of killing his wife and children to spare them the horror of a nuclear groundburst. Critics as literal-minded as Eagleton and Bennett would no doubt detect, in this, a buried and lurid fantasy of murder and infanticide. (By the way, when it comes to Eagletonian literal-mindedness, I have no bitterness because I am, of this infinite resource, an unintended beneficiary. In the same essay that initially attacked Amis, Eagleton also slammed me for disappointing him and not, after all, becoming the George Orwell of my generation. I have instead, he snorts, become the Evelyn Waugh! How is one to come to grips with a man so crude in his sneers that his idea of an insult is to compare me to one of the greatest novelists of the past century?)

Failing entirely to "discriminate", Bennett places criticism of Islamism on all fours with anti-semitism, hostility to the Irish, and to other xenophobic moments in our past. And yes, of course, we remember those bombs that the Jewish refugees from Russian czarism placed in our streets. We remember how (before they became good old assimilated types) they ululated praise for suicide from their synagogues, demanded the segregation of the sexes, insisted on special prayer-rooms at work, exemptions from certain laws and on the censorship of newspapers that didn't "respect" Judaism. One would have to have a capacity for fantasy of something like that order to believe in the Ronan Bennett universe of modern persecution where "those who point to the illegality of Israeli occupation are anti-semites. Those who protest against the war in Iraq are al-Qaida sympathisers and moral relativists." In which known world is that happening?

On the other hand, the world where honour killings and forced marriages happen is real, and so is the world in which mosques are distributing cassettes and DVDs calling for the murder of Jews and Hindus. (So much for precious multiculturalism.) The world where one holy book is sovereign, and only to be understood as written in one exclusive tongue. The world where djinns and devils are real, and where women are unclean and homosexuals are unspeakable, where novelists can be sentenced to death and where bombs can be left to slaughter the sort of "slags" who might go clubbing in London. And the damage that those bombs were designed to inflict was ... indiscriminate.

This is not the only manner in which Bennett gives himself away. He refers to the "Muslim dead from Iraq to Afghanistan" and conscripts them for what he imagines is his side. How dare he? Has he even begun to tot up the number of Muslims murdered by the Taliban? Or the total slaughtered in Iraq since al-Qaida began its campaign to level the Shi'a mosques? Does he think that the forces of the Northern Alliance, or the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, who fight on "our" side against barbarism, are somehow inauthentic Muslims because they prefer Bush and Blair to Mullah Omar or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? Something in his tone makes me suspect that this may well be his problem, just as I might have preferred him to mention that it was also the Provisional IRA, and not just the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act, that left "the Irish community in Britain feeling like a suspect nation".

Bennett may have the ghost of a point when he insists on a sharper distinction between Islam and "Islamism" but if he wants more discrimination here he must learn not to muddy the same waters himself. Does he think Muslims are a "race", or not, and if not, how can he trade down from the already vague and dubious word "Islamophobia" to the toxic accusation of "racism" itself?

I have criticised both Mark Steyn and Oriana Fallaci for writing too obsessively about demography when it comes to Muslim immigration. But whenever I criticise any reactionary religious practice, I am at once accused myself of "insulting a billion Muslims". And it's not hard to find Islamist websites that boast of a demographic conquest to come, for the votaries of the prophet. So, which is it to be? Who is supposed to dissociate what, and from whom? This is going to take all our cultural and political intelligence and, indeed, our "sensitivity". But I'm afraid the faithful will have to get used to the idea that I, too, can be "offended" and that I, too, have deep and unalterable convictions. And it is much worse than pointless, in the face of genuine worry about the spread of real bigotry and awful violence, to try to pin the accusation of prejudice on those who are honestly attempting to ventilate the question, and to clarify it.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author, most recently, of God is not Great: the Case Against Religion.

Freedom of Speech in London

In the name of combating 'Islamophobia', Ken Livingstone has launched an attack on press freedom that reveals his fear of the public.

Brendan O’Neill
15 November 2007

What kind of leader launches an open assault on the press, accusing it of jeopardising public safety and demanding that it put its ‘house in order’? What sort of ruler proposes ‘guidelines’ to the press on what stories it should cover, and even worse, what kind of language it should use to cover them, what kind of people it should employ, and what kind of values it should uphold and communicate to the mass of the population? Kim Jong-il, perhaps? Saddam Hussein, before he was chased into his hole in the ground and later executed? How about Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London?

This week, ‘Red Ken’, as some people insist on calling him, launched a report on British media coverage of ‘Muslim issues’. Titled The Search for Common Ground: Muslims, Non-Muslims and the UK Media, the report was commissioned by Livingstone’s Greater London Authority. It explores the alleged rise of Islamophobia in the media. And in the name of tackling the apparent spread of prejudice through the papers (especially tabloid ones), Livingstone and his supporters have crossed a line normally only transgressed by despots: they’re using their political clout to try to shape the media in their own image. Strip away all the PC lingo about ‘protecting Muslims’, and the London mayor’s latest initiative comes across as an intolerable attack on press freedom.

The report argues that Islamophobia is rampant in the British press, and that new attitudes amongst journalists and codes of ethics will be required to deal with it. In his foreword, Livingstone argues that there is an increasingly ‘negative portrayal of Muslims and Islam in the media’, which is helping to ‘[sow] divisions among London’s diverse communities’ (pxi). Elsewhere, the report argues that such coverage means ‘Muslims understandably feel vulnerable to hate crimes and unlawful discrimination’; indeed, the ‘drip-drip-drip’ repetition of ‘abusive and emotive language’ about Muslims could lead to ‘more hate crimes and acts of discrimination than otherwise’ (p128). In short, the media’s irresponsible coverage of Muslim issues is a threat to social cohesion and a potential harbinger of violence.

In fact, the report uses questionable, one might even say dodgy methodology to show that the media are continually ‘abusing’ Muslims. For chapter 2 – ‘A normal week? Threats and crises in Britain and the world’ – the report’s authors select a ‘random’ week in 2006 and assess the newspapers’ coverage of Muslim affairs during that week. They chose Monday 8 May to Sunday 14 May 2006. During this week there were apparently 352 articles on Muslim-related issues in all the mainstream daily newspapers. The report’s authors found that of these 352 articles, 91 per cent were ‘negative’ in their portrayal of Muslims and Islam, and only four per cent were judged to be positive. Five per cent were judged neutral. This is evidence, the report claims, of the ‘demonisation’ of Muslims by a ‘torrent’ of negative stories (p18).

It pays – a lot – to look more closely at how this research was carried out. First, the random week selected by the researchers happened to be the week in which the government published its report on the 7/7 bombings. That report came out on Friday 12 May. Not surprisingly, there was a huge amount of press coverage, and not surprisingly most of it was ‘negative’, in the sense that it was about four British-born Muslims who blew up themselves and 52 others in London a year earlier; even individuals of an old Stalinist bent, such as those who stack’s Livingstone’s GLA, would find it hard to put a ‘positive’ spin on such a story. Of the study’s 352 newspaper stories related to Muslims, 69 – or 19.6 per cent – were about the 7/7 bombings (p26).

What’s more, the researchers made a broad sweep indeed when selecting articles ‘about Muslims’. They counted all articles that included the words ‘Islam’, ‘Muslims’, ‘Islamic’, ‘Islamist’, ‘Sunni’, ‘Shia’, or the words ‘radical’, ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘extremist’ if the ‘context was such that it was reasonable to assume that an association with Islam or Muslims would be made’. In other words, even an article about an ‘extremist’ online al-Qaeda sympathiser, say, could be selected as a negative story about Muslims, even if it did not say anything about his religious identity (p17). The researchers also included articles where the names of people were obviously Muslim, ‘even if their religious identity was not explicitly stated’. This leads to a bizarre situation where articles about the sentencing of the former boxer Prince Naseem for dangerous driving are included as part of the torrent of negative stories about Muslims. Naseem was sentenced to 15 months in prison in the week selected by the researchers (on 12 May 2006), and because his name (Naseem Hamed) is obviously Muslim, and because the stories (on dangerous driving) are obviously negative, they are added to the pile of evidence that the media are abusing Muslims. Of the 352 articles selected by the researchers, 15, or 4.3 per cent, were ‘negative’ stories about Prince Naseem (p26).

Even worse, in selecting articles that include the words ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shia’, the researchers included all of that random week’s coverage of the bloody mess that is postwar Iraq. May 2006 was the bloodiest month of the year so far in Iraq: according to the Iraq Body Count website, between 2,000 and 2,100 people were killed in Iraq during that month. Not surprisingly, articles about Iraq come second only to articles about 7/7 in the researchers’ list of ‘negative stories on Muslims’. Of their 352 selected articles, 49 – or 13.9 per cent – were news articles about the violence and instability in Iraq. Here, even reporting about a bloody foreign war, which might not necessarily mention ‘Muslims’ but by necessity mentions the words ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shia’, is cited as an example of irresponsible and abusive media content on Muslims.

What are the researchers saying? That coverage of things like Iraq and 7/7 needs to be more positive? That journalists who write on war and rare acts of terrorism should mind their language lest they offend Muslims? Or more to the point, lest they offend those who fancy themselves, through the power of self-selection rather than anything so grubby as an electoral process, to be the representatives of Muslims. The contributors to Livingstone’s report include Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain, Mohammed Abdul Aziz of the Forum Against Islamophobia and Racism, and Tariq Hameed, who writes reports for the Muslim Council of Britain on how journalists should cover Muslim affairs. Are these individuals so narcissistic that they read about the debacle in Iraq and think only of their personal feelings?

In labelling as ‘negative’ and ‘abusive’ even stories about war and terrorism, the report’s authors show their deeply censorious streak. They are effectively updating, in PC terminology, the old BBC man Martyn Lewis’s demand in the 1990s for more ‘happy news’. Where Lewis said news reporters should seek out ‘good news stories’ as well as bad news stories, effectively spreading the ‘And Finally’ bit of News at Ten across the whole news agenda, Ken’s researchers label everything from coverage of Prince Naseem to the war in Iraq as overly negative, and demand more positive stories on Muslim affairs. This is a demand for the press to overhaul its agenda, for journalists to shift their focus, change their language, and, as the report says, ‘contribute to informed discussion and debate amongst Muslims and non-Muslims about ways of working together to maintain and develop Britain as a multicultural, multifaith democracy’ (pxiv). In short, the press should do the kind of thing that Livingstone wants it to. It speaks volumes about Livingstone’s arrogance and contempt for public debate that he would like to, if only he had the power, turn the press into an offshoot of his political fiefdom.

So, the demonisation of Muslims in the media does not normally consist of articles attacking or slurring Muslims – rather it consists of news reports on Iraq, 7/7, Prince Naseem, as well as Iran, Palestine and numerous other newsworthy issues. Thus, the authors of the report are forced to trawl the dodgier regions of the tabloid media for what they consider to be truly disturbing examples of anti-Muslim prejudice. In chapter 3 – ‘Britishness is being destroyed: worries in a changing world’ – they flag up examples of the media abuse of Muslims. The main example – make sure you are sitting comfortably – appeared on the front page of the Daily Express in October 2005. It was headlined: ‘HOGWASH: Now the PC brigade bans piggy banks in case they upset Muslims.’ The report spends five pages discussing and dissecting this silly but fairly typical ‘PC gone mad’ story that the vast majority of us will have shrugged off at the time and certainly forgotten about since. In total, chapter 3 breaks down what the authors admit are ‘four small episodes’, ‘each relatively trivial in itself’ – that is, all of them are tabloid-style ‘PC gone mad’ stories – yet cites them as evidence that there is an ‘attack on Muslims’ in the media (p31).

The authors then get really desperate. Unable to find many clear expressions of serious anti-Muslim prejudice in the mainstream, they move on to the online discussion boards of the tabloid newspapers. On the Daily Express website they find that web-users have written things like ‘I am sick to the back teeth of hearing about Muslims this and Muslims that’; ‘The Islamic tail is wagging the British bulldog’; and ‘Instead of assimilating into our culture, Muslims whine and complain… They should return to the homeland of their beloved prophet Mohammed.’ (p11) Clearly some of these statements were written by individuals with noxious views. But material posted on the free-for-all discussion boards of the Daily Express website hardly represents a mainstream torrent of abuse. If I took seriously everything that was ever said about me on online discussion boards, I’d never leave the house. That the researchers had to trawl the gutters of the World Wide Web in order to find abuse of Muslims (and even here, the abuse cited is fairly mild) shows that ‘Islamophobia’ is not a mainstream or powerful prejudice. Yet the researchers seem desperate to demonstrate that it is. That is because this report looks to me less like an attempt to tackle real prejudice than to propose some quite authoritarian ideas under the guise of ‘tackling Islamophobia’.

This report demonstrates what the phenomenon of Islamophobia is actually about today. There has been no public groundswell in anti-Muslim prejudice, or in anti-Muslim violence; rather, the spectre of ‘Islamophobia’ exists in the minds of the elite, who look upon Britain’s white working-class communities as an unpredictable blob liable to carry out acts of violence against Muslims if they read an article about piggy banks being banned or Prince Naseem being jailed. The Islamophobia agenda, as pushed by central government, the GLA, the police, various self-selected Muslim community groups and, as it happens, large sections of the media itself, is underpinned by a poisonous view of the masses as irrational and given to violent outbursts, and Muslims as pathetic victims who need heroic Ken and his handpicked Muslim community warriors to protect them. That is why this report focuses mostly on the tabloids, because, as it says, these papers are read by ‘millions’ of people. Those horrible, hard-to-predict millions; we can’t have them reading inflammatory material, can we? (pxvii)

The report says that media coverage may lead to increased violence, yet all the evidence suggests that there has not been a rise in anti-Muslim attacks. At the end of last year, the Crown Prosecution Service revealed that in 2005-2006 – in the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings, when politicians, the police and others predicted there would be an anti-Muslim pogrom – there were only 43 cases of religiously aggravated crime, 18 of them against Muslims (or ‘perceived’ Muslims). This represented a decline from 23 anti-Muslim crimes in 2004-2005 (1). It is the irrational fear of public opinion that is widespread in the GLA and elsewhere that leads some to see a connection between fairly ordinary media coverage of important events and a possible rise in violence. The truth is that Livingstone’s desire to police the language that journalists use, just as central government has tried to curb the language all of us use in relation to ‘religious hatred’, does nothing to rejuvenate or improve communuty relations or public life; instead it allows ideas to fester, unchallenged.

Common Ground, with its strange methodology, cliquish community group input and fear of tabloids and tabloid readers, ends by calling for an overhaul of the media. It calls for ‘codes of professional conduct and style guides about use of terminology’; for the employment of ‘more journalists of Muslim heritage who can more accurately reflect the views and experiences of Muslim communities’; and for the Commission for Equality and Human Rights and the government’s Department for Communities and Local Government to focus on ‘combating anti-Muslim prejudice in the media’ and in ‘the general climate of public opinion’ (p133). These are explicit demands for increased government intervention into the press, and anyone who believes in the freedom of the press should rigorously oppose them and hope that the government ignores them.

Of course there are vast problems with the British press, its tendency to scaremonger about the threat of terrorism amongst them. Yet as Karl Marx, history’s most passionate and consistent defender of freedom of the press, argued, a ‘bad’ free press is better than a ‘good’ controlled press. Marx said: ‘The free press remains good even when its products are bad, because these products are deviations from the nature of a free press, [while] the censored press remains bad, even when its products are good, because these products are only good insofar as they represent the free press within the censored press’ (2). Marx ridiculed nineteenth-century European rulers who argued that the press should be restricted because it threatened the ‘public good’ and who called on newspapers to hire only ‘respectable’ individuals whose ‘position and character guarantee the seriousness of their activities and the loyalty of their thinking’ (3). Livingstone, if he had the power, would do precisely these two things. He argues that the media is ‘sowing divisions’ and ‘harming social cohesion’ – that is, threatening public safety – and his report goes so far as to suggest who the media should employ: more Muslims, who apparently have the expertise and the loyalty to uphold the multicultural vision.

There is something archaically tyrannical in Livingstone’s vision for the press: on the basis of questionable findings, he and his supporters express their desire to cajole the media into promoting the Livingstone vision for society, which is the ‘building and maintenance of Britain as a multicultural society’ (pxiii). If Livingstone got his way, it would represent an explicit politicisation of the media, though it would be done under the guise of representing the interests of Muslim communities and the British people more broadly. Yet as Marx said, in a controlled or censored media, the government ‘hears only its own voice, knows that it hears only its own voice, and is yet fixed on the delusion to hear the voice of the people...’ (4) The press should remain free from all forms of delusional interference by the authorities. Our current bad media – fairly free, messy, a bit mad, but which represents at least an aspiration to independence and objectivity – is a million times better than Livingstone’s vision of a calm, slavish and unquestioning ‘good media’ could ever be.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his website here.

(1) See Hands up if you’re suffering from Islamofatigue, by Brendan O’Neill

(2) Communication and Freedom: Karl Marx on Press Freedom and Censorship, Hanno Hardt, The Public, Vol.7 (2000)

(3) Communication and Freedom: Karl Marx on Press Freedom and Censorship, Hanno Hardt, The Public, Vol.7 (2000)

(4) Communication and Freedom: Karl Marx on Press Freedom and Censorship, Hanno Hardt, The Public, Vol.7 (2000)

Amis launches scathing response to accusations of Islamophobia

The Independent

12th October 2007

Martin Amis defended himself yesterday against allegations of Islamophobia, insisting it was necessary to "build all the bridges we can" with moderate Muslims, who he said constituted the majority within the faith.

Outlining his views in a letter to The Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who on Monday wrote in an article that the author was "with the beasts" when it came to dealing with Islam, Amis denied the accusations, insisting the remarks from which she had drawn her conclusions had been "distorted" in an article written by his colleague Professor Terry Eagleton.

"It is a dull business, correcting Eagleton's distortions, but this is the work he is obliging me to do," wrote Amis in the letter, published below in full.

"The anti-Muslim measures he says I 'advocated' I merely adumbrated, not 'in an essay' ('he wrote', 'wrote Amis'– each of these is a little lie), but in a long interview with the press."

In the interview, Amis said: "The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not let them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children..."

The remarks, originally published in August 2006, resurfaced this month when Eagleton, professor of English literature at Manchester University, where Amis has recently accepted a position teaching creative writing, used the interview as the basis for an article attacking Amis's alleged argument as a means of "hounding and humiliating [Muslims] as a whole [so] they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man's law". Eagleton, one of Britain's leading Marxist academics, concluded: "There seems something mildly defective about his logic."

The academic's disdain for Amis and his ideas had an earlier airing in a new introduction to his book Ideology: An Introduction in which he described the writer's father, Kingsley, as a "racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals" – adding :"Amis fils has clearly learnt more from him than how to turn a shapely phrase."

Amis's decision yesterday to write to Alibhai-Brown follows her intervention in the bitter academic spat in her weekly column. Under the headline "Expel the Muslim fanatics who want conflict", Alibhai-Brown recalled sharing a drink with the writer at last year's Cheltenham Festival – when, she said, on the face of it they should have agreed on ways of tackling Islamic terrorism in the UK. "He has pitched himself against demonic Muslims and is at war with them too," she wrote.

However, Alibhai-Brown said, having read the remarks quoted in Eagleton's essay, farfrom occupying common ground on the issue, Amis was "with the beasts" when it came to dealing with Islam, with "the Muslim-baiters and haters, these days as likely to come from the Groucho and Garrick clubs as the nasty, secret venues used by neo-fascists." She said Amis was "another kind of threat to society".

THE LETTER...

Dear Yasmin,

Yes, I remember those drinks we had at the Cheltenham Festival last year – just the four of us, you and Mr Brown, me and Ms Fonseca. (You enjoyed a Ribena, as I recall, while I addressed myself to a powerful scotch.) That night you revealed, inter alia, that you were Shia; and, as far as I understand it, the Shia minority speaks for the more dreamy and poetic face of Islam, the more lax and capacious (tolerant, for example, of representations of the human form), the more spiritual (in the general sense of that word), as opposed to the Sunnis, whose approach is known to be stricter and more legalistic. Your Shia identity endeared you to me, and made me feel protective, because Islamism, in most of its manifestations, not only wants to kill me – it wants to kill you.

When you write that I am "with the beasts" on Islamic questions, it is because you've been listening, rather dreamily perhaps, to Professor Terry Eagleton. Now Eagleton, Yasmin, has a chair at Manchester University, where I have recently taken up an enjoyable post, and he is a man of a redundant but familiar type: an ideological relict, unable to get out of bed in the morning without the dual guidance of God and Karl Marx. More remarkably, he combines a cruising hostility with an almost neurotic indifference to truth; on the matter of checking his facts, he is, to be frank, an embarrassment to the academic profession. But his human need is simple enough: he wants attention to be paid to his self-righteousness – righteousness being his particular brand of vanity.

It is a dull business, correcting Eagleton's distortions, but this is the work he is obliging me to do. The anti-Muslim measures he says I "advocated" I merely adumbrated, not "in an essay" ("he wrote", "wrote Amis" – each of these is an untruth), but in a long interview with the press. It was a thought experiment, or a mood experiment, and the remarks were preceded by the following: "There's a definite urge – don't you have it? – to say... [etc, etc]." I felt that urge, for a day or two. My mood, I admit, was bleak – how I longed, Yasmin, for your soothing hand on my brow! It was, in its way, one of the bitterest moments, one of the moments of wormwood, in the strange tale that began five years earlier, in September 2001.

The press interview took place in the immediate aftermath of the foiled plot (August 2006) to obliterate 10 commercial jets with explosives put together in transit. Which would have resulted in the deaths of another 3,000 random Westerners, the majority of them women and children (these were summer flights across the North Atlantic). Human beings, born of women, caressed such thoughts in their minds.

There were two additional depressants. At least one of the alleged would-be mass murderers had taken the trouble to convert to Islam, suggesting that the exterminatory virus was about to mutate, like bird flu. And I'm sure you remember, Yasmin, that passengers on this route were suddenly forbidden to take books on the eight-hour flight – a resonant symbolic victory for the forces of ignorance, humourlessness, literalism, boredom and misery.

Anyway, the mood, the retaliatory "urge" soon evaporated, and I went back to feeling that we must, of course, build all the bridges we can between ourselves and the Muslim majority, which we know to be moderate. Moderate, and mute. The quietism is perhaps no mystery. In 15th-century Spain, not many people, I imagine, were proclaiming that the Inquisition had gone too far. The extremists, for now, have the monopoly of violence, intimidation, and self-righteousness. Meanwhile, I don't want to stripsearch you, Yasmin, or do anything else that would trouble or even momentarily surprise your dignity, or that of any other eirenic Muslim.

People like Eagleton are the nearest thing we have to the "iron mullahs": he is, in other words, a deluded flailer and stirrer. He recently did a similar job on my old mucker Sir Salman Rushdie; and the rigged-up spat ended with a helpless apology from Manchester. I don't know, or can't remember, how you felt about the knighthood. My father (also lazily and cornily defamed by Eagleton) said of his KBE: "It's not too little, but it is too late." An anachronistic award, perhaps – though one fully deserved by the author of the triumphant Shalimar the Clown. The "storm" that followed the announcement was unforeseen by everybody, including the Fourth Estate (which then hollered on about how "inevitable" it was). You see, time had advanced, in the West, since 1989. Time moves more slowly in Iran and Pakistan. As I don't need to tell you, Yasmin, there is something the matter with the Islamic clock.

You wrong your own intelligence when you write that atheism is another form of fanaticism. This notion is a philosophical non-starter. Adherence, however "moderate", to a holy book that recommends (for instance) the murder of apostates and the beating of women (on suspicion of disobedience) carries certain consequences. Whereas nothing follows from atheism. With atheism, there is no what-next.

I am off to Cheltenham tomorrow afternoon. And I hope to see you at the bar. With all best wishes to you and your husband,

Martin

Lawyers Sap Our Will to Combat Terrorism

Michael Burleigh
The Times
27th July 2007

Many jihadis seek to create a global caliphate, ruled by Sharia. At best, Christians, Hindus, and Jews would live in a state of submission tantamount to second-class citizenship. If they got above themselves, they would suffer the persecutions Islamists visited on the Coptic Christians of Egypt. The rule of Islamists has resulted in murderous chaos – 150,000 died in Algeria during the 1990s when madmen decided that most of the Muslim population were apostates. The Taleban anti-state so ruined Afghanistan that Americans joked that they had to bomb it forwards to the Stone Age. There are significant numbers of people living in Britain who wish to visit such chaos on us.

This is the backdrop to the debate about anti-terrorism legislation. As usual lawyers talk to lawyers, including those overrepresented in our political class. Overlooking that our greatest right is to life, civil libertarians are exercised about proposals to extend detention of suspects from 28 to 56 days.

Shami Chakrabarti, the barrister whom the BBC assiduously promotes as the voice of a presumed liberal consensus, will widen her Diana-like eyes in outrage, while Amnesty will mutter darkly about internment. Then we’ll hear from Gareth Peirce – the Provos’ and now the jihadis’ lawyer of choice – or her business rival Mudassur Arani, whose website advises Muslims how to deny cooperation with M15. Ms Arani was recently exercised by an attack on Dhiren Barot, the British al-Qaeda terrorist, by a fellow prison inmate. She wants jihadi prisoners all kept together, doubtless so that within ten minutes of such consolidation, she would be whining about a British Guantanamo, from where, say, Clive Stafford Smith, would soon relay lurid terrorist tales of torture to Channel 4 News.

Since activist lawyers routinely usurp a moral high ground vacated by a lazy liberalism, it seems almost vulgar to point out that at least one terrorist group – the Baader-Meinhof gang – was co-founded by a lawyer, Horst Mahler (nowadays a neo-Nazi), while Lynne Stewart, defence counsel to blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, is serving a prison sentence for helping him to communicate from his prison cell with his Egyptian followers.

Now that Gordon Brown has rejected the proposal of Lord Carlile of Berriew, QC, to give judges the powers to extend periods of detention, on the understandable ground that senior judges sabotaged the system of control orders after freeing the Belmarsh detainees, perhaps his lordship could get the Law Society to focus on its own nest?

Some of Mr Brown’s proposals announced this week in the Commons make sense, although they are hopelessly overdue. The Tories have long argued for a dedicated border police, staffed with officers on serious salaries. Instead of which we are going to get an agency mainly staffed by low-grade Customs officers. Electronic passenger screening is being introduced after the US warned us that it may introduce visa requirements for Anglo-Pakistanis on the ground that you don’t stop Jaguars when a Toyota has been stolen. Belated steps are being taken to secure strategic sites, sports grounds and shopping malls, as well as, tardily again, to hook up our immigration computers with Europol’s databank of seven million lost or stolen passports.

Another proposal briefly floated was to turn a few circuit judges into European-style investigative magistrates. One can’t quite imagine these claret-faced old buffers in the role of Jean-Louis Brugière, a French judge whose pursuit of Islamists led to his being dubbed “the sheriff”, and not only because of the Magnum revolver he had under his jacket.

One of the puzzles of our time is why Britain scrupulously adheres to the Human Rights Act, when our allies and partners systematically flout the European Convention on Human Rights. Talk of human rights abuses invariably focuses on the US, with sneering TV documentaries about Guantanamo or CIA “extraordinary rendition”. But on much of the Continent they don’t allow civil liberty lawyers to turn terrorism into a risk-free activity.

When the Socialist Interior Minister of Spain organised a campaign of assassinating Eta terrorists across the border in France during the 1990s, he was following in the footsteps of French governments that had routinely killed FLN and OAS arms traders in the 1960s. Getting Spain’s message, France began deporting Eta suspects to places such as Papua New Guinea, and has since been repatriating radical Islamist clerics. The Germans, likewise, did not hesitate to deport a Turkish imam on grounds of national security, even though he had lived in Germany for 30 years. The former German Interior Minister, Otto Schily, once a lawyer for Baader-Meinhof defendants, cryptically remarked of the jihadis: “Those who love death can have it.”

While we agonise about 28 or 56 days custody, it is not uncommon for terrorist suspects in France to be held in preventive detention for four or five years before their case goes to court. The use of intelligence intercept evidence in courts is being debated here, but the Italian security services have long made transcripts of this material available, so revealing the lying cynicism with which, for example, Milan-based Arab jihadis regard European asylum laws. And then there is the internet, one of the key means of radicalising Muslims. Wolfgang Schäuble, the German Interior Minister, wheelchair-bound since a 1990 assassination attempt, has argued recently in favour of hacking into the computers of Islamist radicals. We can’t even manage to shut down jihadi websites or to prohibit subversive organisations, such as Hizb ut-Tahir, from operating on university campuses where the dons think they are dealing with the usual middle-class radicals.

If Mr Brown’s anti-terrorism measures seem ignorant of what our fellow Europeans practise routinely, they also reflect an outmoded habit of separating domestic and foreign policy. Why is foreign aid not contingent upon warning recipient states that they will forfeit it if clerics they subsidise preach hatred of the West? Why aren’t we helping Afghanistan or Pakistan to build secular alternatives to the Saudi-financed madrassas where children are brainwashed with cartoon Jew killers? If this is a neo-Cold War, why are we failing to help the four fifths of Muslims who are not from the Middle East to assert themselves against that demented region?

The predictable racket between rival lawyers does not even begin to address the serious questions involved if we don’t wish to live in that grim caliphate or to be murdered by hysterical fanatics.

Michael Burleigh’s most recent book is Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to al-Qaeda

God is Not Great

(1) Janice Turner
The Times
May 30, 2007

The polemical journalist Christopher Hitchens is more read in America than in his native UK – but that is about to change with his vitriolic new book attacking religion

As styled by central casting, Christopher Hitchens is wearing a cream linen foreign correspondent suit and Rayban Aviators. Small and a bit pudgy, he has his shirt unbuttoned to reveal his grizzled chest-rug, known by admirers as The Pelt of the Hitch. He greets me with highly wrought courtesy and the kind of long, blatant up-and-down appraisal that younger men of his class are now too egalitarian to try at business meetings.

Perhaps no journalist is so admired by his peers, in part because he has actually pulled off the life we imagined our profession would afford. Dashing off 1,000 épater le bourgeois words before a two-bottle lunch, blagging through war-zone checkpoints, starry parties, whisky-fuelled late-night geo-politics and crackling media feuds. Yet as most of hackdom has knuckled down to colourless, desk-bound sobriety, there is Hitchens, still larging it, a 3-D cartoon of what we might all have been, given his ego and intellect, his brass neck and neoprene liver.

He is Hunter S. Thompson cut with Gore Vidal, has broken America – as Vanity Fair columnist and a pop-up TV pundit – without even chipping his minor public school vowels. Some believe he is the one contemporary journalist who will still be read in 50 years’ time, the worthiest claimant to the title heir to Orwell.

And everyone has a story about Hitchens, although at 58 he is fed up with the long-lunch legends that undermine his gravitas and obscure serious consideration of his writing. One speaks of him clearing out a minibar in some African hellhole – he still tries to visit “a fucked-up country at least once a year” – and one senior, male heterosexual newspaper executive tells me, not without affection: “Christopher tried to French-kiss me, tried to ram his tongue between my teeth.”

Others recall his generous patronage when they were young journalists, of the soirées at his Washington apartment, which these days are the DC parties to attend. But there is disdain also, and a sense of betrayal. “A busted flush” is how one former admirer describes him, referring to Hitchens’s political gymnastics since 9/11 that have led the former Trotskyite to support the invasion of Iraq and, in 2004, the reelection of George Bush.

Defending the war has cost him prominent old friendships and forged him unlikely new ones, foremost with the arch neocon Paul Wolfowitz. But now Hitchens is back in his most acclaimed role, the dashing prosecutor. And the former tormenter of (among many) Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, Kissinger and Clinton is levelling up to the big guy Himself.

God is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything, although sweeping in its erudition, is a righteous harangue. When Ruth Gledhill of The Times recently interviewed Richard Dawkins about his scientific debunking of faith, The God Delusion, she found him less angry than his confrontational writing style suggested. But Hitchens is never far below boiling point. He is an evangelical secularist, an atheist warlord. Religion, he writes, is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children”.

This is the book he has been writing all his life, since his primary school teacher remarked how kind the Almighty was to make trees and grass green, a colour so restful to the human eye, and he knew she was wrong, that our eyes were adjusted to nature, not the other way about.

“Marx says criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism,” Hitchens says. “Philosophy starts where religion ends, just as chemistry starts where alchemy breaks off or astronomy starts where astrology runs out. It is the necessary argument. Not believing in the supernatural is the critical thing.”

And yet, I suggest, doesn’t it fulfil one function, an innate human desire for ritual? We are soothed by lighting candles or familiar hymns. Secularism, for all its logic, offers no substitute. Surprisingly, Hitchens agrees. He observes Passover (he discovered late in life that he was Jewish, his mother’s family having changed their name from Levin), which his Jewish wife thinks is contemptible. “She never felt she should identify with anything except to be an American. To say you’re Jewish or anything else is sectarian. I should praise that, but why don’t I? Because somehow it would be banal. And I want my daughter to know what the tradition is.

“But I don’t do Christmas because I can’t stand it.” What, no presents? “Well, you have to . . .” A tree? “Er, yup. We went to Kmart and bought a white tinsel one. Actually it’s rather beautiful. Our annual ritual is screwing it together.”

He was married to his first wife in a Greek Orthodox church, to his second, Carol Blue, by a rabbi. He had his son, Alexander, now 23, baptised. He educates his daughter, Antonia, 13, at a Quaker school, Sidwell Friends, alma mater of Chelsea Clin ton and Al Gore’s son. He has taken her to Washington’s Anglican cathedral to familiarise her with the liturgy. He worries that without the scriptures – which he can quote chapter and verse – she will never understand Milton or Shakespeare.

“The point is,” he says, “religion should be private: I am not paying my taxes to support it. I’m not going to have children taught that metaphysical things are true.” America, where secular education has come under protracted attack from Creationists, is “the territory of contestation at the moment”.

“People [in the US] are fed up with the presumption of the religious and the demands they expect to have met. There are many, many more nonbelievers and sceptics in the States and they’ve just about had enough.”

After we meet, Hitchens e-mails me from a book tour of Dixie where, debating a cleric at every stop, he speaks to large and friendly crowds. “Very often,” he reports, “what you find is that almost everyone there believes themselves to be the only other atheist.” His book went straight into the New York Times top ten, “not because of my blue eyes but because it is part of a freshet of volumes [Dawkins and Sam Harris’s The End of Faith] that encourage a fightback against religious bullying and stupidity”.

It is the US constitution’s First Amendment – which enshrines separation of church and state, and freedom of speech – that is the core of Hitchens’s personal credo. He wrote a paean to Thomas Jefferson (with whom he shares a birthday) and last month – after 27 years as a resident – became a US citizen, taking his oath at the Jefferson Memorial. Even his choice of witnesses was confrontational: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the feminist author, persecuted for her apostasy and criticism of Islam, and a secular Marine just back from Anbar province in Iraq.

While Hitchens’s opponents contend that he has veered right in his defence of Iraq, he maintains that he has simply stayed true to his primary cause: defending secularism and reason latterly against its new, fiercest adversaries, “Islamo-fascists”. He prefers to be known as a Blairite, not a Bushite, he says: “Not to duck the issue. We were right to intervene in Bosnia and Kosovo, and we should have done in Rwanda. I would have supported any president who got rid of Saddam.”

Hitchens has decided that 9/11 is the defining moment – just as the Second World War was to his naval officer father – and fundamentalist Islam is his glittering nemesis. “It is a war to the uttermost with the original form of totalitarianism, which is theocracy. I’ve made a very good living out of freedom of expression and I haven’t had to sacrifice for it yet. And I think it is payback time. And it should come to everyone once or twice in their life. The hour has struck. I regard these people as deadly enemies and I want them to know that I hate them much more than they hate me.”

Would he die for secularism? He has only, as yet, received the odd sinister phonecall. “I’m not going to say that. It’s bravado. But I think it might come to be the case that anyone who believes in unfettered science, sexual emancipation, open society, would have to say they were ready to risk their lives.”

Yet he concedes that Iraq, which he has visited several times, does break his heart: “The difference between our hopes and what has actually happened,” he says sadly. “And I’ve lost friends there.”

As we talk Hitchens smokes his Rothmans and eyes, but does not touch, a bottle of white wine chilling in its bucket. Perhaps his thirst has been quenched by lunch or he’d rather not have me write about his drinking. In our more abstemious age, his legendary alcohol consumption is used to his discredit. Two years ago in a vicious debate on the Iraq War, George Galloway retorted: “You’re a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay . . . Your hands are shaking . . . You need another drink.” And I observe that Hitchens has a curious habit of holding his right hand firmly and correctively with his left.

His wife has remarked that he is a highly functioning alcoholic. He says: “I have never been late for an appointment, never had to cancel a speaking arrangement. I do radio and TV and I don’t slur. I’ve never missed a deadline: you can check that. So it can’t be the case I’m a fall-about drunk. If I needed to prove it to you, I could knock down a lot of booze while we were talking and you wouldn’t notice it.” He drinks, most of all, because it makes other people less dull: “boredom is the terror”.

Anyway, there is no flaw or tremor in Hitchens’s thinking. I’ve seldom met anyone who speaks in such fluid, elegant, nuanced sentences, dizzying in their breadth of reference. His friend, the novelist Ian McEwan, once said of Hitchens: “It all seems instantly neurologically available: everything he’s ever read, everyone he’s ever met, every story he’s ever heard.”

The stories about Hitchens mostly feature his stomach for whisky and dialectic. But I hear enough about him making lecherous grabs at male friends to ask him later, by e-mail, if he is bisexual. He says no. But when younger and prettier, he received much attention from men and at public school he “of course” had homosexual experiences – “everyone did”. He says the rumours probably refer to the time he “smooched” the brother of a girlfriend “who he then very much resembled and it seemed somehow irresistible”. Although, this wasn't the source of the French kiss story.

These days, he says, he’s so decrepit that only women find him attractive. He emits an old-school sexism, a mix of lechery, ostentatious chivalry – he is a hand-kisser – and disregard. He says he has learnt much about women from his middle child Sophia, 18, and envies the easy way that young people enter sexual maturity without the fumbling and embarrassment that he recalls. But he is least insightful when writing about sexual politics, most recently in essays about oral sex and how women can never be funny.

His first wife has forgiven him for leaving her while pregnant for Carol Blue: “I’m invited to stay now. And we’re friends and quite good parents. At the time she was very cross but she says now: ‘When I met you, I realised I was looking for trouble.’

“I have been forgiven and indulged a good deal by women, and God knows what would have happened if I hadn’t been. I’ve been lucky. Though I wish I’d had a sister, though I might have been too well adjusted if that happened. Instead I had a very dramatic baby brother.”

He refers to the Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens, Christopher’s political mirror image, with whom he feuded for years. Now although hostility has ceased, they seldom meet. I ask if they rowed as children and he says that no, his household was quiet and repressed. Besides he left for boarding school at 8. “He and I are slightly too close in age,” he says. “It made us competitive. The thing I like about him is he really loves railways and loathes motorways. He is nostalgic for a lost and very English idyll.”

But what he can’t abide is Peter’s Christian faith and belief in intelligent design. Christopher has prayed only once in his life – for an erection (unanswered). I wonder whether he envies the faithful as he gets older and death looms, since all that secularism offers in place of everlasting life is “life’s a bitch and then you die”. “Well, that is not said as a gloomy thing, is it? People say it to cheer themselves up.” But it is a dark statement. “There is comfort in noir,” says Hitchens. “There is absolutely no comfort in ‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam’.”

In his own words... ‘

On terrorism Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint

On drinking How do I do all this and still drink enough every day to kill or stun the average mule? Many great writers did some of their finest work when blotto, smashed, polluted, shitfaced, squiffy, whiffled and three sheets to the wind.’

On free speech There is a utilitarian case for free expression. It recognises that the freedom to speak must also be insisted on for the person who thinks differently. For your own sake, you need to know how other people think


Extract from his important new book

Link: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

By Christopher Hitchens

(2) Review by Johann Hari followed by Extract.

The legion enemies of Christopher Hitchens have long argued that he has declined into a premature alcoholic senility where he can only belch and flail about incoherently. This dazzling three-hundred page howl against religion will bitterly, brutally disappoint them. It shows Hitchens can still intellectually get it up - and how.

Hitchens has passed through many phases in his political life, from Trotskyite leftist to Wolfowitzian neoconservative, but there has always been a single animating core to his thought: an intense loathing of religion. He is not merely an atheist. He is an anti-theist, convinced that the idea of God has been a disaster for humanity, leading us up a hundred blind-alleys of sexual repression, hallucination and sectarian slaughter. Here, he redefines organised superstition - 'religion' - as humanity's real "original sin".

As with Friedrich Nietzsche's 'The Genealogy of Morals', Hitchens' approach here is primarily historical, tracing the major religions back to their origins and showing how they were plainly fabricated by divinely-uninspired mammals. Why does the 'Virgin' Mary have "no memory of the Archangel Gabriel's visitation, or of the swarms of angels, both telling her she is the mother of god?" he asks. "In all accounts, everything her son does comes to her as a complete surprise. What can he be doing talking to rabbis in the temple?" Why does the 'Prophet' Mohammed receive convenient messages from Allah sanctioning whatever he wants to do, including having sex with a nine-year old child?

The answer, to Hitchens, is obvious, and derived from Ludwig Feuerbach's great insight: God did not create man. Man created god, cobbling him together from a string of half-understood events and rumours. He points out we can actually see how religions are born, live on film. The 1964 documentary 'Mondo Cane' showed the reaction of Pacific Islanders exposed for the first time to Westerners. They concluded that the white interlopers were "their long-mourned ancestors, come back at last with goods from beyond the grave." On the island of Tana, they had a "revelation" that an American GI called John Frum was their redeemer, and to this day, they hold ceremonies proclaiming that the savior Frum will return.

Hitchens does not just attack the easy religious targets - the Falwells and Bin Ladens. He shows how even the warm fuzzy faces of religion can be repellent. He has shown before how Mother Teresa was a corrupt, malignant dwarf who left people to die in agony because "Christ loves suffering." Here, he takes apart the grossly over-rated figure of Mahatma Gandhi, who loathed modernity and medicine, advised the Jews to commit suicide in the face of the Holocaust, and played a much less impresisve role in the battle for Indian independence than the secular Nehru. Ditto the Dalai Lama, whose "one-man rule in [his] Indian enclave is absolute" and who sells dispensations to ludicrous figures like 'actor' Steven Segal.

Stirred into this historical account are some delicious puncturing barbs at the faithful. Do Christians, Jews and Muslims imagine, he asks, that before Moses received the Ten Commandments, he thought murder and theft were good ideas?

In early September 2001, Hitchens was asked a hypothetical by the religious broadcaster Dennis Prager. Imagine you are in a strange town, and a large group of young men are approaching you. Would you feel more or less safe if you knew they had just come from a prayer meeting? Hitchens replied that, just to stick to the letter 'B', he had enjoyed that very experience in Blefast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad - and every time, he would have felt safer being approached by atheists. The prayer meeting-loving jihadists promptly proved his point in New York City the following week.

The tract is sprinkled with one-liners: the Catholic Church's motto could be "no child's behind left", he quips, and the Church of England is what you get when you "build a religion on the family values of Henry VIII." This is partly why 'God is Not Great' is currently the best-selling book in the United States, and the crest of a tsunami of re-energised atheism. Hitchens neatly dispenses with many of the criticisms that are being thrown at himself, Richard Dawkins and its other exponents.

Firstly, they claim atheism is "arrogant". But this is the precise opposite of the truth. At its core all atheists say is that, in the absence of evidence, it is absurd to believe. What could be more humble than sticking scrupulously to fact and reason? More to the point, Hitchens notes, "How much vanity must be concealed... in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?"

Secondly, they claim the New Atheism critiques only fundamentalist religion. Reza Aslam, for example, has claimed that the Dawkins-Hitchens-Harris school has the same literalist reading of religious texts as fundamentalists, poring through (say) the genocidal statements of the Old Testament God and taking them as factually true. But how many religious people in the world have reduced their texts to mythology and metaphor? How many would say their religious text contains no truth-claims about the material world? A few - a very few. For the vast majority of believers, this critique still pertains.

Hitchens is less adept when dealing with the third major criticism: what about Stalin and Mao, the atheist mass murderers? Don't they puncture Hitchens' thesis that "all major confrontations over the right to free thought, free speech, and free inquiry have taken the same form - of a religious attempt to assert the literal and limited mind over the ironic and inquiring one"? He responds by redefining Stalinism and Maoism as political religions, even offering Lysenkoism as Stalin's "miracles."

There is a more convincing atheist answer. Only the most naive nineteenth century forms of atheism, the ones that imagined ending religion would end evil, are discredited by Stalin. A more mature atheism acknowledges that faith - belief without evidence - is one form of bad thinking among many. Just as eradicating smallpox did not cure cancer, discrediting faith would not cure communism, fascism and other delusions - but it would still be worth doing, because faith on its own claims many victims. Besides, most atheists do not simply have a negative anti-religious vision; they advocate the rationalism and adherence to evidence of the Enlightenment - the best remedy for all these delusions.

If there is a flaw to this book, it is that Hitchens' atheism sometimes takes on a misanthropic tone. He opens the book by quoting the eleventh century Persian poet Omar Khayyam: "And do you think that unto such as you/ A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew/ God gave a secret?" The idea that humanity is "maggot-minded" keeps recurring: he refers to "our miserly endowment of cranial matter" and laments that humanity has a natural "gullibility, herd instinct and... need to be credulous." He jokes at one point that this planet is "a prison and lunatic asylum that is employed as a dumping ground by far-off and superior civilisations." It's hard not to think of the mysterious central character in his friend Martin Amis' novel 'Night Train', who commits suicide because she concludes that this mediocre world can never match her own fabulousness.

But Hitchens is supple enough to sense this flaw, and to counteract it a little. He stresses that the new Enlightenment he advocates as a remedy for superstition "is within the compass of the average person." He approvingly quotes the much more life-affirming atheism of Jospeh Conrad: "The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is... I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural."

The book is full of pin-pricks of sanity and hope like this. Every child stuck in every "faith school" should be bought a copy. A campaign to put this glittering anti-theist tract on the national curriculum - alongside the Bible, Koran and the other insufferable staples of "religious education" - should begin here.

(3) Exract from God is Not Great

There are four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.

I do not think it is arrogant of me to claim that I had already discovered these four objections (as well as noticed the more vulgar and obvious fact that religion is used by those in temporal charge to invest themselves with authority) before my boyish voice had broken. I am morally certain that millions of other people came to very similar conclusions in very much the same way, and I have since met such people in hundreds of places, and in dozens of different countries. Many of them never believed, and many of them abandoned faith after a difficult struggle. Some of them had blinding moments of un-conviction that were every bit as instantaneous, though perhaps less epileptic and apocalyptic (and later more rationally and more morally justified) than Saul of Tarsus on the Damascene road.

And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between Professor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins, concerning "punctuated evolution" and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication. (My own annoyance at Professor Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, for their cringe-making proposal that atheists should conceitedly nominate themselves to be called "brights," is a part of a continuous argument.)

We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and—since there is no other metaphor—also the soul. We do not believe in heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that without these blandishments and threats we commit more crimes of greed or violence than the faithful. (In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry could ever be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way.) We are reconciled to living only once, except through our children, for whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way, and room. We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.

Most important of all, perhaps, we infidels do not need any machinery of reinforcement. We are those who Blaise Pascal took into account when he wrote to the one who says, "I am so made that I cannot believe." There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness. We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man's most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is or could be "holier" than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty.

Some of these excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery will obviously, if they are serious, bring us into contact with belief and believers, from the great devotional painters and composers to the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman. These mighty scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis for his refusal to collude with them. We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness.

While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way—one might cite Pascal—and some of it is dreary and absurd—here one cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis—both styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear. How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible! The Aztecs had to tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the sun would rise. Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more times than that, perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be concealed—not too effectively at that—in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan? How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one's own sin? How many needless assumptions must be made, and how much contortion is required, to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to "fit" with the revealed words of ancient man-made deities? How many saints and miracles and councils and conclaves are required in order first to be able to establish a dogma and then—after infinite pain and loss and absurdity and cruelty—to be forced to rescind one of those dogmas? God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.

The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the "meaning" of later discoveries and developments which were, when they began, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them. And yet—the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what "he" demands of us—from our diet to our observances to our sexual morality. In other words, in a vast and complicated discussion where we know more and more about less and less, yet can still hope for some enlightenment as we proceed, one faction—itself composed of mutually warring factions—has the sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have all the essential information we need. Such stupidity, combined with such pride, should be enough on its own to exclude "belief" from the debate. The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted.

The argument with faith is the foundation and origin of all arguments, because it is the beginning—but not the end—of all arguments about philosophy, science, history, and human nature. It is also the beginning—but by no means the end—of all disputes about the good life and the just city. Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other. For this reason, I would not prohibit it even if I thought I could. Very generous of me, you may say. But will the religious grant me the same indulgence? I ask because there is a real and serious difference between me and my religious friends, and the real and serious friends are sufficiently honest to admit it. I would be quite content to go to their children's bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to "respect" their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations. And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition—which is that they in turn leave me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing. As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.