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War of the words
By Eugene Rabkin
Tags: Israel News 

On a recent September evening, Christopher Hitchens, a noted journalist and author, was celebrating his daughter's birthday in Manhattan. Sophia, who has recently moved from London to attend college, sat across from Hitchens in a lounge chair in a dimly-lit hotel bar in Greenwich Village. She was talking about the complications of being his offspring: "You never know whether somebody wants to be friends with you because they like you, or because you are Hitchens' daughter. Guys of my age are obsessed with him!" To which Hitchens jokingly replied: "Guys. Just my luck."

Sipping Jack Daniel's with club soda, Hitchens looked relaxed and content - a bit of an anomaly if you are used to seeing him in public debates, where he destroys his opponents with antagonistic glee. Today, these mostly consist of religious leaders of various stripes. Hitchens' new book, "God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" (Hachette Book Group, 2007; published in Hebrew by Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir), is a vehement attack on organized religion. The bulk of it is devoted to dismantling the claims of the three major monotheistic faiths - Christianity, Judaism, and Islam - with the aim of taking a stand against the spread of religious fundamentalism.

Along the way, Hitchens attacks such revered religious figures as Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, and Mahatma Gandhi. His aim is to demolish the myths that have made them into icons that fill even the most ardent atheist with respect. But Hitchens' forte is to go where other critics do not. To him, truth is more important than tact. When a popular Christian conservative Reverend Jerry Falwell died, Hitchens remarked in public: "It's a pity there isn't a hell for him to go to." When Sean Hannity of Fox News asked Hitchens whether he cared about Falwell's family's feelings, Hitchens replied: "I don't - he was a vulgar fraud and a crook."
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"God is not Great" has been a success not only in terms of the number of books sold (it's been on virtually every best-seller list), but in the amount of controversy and debate it has caused. "I get invited to a debate by Christian (mostly Protestant) and Jewish Reformist organizations about twice a month," Hitchens said: "It's become a part of what I do. I don't get invited by Muslims, or by Mormons, or by Orthodox Jews. They are not interested in having a debate." Hitchens is an incredibly prolific writer. In addition to his main job as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, he writes for The Atlantic magazine and Slate, and contributes to a wide variety of other publications. He has written 17 books, and he writes book reviews for London Review of Books and The New York Times literary supplement, among others. When he is not busy angering the political left and right, he finds time to host friends at his home in Washington, D.C. These include liberal authors like Salman Rushdie and conservative politicians like Paul Wolfowitz, a former political adviser to George W. Bush and now president of the World Bank.

In addition to all of this, Hitchens manages to co-teach a graduate course on cultural criticism at The New School for Social Research in New York, where he lectures on his intellectual patron saints - George Orwell, Mark Twain, and H.L. Mencken (full disclosure: I was a student in his class three years ago). Two hours before Jack Daniel's and club soda, Hitchens sat at the head of a table in a long, narrow room, lecturing on Orwell. Fifteen students sat around him, listening intently, sometimes breaking into muted laughter at Hitchens' jokes, sometimes taken aback by the forcefulness of his convictions (e.g. confrontation with Iran is certain and inevitable) and judgments (anyone who is capable of enjoying "Inglourious Basterds" is an insensitive cretin). The lecture could have carried the same title as Hitchens' book, "Why Orwell Matters." He expounded on Orwell's role in attacking totalitarianism, and on his contribution to post-colonial and cultural studies. Perhaps what matters most to Hitchens is that Orwell was a non-partisan intellectual. He dished it out to liberals and conservatives in equal measure. He went after evil, and evil is apolitical.

This is the way Hitchens operates. Until September 11, 2001 he was a mascot of the political left. After the Twin Towers collapsed, Hitchens became one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the Iraq invasion. This is when politicians like Wolfowitz, the mastermind behind the invasion, began courting Hitchens. In turn, many intellectuals on the left started to hate him. Alexander Cockburn, the editor of The Nation and a former friend, became one of his most outspoken critics, painting him as a self-promoting traitor. I asked Robert Boyers, the editor of Salmagundi, a cultural magazine, for his opinion. "Judging by his writing," Boyers said, "Hitchens seems to be a thoughtful and serious person, and I cannot imagine that on subjects of great importance he would tailor his views simply to make a stir. I know that I view Hitchens in a different way than many of my colleagues on the intellectual left do. They see him as an opportunist who has adapted some of his positions to provoke attention and make himself seem hugely controversial."

Left or right?

For Hitchens, as for Orwell, high ideals transcend partisan squabbles. Human rights are at the top of that list. His observation of the long history of cruelty by Saddam Hussein's regime prompted Hitchens to support the invasion of Iraq, despite the backlash from the American political left. "Of course at some point one must clarify what they mean by 'left' and 'right,"' said Hitchens. "My position was actually solidarity with the Iraqi Arab and Kurdish political left. There were plenty of people on the right opposing the decision to go to war with Iraq, such as Henry Kissinger and his crew, and the nationalists like Pat Buchanan. And some people on the left supported the war, such as Kanan Makiya [an Iraqi intellectual] and Ann Clwyd [former chair of the Parliamentary Labor Party] among others. To be sure, it was a small group. I did not care whether calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein meant making alliances with the right. After all the years of being a Marxist and a Trotskyist, I sometimes feel that it should have been us making this argument, and that by refusing to do so, we have become historically conservative." According to Hitchens, his reasons for supporting the Iraq war were no different from those that made him call for intervention in Bosnia. The Clinton administration and the United Nations put off military invasion there, allowing Milosevic to commit genocide, until loud protests from Hitchens and other popular intellectuals like Susan Sontag and Bernard-Henri Levy shamed them into action.

"There is no oil in Bosnia," he said. "It is a Muslim country, so Israeli interests are not involved. None of the usual accusations against us could be made there. And if the leftist anti-war stance prevailed, the whole country would have been ethnically cleansed. I did not become a socialist to watch genocide committed while I stand passively aside. So if anything, the left owes me an explanation, not the other way around."

Nor does Hitchens seem to care much for the fact that the official reasons for invading Iraq were largely concocted by the Bush administration; the U.S. removed a dangerous dictator, and that is good in itself. "If we had taken the anti-war stance against Hussein all the time, he would have annexed Kuwait," says Hitchens. "He would have continued the cleansing of Kurdistan. He would have been allowed to build a nuclear reactor. Then what?"

If anything, Hitchens thinks Saddam should have been removed earlier. Such logic sounds familiar. When calling for early intervention, many hawks cite appeasement of Hitler by England and France before World War II as an example. Hitchens does not make such a comparison, but he uses similar reasoning. He is concerned that Iran will make a nuclear weapon and that we should act now to prevent this. "If we are to have a confrontation with Iran," said Hitchens, "it should be on our terms and not theirs. There is a stupid expression the President [Obama] uses: 'There are wars of necessity, and wars of choice,' implying that Afghanistan is the former and Iraq is the latter. In truth, both wars were inevitable; we have just been putting them off for too long. You either think that there is only a perceived conflict that arises out of misunderstanding, or that there is a real conflict. If it's real, act now. This is not a question of left or right - this is realpolitik."

As for claims that Saddam was a secular dictator, Hitchens thinks they are nonsense: "The first people Hussein got rid of in his own country when he came to power were the secular Communist party. Then he went to war with the Shia theocracy in Iran, and he tried to outbid them in religious propaganda. If you read the Baathist party propaganda at the time, they paint Iran as the nation of infidels against whom Saddam was fighting jihad. He built the biggest mosque in the Middle East and had himself painted in a mullah's robe. He publicly endorsed suicide missions in the name of jihad. He sent money to the Islamic fundamentalist groups as far as the Philippines. He definitely had a relationship with Al-Qaida - maybe not the close one like the Bush administration painted, but it was there."

The great contrarian

Hitchens thrives on attention, positive or negative. He is the kind of intellectual who goes where the heat is. In "God is not Great" Hitchens describes how a conservative Christian talk show host asked him to imagine a situation where he was approached by a group of unfamiliar men in a foreign city. Would he feel safer or not if he knew that these men were coming from a prayer meeting? "Just to stay within the letter 'B,'" he replied, "I have actually had that experience in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad. In each case I can say absolutely, and can give my reasons, why I would feel immediately threatened." And threatened he has been. In February this year Hitchens was physically attacked in Beirut (maintaining the letter "B" theme) by members of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party for defacing one of their posters, whose logo looked like a Nazi swastika.

Whenever there is not enough fuel in the fire, Hitchens is happy to add some. Thus he suggested to his American publisher that the U.S. book tour for "God is not Great" should not be the usual amiable fan club affair, but a series of debates with prominent religious figures. Watching Hitchens debate leaves you with a feeling that arguing is his strongest instinct. His erudition is formidable. He possesses a seemingly inexhaustible arsenal of quotes from famous philosophers and authors that quickly roll off his tongue. Hitchens expects the same level of intelligence in his opponents, and is therefore unforgivable in his debates, often cutting people off or simply remarking that they are stupid. This may be boorish, but he simultaneously manages to act with remarkable politeness, expressing gratitude and goodwill to his hosts and opponents with his trademark quickness.

Sometimes one gets the impression that Hitchens' actions border on theatrics. His acceptance of an editorial position at Vanity Fair in 1992 caused a stir in the intellectual world. "Many people on the left were extremely snarky about it and took him to task for his willingness to write on a regular basis for what they thought was a sleazy publication that had absolutely nothing to do with the kinds of values that Hitchens has promoted on the pages of The Nation and other magazines," said Boyers, who is also a visiting professor at The New School for Social Research. "I remember being on a panel at The New School, where, in a conversation with David Brooks of The New York Times, I compared Hitchens to Orwell, and many people in the audience got up to say that it was inconceivable that a person who had agreed to write a monthly column for a magazine like Vanity Fair could be taken seriously, and that his name should not be mentioned in the same breath as Orwell or any other writer of that caliber."

As one of his projects at Vanity Fair, Hitchens subjected himself to a physical makeover routine that would not be out of place on a daytime TV talk show. He documented the procedure in a series of articles on the magazine's Web site. Next, Hitchens decided to experience waterboarding in order to determine whether it constitutes torture or not. Again, this evoked an array of reactions, some accusing Hitchens of exhibitionism and self-promotion. Along the way, he wrote an article titled "Why Women Aren't Funny," causing much offense to the female population.

Hitchens is as worldly as he is intellectual. He likes a good meal and a strong drink. He used to smoke three packs of cigarettes a day (he recently quit). He is well aware of his looks, alternatively self-deprecating and confident (he once uttered something about the irresistibility of his blue eyes). He has had good luck with the women in his life. Hitchens is married to Carol Blue, an American journalist and screenwriter - his second marriage. In his youth he dated Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue. And he likes to be around and impress young people. On the last day of our class at The New School, he took us out to Waverly Inn, a posh West Village restaurant co-owned by Graydon Carter, the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair (one of the few ways to make a reservation is to know his cell phone number).

Hitchens often entertains high profile guests in his Washington, D.C. apartment, and seems to enjoy that high society environment. "I find that in his latest writing, unlike in his books or earlier articles, there is a bit of preening and self-importance that I don't recall seeing before," said Boyers. "He seems eager to establish that he has entry to the salons of the famous and powerful, and in some of his articles over the past few years there has been some gratuitous name-dropping that points to a desire to establish himself as an important and even glamorous public figure. This does not befit a serious, first-rate intellectual, which Hitchens is. Not that it takes away from the seriousness of much of his writing."

Hitchens was born in Portsmouth, England in April 1949. His father's side of the family is Anglo-Saxon and Celtic, from the southwest of England. His mother's side is Jewish; her ancestors are from German Prussia. Hitchens described his parents as refugees from their respective religions: his father, a naval officer, had a strict Baptist upbringing, and his mother never told either her husband or her children that she was Jewish. He has a younger brother, Peter, a right-wing British columnist. Hitchens was the first one in his family to go to a boarding school, the type of education typically reserved for the rich. He subsequently went to Oxford University, where he studied philosophy, political science and economics.

"I always wanted to be a writer. Or needed to. I am still not sure which," he said. During and after college, he gravitated toward the political left and was a self-described Marxist and Trotskyist (just before he entered college, Hitchens joined a Trotskyist group called International Socialists, mostly in order to oppose the Vietnam War).

Hitchens first visited the United States in 1970, on a writing scholarship. He desperately wanted to stay. "I thought of becoming an illegal immigrant," he said. Upon arriving back in London, he got a job writing for the left-wing magazine New Statesman (the magazine was one of the loudest voices in support of the creation of Israel in 1947). It was not until the revolution in Portugal in 1974 that he began to distance himself from the radical left - witnessing the violence from the left seemed to have made him question his partisanship. He came back to the U.S. in 1981, somewhat disillusioned with the way things were going in the United Kindgom.

"England in the late '70s was really depressing, especially politically. The Labor government was coming to a sad end. I had no alternative but to realize that in some ways Thatcher was right, that the era of long social-democratic rule was played out. And I did not want her to be right," Hitchens said, explaining his decision to move. "Also, I was turning 30, and I thought that if I did not leave now, it would only become harder. It's too easy to settle down. You know, get a mortgage, get married."

Hitchens got his first American job as a journalist for The Nation, a left-wing current affairs magazine to which he was already contributing. During his tenure there, he became a prominent voice of the left. It was not until the events of September 11, 2001 that he began to change his political views.

But if his politics have shifted to the right, Hitchens' other ideas remain firmly progressive. He detests every vestige of humanity's ignorant past - organized religion, in his view, being the main one. He heavily criticized the Bush administration for hindering stem cell research. He considers the phrase "intelligent design" an oxymoron. He has lambasted every religious leader in the U.S., from Al Sharpton to Billy Graham. Because of his extraordinary rhetorical powers and sharp wit, he has become fantastically good at dismantling his opponents in public debates. Last year in a debate at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, he left Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a popular Jewish polemicist who calls himself "America's Rabbi," embarrassingly searching for his definition of God.

In the same debate, Hitchens produced one of his innumerable anecdotes. Arguing that there never was any covenant of God with the Jews, because there is no historical or archaeological evidence of it, he produced the following story to the audience's laughter: "It was Lord Alfred Douglas who said, in a nasty little poem: 'How odd of God to choose the Jews.' To whom someone at Oxford replied: 'Not odd of God, the goyim annoy him.'"

How religion poisons everything

The tone of "God is not Great," however, is far from humorous. It is an angry book, and Hitchens' writing sometimes feels almost exasperated, as if it is not even clear to him why a phenomenon that a civilized society should have tossed overboard a long time ago still exists. "Absurd" seems to be his favorite word, showing up in the book on 19 different occasions. Still, Hitchens thinks (and says so in the book) that religious belief is ineradicable. When I asked him whether he ever wonders why people believe in God in the 21st century, Hitchens said: "No. I think Richard [Dawkins] does - sometimes in his writing style you sense that feeling of incredulity. I think religion is a part of our makeup. There are probably evolutionary reasons for that too. Really, our science is still in its infancy and we still have much to learn. I know people who accept scientific findings and are also religious. But whatever the truth may be, the story that our moral issues were taken care of 2,000 years ago in Palestine by God's son, who died for our sins, is not. You simply couldn't sell it now if it was a new idea. Its only advantage is that it came first."

In "God is not Great," Hitchens summons the already familiar scientific and historical evidence that disproves many claims religion makes, especially those about the origin of the world. He raises difficult questions that the devout either suppressed during the time of religious supremacy in the Middle Ages, or largely deflected or tried to explain away during the Enlightenment in the 18th century. These questions of course are quite familiar and have been raised before. For example: If God exists, why is there so much evil in the world, much of it committed in his name? Which god, and therefore religion, is the true one? If God created the universe as the religious books describe, then why does scientific evidence paint a very different picture?

Hitchens spends a fair amount of time in the book going over the crimes committed in the name of religion. It would be tempting for defenders of religion to bury many of these crimes in the folds of history. After Hitchens brought up the slaughter of the Canaanites and Hittites by the Jews, the best defense Rabbi Boteach could offer was that the Jewish people would not commit such an atrocity today. But such a dismissal would be wrong. One need not look further than the events of this past summer; from the continuing suicide bombings in the name of Islam, to the biggest sexual child-abuse scandal in Ireland's history involving Catholic priests, to the arrests of Sephardic rabbis in Brooklyn and New Jersey for allegedly financing an illegal kidney-trafficking operation (the scheme originated in Israel) to see that religious wrongdoings go on today.

Of course, Hitchens is concerned with the here and now. "I've been writing against religion all my life," he said, explaining his decision to write "God is not Great," "but I thought that a few years ago we were getting to a critical mass with theocracy and the challenges from various parties of God, from Indonesia to Iran to Israel, and to some degree in the United States. I was fed up with the attacks on science and the teaching of biology."

Hitchens' most alarming point is that not only does religion still play a large role in politics, but that the religious dictate their beliefs to the rest of society. "There are people who want everyone else to suffer from their beliefs," he said. Indeed, it is one thing when a code of law is written by a society that clearly separates church and state. It is another thing when the society is governed by religious laws concocted hundreds of years ago, when the world was more ignorant. It is one thing if a person commits a murder and is punished by law. It is something radically different when an ayatollah issues a fatwa (a religious ruling in Islam) sentencing Salman Rushdie to death for writing a book, or when a religious fanatic murders Theo van Gogh, the filmmaker and a grandson of the great painter, for making a film.

Hitchens still gets death threats from anonymous callers. "Almost every day now somebody sends me a book, an essay, or an article completely devoted to attacking me, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or Daniel Dennett," he said. And then, with typical gusto, added: "Which is better than I expected!" According to Hitchens, religion's attack on culture is not accidental. Some of the devout claim that religion brings fulfillment, meaning and morality into their life. For Hitchens, culture plays and should play this role instead. It is from books, art and music that we should draw our fulfillment. To him, the most fundamental philosophical questions - what is right and what is wrong - come from Dostoevsky, not the Bible. The most sublime moments come from poetry, not from feeling of rapture during a prayer. Inquiry comes from art and not from religious laws that were simply handed down to us.

Obviously, Hitchens is not alone in his position, and that is why religious fundamentalists worldwide have always tried to control art. In the United States today, for example, the Christian right is still trying to destroy the National Endowment for the Arts, a government sponsored organization that funds artistic projects. And if they cannot destroy the NEA, they would very much like to censor the sponsored artists. Then there is, of course, the question of morality - one that religious leaders raise all the time. This issue particularly enrages Hitchens, not least because it is raised by religious leaders with dubious moral records, like Al Sharpton.

The last defense the faithful offer is that religion provides us with morals, and that without it we would behave like murderous beasts. This is an argument similar to one popularized in the 17th century by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who stated that humans are inherently aggressive and that only government can bring order and peace - without it, life would be "nasty, brutal, and short." Furthermore, it states that the agents of government are entitled to a privileged life because they sacrifice their lives in order to prevent such a state of nature. Needless to say, the Hobbesian view has been used to justify many an atrocity committed by governments. Now, substitute religion for government and you have a similar picture.

Hitchens proposes another alternative. He says that morality is innate in us, and that we would be just as ethical without religion. This exact point was addressed by the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 1754 essay, "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men," in which he stated that human beings are moral creatures by nature and that it is our society that makes us immoral by artificially creating inequality (Why are the servants of God in the U.S. exempt from paying taxes?).

Hitchens is more pointed in his critique, invoking Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov" in his epigraph for a chapter dealing with religion and child abuse. In one episode of the book, one of the brothers, Ivan, asks another if he would agree to torture a little child for the benefit of humanity. Alyosha replies that he would not. "Does one have to be religious to say no to such a proposition?" is the question Hitchens poses.

Perhaps what is most attractive about "God is not Great" is that in it Hitchens maintains an incredibly alluring pride in humanity. He thinks that religion, with all its prescribed laws, its fatalism, and its claims to absolution from difficult ethical and moral problems is a kind of irresponsible escapism; and that, as humans, we must accept that the responsibility of living our lives with decency rests solely with us. As a matter of fact, these ideas of the Enlightenment era are the crux of the book. At the end of it, Hitchens calls for a "new Enlightenment." To be more accurate, he is calling for a renewed Enlightenment, in the Kantian sense of the word. In a 1784 essay on this subject, Kant wrote: "Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another." For Hitchens, the overthrow of religious tutelage is long overdue.

Eugene Rabkin teaches Critical Writing at Parsons - The New School for Design in New York City.
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