Beautifully put and utterly correct. I used to enjoy his wit and irreverence. Then, almost quite suddenly, he turned into a pro-war anti-islamist neo-con who was utterly boring and predictable. I did not at all understand this transformation, particularly within the current political environment when most decent folk at around his age are moving to the left. But I think that you have hit the nail on the head in providing a sad but economically sound explanation.

Brilliant writer. You’re just jealous.

@John

“I did not at all understand this transformation”

You’ve never seen his brother, then?

What sort of an animal writes, on the morning of his death, that the world will be a better place without him?

Are you mentally ill?

@Lee

No.

Not sure if this a joke. Forgive me if it is, for I’m engaging with it at face value. By ‘available riches’, do you literally mean money and salary?

That argument seems difficult to sustain. While it’s obviously true that many Zionist individuals and organisations shape or control dialogue in a number of countries through their organised capital, public intellectuals can make a pretty decent living by ignoring the Middle East altogether (indeed, many do).

Further, why, when Hitchens was obviously a very smart guy, would it have taken him a couple of decades of getting paid to write and speak publicly to realise “Gosh, you get paid more if you take a neocon stance than if you defend human rights”? I think he, perhaps, might have realised this earlier?

There’s surely more to his – and the others you mention – transformation than money. We owe it to ourselves, and the ideas we believe in and which others have abandoned, to examine what the real factors for transformation might be.

You are entitled to your opinions, but I think I can say with a high degree of probability that more human beings will be inspired with the messages that Christopher Hitchens gave to the world than with your rather limp diatribes.

@Patrick Agreed. Shameful statement.

Craig, and since when did two wrongs make a right?

‘You do not speak ill of the dead’ (My mother 1927-2009) Holds good in England and im sure it does in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, but with accents.
Your very very wrong
Alan

I should be fascinated to know what things Hitchens said could be suggested as being widely regarded as “inspiring”!
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Gavin – it’s an interesting question. I’m not sure it’s a conscious process, since no-one would be that selfish in front of oneself, if I can put it that way. A proportion of people are enormously self-interested and avaricious, and so they move to a profitable political position, thin slice by thin slice. In their view, the process is so glacial it’s just a change of heart, or perhaps not even noticeable.
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At that point, the mass media – who are inclined in the direction of corporatism anyway – regard them as “acceptable polemic” and may fete them enormously. The Right is, for the most part, given a great deal more of an easier time than their Left-leaning counterparts, since when meeting journalists the former are amongst friends. As Craig says on another thread, Manning and Assange are not given an easy ride in the media – but Fox and Werrity are afforded substantial respect. And so the pattern holds, for an elite on the one side, and Official Enemies on the other.
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Whether this psychological process applies to Hitchens or not is debatable, but his supporters might acknowledge it as a possibility.

What’s insensitive isn’t that you’re writing too close to the man’s passing; it’s that you’re talking utter rubbish.

I should have mentioned also that journalists who take a strong line in favour of a particular war, should be held more to account for that view. As writers for Media Lens often discover, journalists with the most substantial right-wing blind-spots are sometimes outraged that someone wants to hold them to account – and the complainant is either verbally abused or ignored.
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Perhaps the impact of Hitchen’s strident views will be felt when the UK/US media can no longer go along with the line that Iraq is a free and democratic country in a better state than it was found. I don’t think they can keep that one up for very much longer, to be honest.

What is the collective noun for neo con trolls?
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I always enjoyed George Galloway taking Hitchens on when George could get a word in that is. Hitchens took up most of the preceding video and half of this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHW3PM_d7SM&feature=related

Craig you are wrong about Aaronovitch he was a Stalinist and Phillips has always been a Labour member on the make.I knew Hitch when he was in IS brilliant but arrogant but I dont think he moved to the right for money he was doing fine on the left but he got caught up in the gunghopost 911 mood in the US

Hmm. A scatterbomb of trolls?

@Hugh_Kerr – he was fine on the left, but got caught up in the “gung-ho post-9/11 mood”. If true, that would make him unprincipled, no?

What a truly unsupportable and deeply nasty comment from you, Mr Craig Murray. It is perfectly possible to disagree with Hitch on many things especially the Iraq war to liberal interventionism as a workable concept deserving of support. What is so disappointing about your comment is that you display such ignorance of so much in your sweeping dismal and a complete lack of literary good taste. Hitch was indeed the Orwell of our time. And he was an honest to goodness seeker of the truth who did not suffer fools gladly; but nor was he some Zionist shill either. What an ugly charge. Show us the evidence for this or retract it if you have any honour.

I understand your point on his shift to the right but feel it’s an oversimplification to identify him only in that sense.

I wouldnt say he was unprincipled about the war just wrong! but he was right about many other things including Kissinger the Clintons Mother Teresa and religion and a brilliant polemicist

I support Craig’s honesty, although being less forthright than him I probably would not have added the “better place” line.

Time to remember the Not The 9 O’Clock News politicians sketch…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T17VzztS60M

Mr Murray,
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By now I think you use the word “Zionist” as nothing more than a pejorative to those whose politics you deplore. It does have a true meaning, y’know! And if anything, even unto death, Hitchens was not a Zionist. In fact, he was pretty vehemently anti-Zionist.
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He did become a bit neo-con as even he admitted though.

Purely respect for the dead. Should always hold true. The same as taking off your hat or saluting a hearse when it drives by. Even if you have no idea who the deceased was. It matters no a jot the historic context or how deep seated in folk law the act is.
Oh and I have not come from the Telegraph site and consider the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to be wrong.
And yes i can feel sadness at the passing of Col Gadaffi. The manner of his death was beyond belief.

@Angry – is it possible in the context of US politics to be a neo-con but not a zionist? It’d be great to see some folks on the American hard right denouncing zionism, but I’m not aware of any.

Frankly I am sick of the creeps the likes of that booze sodden blackguard C. Hitchens, who aided and abetted the mass murder in Iraq, in his cheerleader-ship; harrumphing the worst kind of pricks whom will shit themselves if a car back fired from afar around these, but are always all too ready to order the troops into battle, to divert the taxation funds into the bank accounts of the various wankers set as oligarchs/military industrial complex.
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Further, the demise of his kind of specimen, makes me somewhat religious; wishing that there is a hell, and an after life, so the bastard can get a good roasting and a good kicking in for his crimes against humanity.
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So far as the indignations about this line of thought goes, I have one answer; go fuck yourselves in a mirror.

Patrick,

True, but if your point is no more than that it is seemly to wait a few days before expressing my view of the man, it is not such a strong one. Do you hold it as a universal principle? You must have been outraged by coverage of Gadaffi’s death?

Craig,

As a principle, I don’t think it is appropriate to say that the world is a better place, on the morning that a man (with grieving children, who can access the internet and see your comments) has died. I do think it is appropriate to hold back for a reasonable amount of time before spewing your opinions on the man. It is a question of respect, and a question of decency. The honourable thing for you to do now would be to apologise and retract your comments.

I don’t see the relevance at all of Gadaffi here.

Patrick

I feel I have to object to the sentiment of this blog entry. The crux of Craig’s argument is that Christopher Hitchens had “a strange and extremely unpleasant manifestation of intellectual prostitution” from which you “suspect the available riches for zionist propagandists are a major factor” and hence that the world will be a better place without him in it.

In your opinion the charge of “intellectual prostitution” leading to the idea will be a better place with those who practice it dead.

Having read Christopher Hitchens autobiography and many articles and seen him in various debates and interviews, I came to the conclusion that his position was based on his own considered judgement, and his position of being stridently anti-totalitarian and pro-freedom of speech. This being the case, this then clears Hitchens of the charge of “intellectual prostitution”.

My own opinion is that your loosely founded argument is a substitute for your view that Hitchens’ support for the war, a war in which many people died and from which a situation arose in which many more people died, was the wrong thing to do, and the world would be a better of place if those who did that were dead. You may affirm or deny this claim, but I would ask you to be sincere in your reasoning.

Finally the sibling rivalry is over and I’m not mourning. This spat news is merely pushed up the agenda to take up valuable news tiome from the real issues, i.e. the Fox Werritty, Gould conspiracy to attack Iran.

The BBC are cowards and bootlickers for acting up to these neocon warmongers, occupy them, b….x to their consultation.

I agree with Craig entirely on this one.

Hitchens in all of his writings came across as a vainglorious, unprincipled, loathsomely self-obssessed arse. As for being right about Kissinger and the Clintons. Gee, really? I had no idea about Kissinger or the Clintons until Hitchens came along and the scales fell from my eyes!

Without his continued propagandising for the neocon lunatics that now hold sway over the USA (yes, that includes the supremely craven Obama, who has proved himself the equal of any neocon agenda) the world is indeed a better place.

And as for not speaking ‘ill of the dead’. What utter bollocks.

Craig, then that makes you just as bad as Christopher Hitchens.

ingo,
Your German mind has worked it out.
A petulant and sulking Nick Clegg –the Madame Fifi of British politics – could not bring himself to attend the Commons this week to listen to the Prime Minister’s statement on the historic use of Britain’s EU veto.
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UK now has been afforded the “observer status” (basically look but don’t touch of kind of arrangement), Clegg says nothing, but has come out talking about the dearly departed C, Hitchens, and his encyclopedic knowledge. Evidently Clegg was a fact checker for the articles written by him. The zionist gate keepers would like to debate their agenda, regardless of the actualities, and events unfolding around the world.

As far as I am concerned George Galloway nailed it with his description, “a drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay”. At the time I admired “popinjay” as a non-blasphemous, non-scatological term of belittlement. Since then I have come to see that it was meticulously accurate: like the more familiar “weathervane”, it means someone whose opinions swing erratically around through the entire circle of the compass.

As for Patrick’s horror at any public criticism of the recently dead, isn’t that an example of precisely the kind of superstition that Mr Hitchens himself mercilessly castigated – for example, in “God is not Great”? Note that there is no gratuitous or spiteful exaggeration in “drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay”: every single word is factually correct.

I’m not sure I would necessarily go along with Craig’s view that the world is a better place without Mr Hitchens. Surely he was entertaining – to those who appreciated his particular brand of zany opinionated argument – and did little or no harm to those who simply ignored him.

Of course I am feel compassion for Mr Hitchens’ family and friends, and I appreciate that he was – as Alan Campbell was quick to insist – a “brilliant writer”. But what shall it avail a man to have a wonderful gift of articulacy, fluency, and persuasiveness if he uses it to advance opinions that eventually come full circle and contradict each other? Isn’t such a communicator ultimately a confusing time-waster? What did he really believe, and how would he really advise others to behave? It’s hard to look at Hitchens’ lifetime opus and come to any reliable conclusions at all, except that he liked airing his views and being paid for doing so.

There is a eulogy for him on the BBC website. Straight out of Vanity Fair at the beginning, just like them quoting Werritty’s Spectator article the other day.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16212418

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Interesting that Clegg once worked for him.
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Oesophageal cancer is a very unpleasant disease. My father died from it but at a later age than Hitchens and he did not drink heavily as Hitchens was reputed to do. But I weep no tears at all for Hitchens when I remember how he used his platform to proselytize for unjust and illegal actions like the Iraq war.
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Do you remember this toe curling stuff too? {http://keeptonyblairforpm.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/blair-vs-hitchens-full-transcript-munk-debate-religion/}

Hitchens was a journalist who learned from what he observed, not just in London and Washington but in more than 60 countries.

Yes, more points of reference than a diplomat.

Try to break outside the group think.

Hitchens took issue with his former fellow travellers. That requires more courage than letting your views evolve with the fashions of a small metropolitan bubble.

Get close to the ground (closer than you get as a diplomat), have the courage to expel yourself from your social circle, throw off the trappings and customs of your clan, lose yourself in a hostile crowd, challenge your premises.

And like Hitchens, you’ll find your perspective changes.

That will make you a more rounded human being, though not necessarily a better writer.

Post-9/11 Christopher Hitchens was a loathsome creature:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/995phqjw.asp

I mistakenly retweeted this presuming it was honoring Hitchens before I read it. Clearly foolish of m
Hitchens was more than just a supporter of the Iraq war. He was a vehement anti tyrant and was in no way a Zionist.
Incidentally I agree that all tyrants deserve was Saddam received, I disagree on the “collateral damage” aspect. Just as I disagree on the wanton terror bombing of German civilians. If I wished the world to be rid of those who disagree about allied bombing of German civilians. We’d be pretty sparsely populated.
Hitchens had many great things to say. As a prominent atheist no doubt enlightening many with his writing he undoubtedly has been a force for good, and if you believe as I do that a world.filled with atheists is a.more peaceful world, a force towards peace to some extent.
You can’t just cherry pick the Iraq war in a vacuum and pretend he never did anything else. Ans use that as a justification to say the world is a better place without him.

To all those saying that special respect should be afforded on the day of someone’s death. I’m fairly sure Hitchens would think your an arse.

See what you mean Craig.
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333 Comments so far….!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/16/christopher-hitchens-obituary?intcmp=239

I think that those saying, “please respect the dead!” have little understanding of who Hitchens was. For a start, he had no respect for the dead himself, as anyone who watched his gloatfest over Jerry Falwell’s death will remember. Secondly, he probably wouldn’t consider it “respectful” to start uttering platitudes and homilies to him now that he’s dead. He would probably think it disgusting.
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Anyway, I always thought him entertaining even when I sometimes massively disagreed with him. But I think that this video of him debating some wooly-headed rabbis is him at his absolute best:
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbBVB66DC5k

This is what Hitchens wrote on the death of Jerry Falwell, “It is a shame that there isn’t a hell for him to go to. We have been rid of an extremely dangerous demagogue who lived by hatred of others and prejudice.”

Do as you would be done by.

As for his Zionism, after 9/11 Hitchens dropped his support for the Palestinians like the proverbial hot brick. He then went on to attack Edward Said as he lay dying.

What a piece of work!

Mr Murray, as it happens I wish you hadn’t pussied out by making that update.
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Hitchens knew more than anyone what it was to debate ruthlessly and if his fan-boys and fan-girls don’t get that then they were far too soft for him anyway.

Wrong link.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/8960100/Christopher-Hitchens-dies-aged-62.html
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The Guardian’s obit by Peter Wilby allows no comments. Scared of what might come out of the woodwork?

Similar stuff in the Mail. Only 111 comments, so far…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2074866/Writer-Christopher-Hitchens-dies-aged-62-battle-cancer.html

Craig, with you 100%. This is not the time for hypocracy. Soon he wont be news.
Hitchens excused the inexcusable. He choose, in full knowledge, to be on the side of the mass murder and have innocent blood on his hands. Only he knows why but now he faces judgment.
The coordinated attack on you was a predictable development.

If Hitchens was a zionist he had a funny way of showing it:
“I am an Anti-Zionist. I’m one of those people of Jewish descent who believes that Zionism would be a mistake even if there were no Palestinians.”*
I believe he was wrong about Iraq too–but I think he was also sickened by the hypocrisy of those on the left who refused to oppose fascism with an Islamic face.
I mourn the loss of someone who stood up for intellectual argument in the public sphere. We have far too few of them. You are one Craig, he was another. How many others can we all name? The fact that intellectuals do not always agree is kinda sorta the point, no?

*Walter Hölbling; Klaus Rieser-Wohlfarter (2004). What is American?: new identities in U.S. culture. LIT Verlag Münster. pp. 351–. ISBN 9783825877347.

‘My position is simple. Those who planned the Iraq war, including those who used media positions to propagandise for it, have lost entitlement to the signs of society’s respect.’
Very succinct and very reasonable. The more DT readers you have given apopleptic seizures to the better, Craig.

“Only he knows why but now he faces judgment.”
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No, he doesn’t. He’s dead.
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“The coordinated attack on you was a predictable development.”
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What “coordinated attack” are you talking about?

It’s hilarious to read the standard old-wives BS regarding the dead even in this strange, 19th, 21st century. I couldn’t stand the self-righteous popinjay when he was alive so I’m suppose to, now he’s dead, not think it or say it. I didn’t care he was alive and don’t care he’s dead nor did I ever think he was creative or insightful. He followed the pathology, recently noted in the letters section of the LRB by Pankaj Mishra in reply to a letter from celebrity historian Neil Ferguson, “… among intellectuals once identified by Orwell: ‘the instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment, to accept the existing trend as irreversible’ “. And the bowing and scrapping I did say, I think, is usually done for money, fake honours and ego.

All this post demonstrates is your bad taste, profound ignorance and increasing detachment from reality.

Jon: @Angry – is it possible in the context of US politics to be a neo-con but not a zionist?
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Hi Jon, thanks for the question.
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The answer is, yes. It is possible to be a neo-con but not a Zionist.

“Frankly I am sick of the creeps the likes of that booze sodden blackguard C. Hitchens, who aided and abetted the mass murder in Iraq, in his cheerleader-ship; harrumphing the worst kind of pricks whom will shit themselves if a car back fired from afar around these, but are always all too ready to order the troops into battle, to divert the taxation funds into the bank accounts of the various wankers set as oligarchs/military industrial complex.”
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This.+1

Craig – why didn’t you have the intellectual honesty to attack Christopher Hitchens while he was alive and able to defend himself but only now do so when he is dead and unable to respond to your accusation of “intellectual prostitution”???

Is such behaviour the sign of a man of honour or a whore?

Yeah Jon, it is possible to be virgin and have sex too, after all Virgin is only a concept huh! The shibags masquerading as neo-cons were ardent zionists, and have been on record to denote anti neo con is antisemitic too.

@Angry, sure, in theory. But can they thrive in the US political environment? I say it is nigh-on impossible. (Indeed, is it possible to clamber into bed with ardent zionists on every other topic, ignore what that support does to the Palestinian cause in practice, and still call oneself an anti-zionist?)
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Any examples of neo-con anti-zionists come to mind, other than the topical one?

Let’s remember the popinjay Hitchens gleefully celebrated genocide as part of la mission civilisatrice http://j.mp/unwTnI

Nice one, Stephen. Spot on comment at 12:51.

Any examples of neo-con anti-zionists come to mind, other than the topical one?

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No. But most neo-conservatives would consider Israel to be closer to the ideal of neo-conservative eschatology. (I’m channeling John Gray a little bit here) My understanding of who qualifies as a neo-con produces a shorter list than most around here. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz etc… with some other important names on the “liberal” wing of neo-conservatism, particularly Francis Fukuyama.
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Neo-conservatism was usually based around a somewhat specious distinction between totalitarian ideologues and autocratic opportunists. The former would be Communist or Islamist regimes. The latter would be “tinpot dictatorships” such as Mubarak, Pinochet, the Shah etc…
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Neo-conservatives generally saw the latter as being closer to the endpoint of human history, as propounded by Fukuyama and maybe many other neo-cons. If they are to be taken at their word (and generally I do take Fukuyama at his word, if not necessarily all neo-cons) neocons believe all humans want to live in a liberal democratic society with liberal economic laws and with social liberties of almost all kinds. Now, if a neo-con looked at Israel and compared it to the rest of the Middle East (or, for that matter, the US or some of Europe) they might consider Israel being more in line with the neo-con ideal. I doubt that there would be many neo-cons who would think of Israel as being dictatorial or totalitarian. So, no. Most neo-cons are not “anti-Zionist” as such.

Good riddance to a nasty piece of work.
Those who object Craig’s characterisation and take issue with his language, should be reminded that extremist neocon propagandists of the hitchins ilk are, at the very least, accessories after the fact to mass murder and myriad crimes against humanity.

He was an atheist who attacked belief in God and slandered Mother Teresa, so good riddance.

PS. If God eventually grants him repentance and mercy in the invisible world, I don’t object.

Abe Rene: He was an atheist who attacked belief in God and slandered Mother Teresa, so good riddance.

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Some of his best work there! Attacking belief in God is an excellent thing to do and I don’t think that Mother Teresa deserves to be free from criticism. Neither does Hitchens. Anyway, just be happy instead of pouting.

Abe Rene: PS. If God eventually grants him repentance and mercy in the invisible world, I don’t object.

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You don’t object to God? Is that you giving God permission to grant repentance?

This week the World service/Radio 4 did a program about Islamic groups rising to power after the Arab spring. The Salafi and Muslim Brotherhood are not nice friendly groups sharing tea and leaving worshippers to their own devices. They are both steeped in the culture of personal spying that has become the norm in the UKUSIS created, now expired dictatorships. If you type a four letter word into Google in these countries, expect to get a very close inspection from both state and religious police.
The fact the BBC was trying to portray them as some kind of equivalent to suburban Methodists in the UK is cause for concern.
The fact is that the anger at UK foreign policy has reached such dangerous levels that countries like ours cannot even build a nuclear power station without fear of making a target for terrorism and blowing us up like Hiroshima. Alternatively they will force us to become a police state as is happening now in the US. Or alternatively they have to give the Muslims concessions and a portion of self-rule in the form of the inclusion of such religious groups into Middle-Eastern mainstream politics and societies.
They have changed the tyres and filled up the anti-freeze, ready for another 40 years of dictatorship under economic collaborators. they very strongly underestimate the rage of the Muslim world if they think that casting a few bones to the lions will keep them happy for long.
Only China has the political cleanness to colonise Africa. and the violence wrought on the Muslim world has castrated us for a considerable period of time. Then, like the Tories, they will make a come-back with an utterly sham coalition with the Salafi and Muslim Brotherhood partners they are now empowering.
Be warned, these groups are the Nick Cleggs who will revitalise the neo-cons in a few years time. talk about intellectual prostitution. The prostitution of the Muslim intellectuals is far greater than the journalists of this country. Their starting point is phone hacking and spying on personal lives. Where will they be in a few years time? I will tell you. A great deal nastier than the Mubaraks and Gaddafis into whose shoes they have climbed.

For those interested in intellectual honesty they will see that Hitchens was more than capable of attacking the views and practice of those who were his allies on other matters – look up what he says about Karzai, torture at Abu Ghraib, the Tea Party, Kissinger etc. etc. Perhaps one should ask where is the intellectual honesty of those on the other side of the USIsraellMIC divide who we here so often from here – where are the criticisms of the Syrian and Iranian regimes, the human rights abuses of Hamas etc.etc. Allowing the ends to justify the means and seeing the world in purely black and white terms has never been an intellectually honest position – Hitchens and his hero Orwell understood this and for this reason they should never be forgotten.

Contrarianism

The World At One had a nice juxtaposition on this.

First they had a piece on Bradley Manning. His contrarianism is likely to end up with him having to spend a lifetime in jail. And there have already been accusations of torture in that imprisonment.

Christopher Hitchens’ contrarianism led him into the dinner parties, the beds and the pockets of the Washington ultra-elite.

I know who history is going to chose as the true spirit.

Abe Rene -

“PS. If God eventually grants him repentance and mercy in the invisible world, I don’t object.”

God WILL be relieved to know that you will not object…!!!

It must be so fulfilling to have such a close connection with your ‘creator’…..

Sorry, but it is very difficult to take such sense of certainty and unquestioning belief in GOD, seriously….

“What sort of an animal writes, on the morning of his death, that the world will be a better place without him?

Are you mentally ill?”

It’s obvious to anyone reading this blog that Mr. Murray is mentally ill and drenched in self-pity.

To Moneycircus:

Change In one’s ‘perspectives’ as you put it is not an indication of enlightenment as you seem to imply -

Hitchens consistently and vocally supported and propagandised illegal invasions – even after the horrendous cost in human lives and systematic destruction of the socio-economic fabric of the invaded nations became apparent and beyond serious dispute.

He embraced some f the most notorious neocon psychopaths including bush, wolfy . etc. and championed their cause.

One could equally argue that Mr. Himmler, the chicken farmer pushed his restrictive envelope and rose above his station and restrictions…..

I’m quite amused by Angrysoba’s description of what neocons want:
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“neocons believe all humans want to live in a liberal democratic society with liberal economic laws and with social liberties of almost all kinds.”
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How come the US has moved further and further from that ideal, under neocon rule? They’ve moved the country towards totalitarianism. Now they’re even planning internment without trial.

Stephen. I’m in a bad mood so watch out. This country is run by people with balls but no brains. Balls to commit state resources to an alliance of terror with religious fanatics I call Zionist Zombies against their enemies, the keepers of the religion of Tawheed. Oneness of God, which the Jews used to custodians of previously. This country like Blair believes that all of its wrongdoing will be washed away by the sacrificial blood of Jesus.
NO BRAINS NO BRAINS NO BRAINS NO BRAINS NO BRAINS.
The Islamic world however has brains but no balls. We have allowed ourselves to be squeezed into making deals which will produce the same colonised powerlessness time and time around.
The Muslims know from the Qur’an that the only way to throw off this oppression is to change themselves, quit lying quit spying quit politicking with our enemies. But nobody has the balls to tell the existing leadership that loves the old ways to get stuffed. NO BALLS NO BALLS NO BALLS NO BALLS.
Love reading your devil’s advocate drivel. I know I’ve quoted it before but it seems relevant now. MacFleckno:
‘The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.
Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,
Strike through and make a …’
So with Stephen.John Dryden about his rival commentator Thomas Shadwell. Bye.

I guess the point I stopped reading Hitchens was when he went all transatlantic. Some misguided soul gave me a free-offer subscription to the Spectator, and he was in it. I had the impression he was trying (too hard) to be a print Glenn Beck. Still, he was entitled to his own opinion – and to state it. I doubt he’s gone to Jesus…as an atheist, he’d hardly want to, would he?

“neocons believe all humans want to live in a liberal democratic society with liberal economic laws and with social liberties of almost all kinds.”
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Don’t laugh. They do. Just remember that “liberal” for a neocon means “laissez-faire” and that “social liberties” means “legalised theft”. It’s a dialect thing.

“What sort of an animal writes, on the morning of his death, that the world will be a better place without him?”

Christopher Hitchens did just that when Jerry Falwell died. (And Hitchens was quite right to do so, IMO.)

So, if you are saying that anyone who speaks ill of the recently departed contempt then you are saying that Christopher Hitchens, who has just died, deserves contempt, which in turn means that *you* deserve contempt by your own logic.

Well done!

Herbie: I’m quite amused by Angrysoba’s description of what neocons want
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Komodo: Don’t laugh. They do. Just remember that “liberal” for a neocon means “laissez-faire” and that “social liberties” means “legalised theft”. It’s a dialect thing.

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If you read what I wrote correctly you would have noticed this part, “If they are to be taken at their word…” before the bit that both of you are howling over.

“howling”
,
,
Komodos never howl, they hiss, hiissssssssss

Komodos never howl, they hiss, hiissssssssss

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Ssssssssssssooooooo desssssssu ka?

Komodo
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I know about how Merkins use the term “liberal”. They use it to mean both socialism and laissez faire, which confuses them much more than it does us.
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I was thinking more about the totalitarianism end of things. That’s the way the US is going under their rule. The rule of law and individual liberties have been steadily eroded under their diktat.
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How do they reconcile that with Angry and your statement of their beliefs?
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I’m with Chris Hedges in that their direction is towards neo-feudalism and further that history itself is pointing that way. In this regard Fukiyama is an idiot of course, but what do the thinking ones say about this when their stated beliefs seem to be much more libertarian?

Anno

“All objects lose by too familiar a view”

Leo

The difference is that Hitchens took on Falwell while he was alive.

Stephen:
“Craig – why didn’t you have the intellectual honesty to attack Christopher Hitchens while he was alive and able to defend himself but only now do so when he is dead and unable to respond to your accusation of “intellectual prostitution”???”
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If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck… Intellectual prostitution is what Craig called it, and intellectual prostitution it was.
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Apart from which: if Craig reserved his accusations for the dead, he’d still be working at the Foreign Office.

@Franz: “if Craig reserved his accusations for the dead, he’d still be working at the Foreign Office.”
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Well said.

“I mourn the loss of someone who stood up for intellectual argument in the public sphere.”

He is an intellectual millionth of who you should mourn -the unheard, unarmed millions of murdered and maimed, whom he abandoned to sophistry and lies.

Terrorist air threats will be diverted to Scotland during Olympics

Friday, 16 December 2011 04:28

Aeroplanes suspected of harbouring a threat from terrorists are to be diverted to a Scottish airport in order to protect London during the Olympic games.
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The news is revealed in a report in today’s Scotsman newspaper which claims that Prestwick airport has been chosen to receive suspect flights.
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According to the paper Strathclyde police are preparing to deploy a round-the-clock presence at the Ayrshire airport in anticipation of dangerous flights being detected by UK intelligence.
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Planes thought to contain bombs or believed to be under threat from hijackers will land at Prestwick instead of London’s Stansted. The cost of footing the police bill will fall on Scottish taxpayers.
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The news follows reports that an extra £41m is to be spent on the London Olympics opening ceremony in order to bolster security. It includes an estimated 800 Scottish police officers who will be drafted in to help their southern counterparts.
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Few people are aware that suspect flights from the west are already diverted to Prestwick with those from the east sent to Stansted. However, throughout the games and the build-up, the Scottish airport is currently the sole airport for these flights.
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More here:

http://newsnetscotland.com/index.php/scottish-news/3906-terrorist-air-threats-will-be-diverted-to-scotland-during-olympics

oops! wrong thread.

Sorry!

Rather appropriate that Christopher Hitchens should die when the flag came down on the US invasion of Iraq. The people from the left who supported that invasion should never be allowed to forget their mistake.
Christopher Hitchens went badly wrong in recent years. I tended to prefer his brother Peter, a conservative, but invariably true to his principles and much less naive than Christopher about the nature and consequences of military intervention in the Middle East.

Today I saw a satellite TV news snippet of the witch Clinton brazenly sporting a Kabbalistic red string wristband for the world’s cameras.
http://www.ehow.com/about_5217878_meaning-red-string-bracelets_.html
How you move from Christianity via Judaism and Hinduism into black magic and still retain your credibility with the oil sheikhs defeats me completely. The neo-cons are not People of the Book, but committed Satanists. She might just as well have been wearing red horns and a bunny girl suit.. or was that later for invited guests?

Craig

Nope – I searched your site first before making my original comment – only one prior reference.

Why RIP?
I don’t wish that he rests in peace. I wish that he burns in hell.
A hell more painful then then the white phosporose that rained down on the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, which he supported.

Oh please God, fill his grave with fire!
And make sure he will never ever rest.
Does he think he escaped justice before he could be arrested and tried before a court or law for his crimes and the crimes he supported?

Well, now it is time for him to face real justice, a never ending justice.
So Christopher Hitchens, may he burn in the deepest hottest pit of hell, and may he remain there for ever and a day.

Angrysoba, Frederick: the point is, I don’t know what his final fate is. So I prefer to allow the possibility of eventual pardon. As for my expressly not objecting to God’s will: we can agree that objecting to His will wouldn’t be wise.

Stephen; “The difference is that Hitchens took on Falwell while he was alive.2

Wrong, I remember at the time of Jerry Falwell’s death, Hitchens was being interviewed live on TV, and said “”I think it’s a pity there isn’t a hell for him to go to” , and when the interviewer said that was a callous remark to make on somebody not even buried yet, that may caused distress to Falwell family, Hicthens followed up with “If they give him an enema he be buried in a matchbox.”

I called him a wanker when he was alive, and heckled the bastard, and sure as hell, now that is he is despatched back to his sponsors in hell, I can curse that mass murderers propagandist, and wish/hope he is getting his genitals roasted whilst his ares is worked on with sharp forks of the little devils for eternity.
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Everyone has to earn a living but scum like Chris Hitchens eat their caviare from the hollowed out skulls of the infants they have managed to get bombed, and drink champaign in abundance to numb the empty worthlessness they feel post feasting upon celebrations of the humongous numbers of the corpses they have managed to create.
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Bastards the likes of him give humanity a bad name, and that goes for fuckwits(especially the ziofuckwit kind) that supports this kind of monster. Note for the rest of the sell out fuckwits; you too will enjoy such disrespect, and infamy, if you carry on the path of being belligerents’ propagandists, aiding and abetting these sick fuckwtis to wage wars upon the peoples of the world.

Boy, sensitive lot those Telegraph readers.

Obviously their first time on the net.

Catch an eyefull of what Xymphora has to say about the old foggey:
“It is funny that the monster Hitchens died at the same time that the monstrous war he called for came to an end. With all the things he wrote, the only thing he will be remembered for is that he was a neocon hanger-on. Pathetic.”
http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2011/12/some-deaths-are-worth-celebrating.html

Get a Life, you lot!

Macky

No just because you say I’m wrong it doesn’t follow. The Hitch said plenty about Falwell while he was alive – just seacrh for what he said about Falwell’s inane comments that the US deserved 9/11 because of its moral decline.

If anyone cares to actually read what Hitchens says about Isreal and Palestine they will see that all the talk about him being a Zionist propagandist/supporting phosphorus attacks on innocent civilians is just plain garbage.

Mary, I read the Blair-Hitchens debate neither of whom impressed me. Claiming that when religion is absent there are still nasty people Blair said about fanaticism still being there when religion was absent.
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“The 20th century was a century scarred by visions that had precisely that imagining in their vision, and at their heart, and gave us Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot. In this vision, obedience to the will of God was for the weak, it was the will of man that should dominate.”
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He fails to add that the 20th and 21st centuries also gave us religious megalomaniac dictators like himself and G. W. Bush. Can Blair really not see that he is the same as Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin?

“Can Blair really not see that he is the same as Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin?”

Can you see that he clearly isn’t – please go and read some history. As Hitch said “what can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof”

Stephen,
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“Can Blair really not see that he is the same as Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin?”
Can you see that he clearly isn’t – please go and read some history. As Hitch said “what can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof”
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So where’s the proof of your counter-argument then?

@Stephen, sorry your weasel sophistry doesn’t wash; your comment of “the difference is that Hitchens took on Falwell while he was alive.” addressed to Leo, (who in turn was responding to somebody attacking Craig by posting “What sort of an animal writes, on the morning of his death, that the world will be a better place without him?”), thereby your direct implication being that unlike Craig, Hitchens had not spoken ill of the dead. Whereas this is completely untrue, as Hitchens , in characteristic offensive & coarse language, had done exactly that, and in such a manner as to make Craig’s “The world will undoubtedly be a duller place without Christopher Hitchens. Oh, and a better one too” sound like words of love in comparison !

Re CH position on Israel, I haven’t read enough really to comment; but I think that it may turn out to be somewhat messy & complex; the fact that he discovered quite late in life that he may have inherited Jewish ancestry from his Mother , which was at around the same time that he was “metamorphosisin from a Butterfly to a Slug” post 9/11, adds another complicating factor into the mix. Strange thing is that his brother flatly denies this supposed Jewish ancestry!! But more than strange, and in fact quite hilarious, is the reactions of the commentators at that nest of rabid Zionists & Islamophobes, Harry’s Place; they’re all turning into schizophrenics as they don’t know if to praise him for his Islamophobia, or to condemn him for making anti-Zionist statement !! LOL !!

Nice one Macky.
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John. I agree about that so called debate. They polished each other’s egos.
This is Bliar today. I suppose we could say ‘he would say that, wouldn’t he’.
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Tony Blair described him as “a complete one-off, an amazing mixture of writer, journalist, polemicist, and unique character”.

[..]
Mr Blair, the former Labour prime minister, publicly debated religion with Hitchens in November 2010. He said Hitchens “was fearless in the pursuit of truth and any cause in which he believed.
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“And there was no belief he held that he did not advocate with passion, commitment and brilliance.
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“He was an extraordinary, compelling and colourful human being whom it was a privilege to know.”
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16226580
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Tempted to say that the swamp of stuff written and said in praise of Hitchens today is in complete disproportion to his value to the human condition. He will be forgotten very soon.

Stephen, I was waiting for a comment like yours. Tony Blair, Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin were all mass murderers. That is indisputably proven. Clare Short, when she eventually resigned said that there was no open debate in cabinet meetings, just the dictates of Tony Blair. So he was a dictator too. How much proof do you want?

I just don’t get the adulation for Hitchens.This article,to me,reveals a vain,boorish,pompous,deeply confused,arrogant,racist individual.There’s a telling quote by wife about violence but,predicatably enough,it’s violence by proxy i.e. a coward’s bluster.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/22/christopher-hitchens-decca-aitkenhead

Macky

Look at what I said – I have no problem of people speaking ill of the dead (and as you point out Hitchens would have not worried on such a score) – my problem is with those cowards who only do so when the person is dead and then twist his views. I have never inferred that Hitchens had not spoken ill of the dead. I made my view perfectly clear with regard to Craig’s words in an earlier post. If you had any honesty you would apologise – there is no sophistry on my part. You make the common mistake here of assuming that all people who disagree with you disagree in the same way – so that you can have the convenience of tarring them with the same brush.

“Re CH position on Israel, I haven’t read enough really to comment” so why do so?

“Strange thing is that his brother flatly denies this supposed Jewish ancestry!!”

No he doesn’t – he just makes the point that their mother was not a practicising Jew and that you have to go back a few generations before you find one. CH just says that under normal Jewish matrilinear practice that he would be a Jew (which is true) – but i’m pretty certain he died an atheist.

HItch was not an Islamophobe (tarring with the same brush again!) – he was against Islamofacists and was a strong supporter of Moslems in Kurdistan and Bosnia – and of all those whose suffered under totalitarians whatever religion.

You may of course wish to portray healthy debate as schizophrenia – a phenomenom not unknown in totalitarian states.

“A strange and extremely unpleasant manifestation of intellectual prostitution. ”
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Cannot disagree.Thoroughly despicable man.
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i wonder if he has discovered whether there is a devil or not .. doubt he will realise god in the other place.

“I just don’t get the adulation for Hitchens.This article,to me,reveals a vain,boorish,pompous,deeply confused,arrogant,racist individual.There’s a telling quote by wife about violence but,predicatably enough,it’s violence by proxy i.e. a coward’s bluster.”
.
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the adulation is because they can hide behind him nodding their heads and wagging their tails.

The statement that:
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“Those who planned the Iraq war, including those who used media positions to propagandise for it, have lost entitlement to the signs of society’s respect.”
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can be directed against almost anyone. For example:
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Those like CM who deny the existence of the British race and promote its destruction by propagandizing for mass immigration have similarly lost entitlement to the signs of society’s respect.
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The only moral difference I can see between Hitchens and members of the Liberal-Democratic party is that Hitch’s war for oil was against Iraq, whereas the Lib-Dems war for oil was against Libya.

Hitchens’ only real crime was to support a government as it went about the dirty business of real politic as usual, something that most of us have done at some time in our lives.

And unless you’re a pacifist under all circumstances — is anyone — the question of which wars one supports is more a matter of judgment than morality.
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So before the good that he did is interred with his bones, can Hitchens not be remembered even momentarily, for his indictment of Henry Kissinger’s murderous role in the prosecution of the Vietnam War, and the example he provided of the eloquent and entertaining use of the English language.

Perhaps those wishing to throw around accusations of intellectual prostitution should perhaps first of all have the intellectual honesty to read Hitchen’s own thoughts as to why he changed his political position on many but not all things (which he never denied) rather than relying on the unreliable accounts of his opponents. Just a clue (and it is there in Dawkins interview of HItch in the current issue of the New Statesman) he saw opposition to totalitarianism as being pretty key!

John Goss

I said read some history first. You have yet to reach the F- John must not make it up on the schoolbus stage.

Jives, from what I’ve read of Hitchens, and Decca Aitkenhead’s interview for Hitchens’ new book, I would say she is the better journalist and debater than he is. This simple paragraph shows it.
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‘We must also make what we will of his claim to have slept with two unnamed young men at Oxford who later joined Thatcher’s government. Hitchens was exuberantly bisexual in his younger days – until his looks “declined to the point where only women would go to bed with me” – and is quite candid on the matter, so his refusal to name the future ministers looks at best coy and at worst like teasing up a bit of publicity for the book. “Oh no,” he says. “To the contrary, I’d rather not discuss it.” So why mention them at all? “You may look in vain for logic or consistency,” he concedes.’

A very long time ago, when Hitchens was a young man, I knew him for a while. He was part of a kind of gang I was knocking about with. He was exceptionally pleasant but I can’t remember being very impressed with anything he had to say. Most of us were much more radical than him, and although he has often been described as a Trot I never saw much evidence of that.
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I have never read any of his books properly, but have dipped in here and there. Mostly because I disagree with almost everything he has to say. What strikes me about him is that he was a great mate of Kingsley Amis as well as Martin, and I think he shared a lot of Kingsley’s values.
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He had a great mastery of the English language, and great personal charm. Apparently he had a great memory, perhaps he was so much in love with Anglo-Saxon culture that he wanted it imposed on the world. I think Amis, who had once been a Communist, was also a bit like that.
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He had not insignificant courage, and he liked people who said what they thought, even in his neocon years he respected radicals at times.
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I would be very surprised if money was a motive for any of his opinions.

There was no transformation. This man had only one ideology and its called SELF!

I’m sorry, I don’t revel in anyone death. I may not have agreed with some of Christopher Hitchens’s recent views but I wouldn’t have wanted him to get cancer and die. For what it’s worth, I don’t think he changed his views because of money. Incidentally, his brother, Peter, is a very decent man who is on the paleocon Right and though he too once was a Leftist, he shifted much earlier and to a very different place, politically. These prodigal sons of the English upper-middle class! I don’t agree with Martin Amis’s new-found neocon views either and in fact I reviewed his book of essays in the Independent in that critical light, but I certainly wouldn’t want any harm to come to him.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-second-plane-by-martin-amis-776567.html

Stephen, you ask for proof, I gave you proof. Jives told you to counter the arguments. You ignored him and came up with the most childish argument imaginable:
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“John Goss

I said read some history first. You have yet to reach the F- John must not make it up on the schoolbus stage.”
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If I could understand it, I might even respond.

@Stephen,

“Look at what I said” — I can only go on exactly what you have said , and my accurate précis of the exchange of posts reveal exactly the context of your false insinuation against Craig; rather telling that you don’t want to admit to this, as this would mean having to apologise to Craig, so instead you state that you expect me to apologise to you ! For what ?? Your disingenuous sophistry ? ..don’t hold your breath.

“so why do so?” — Well I haven’t ! I didn’t state that CH was supporter of Israel nor that he was an Anti-Zionist; I just stated that his position wasn’t probably so cut & dried for various reasons, some of which I mentioned. Thanks for the clarification (if that is what it is) of Peter’s view of their Jewish ancestry, all Wiki gives is;
“Hitchens’ Jewish-born ancestors were immigrants from Eastern Europe (including Poland”

“HItch was not an Islamophobe” .. – Let’s just say that I don’t think you will not find many takers for that viewpoint; off the top of my head here’s some quotes from the great “Anti-Islamophobe” !

“I’m against the burning of books, except the Koran”

“Afghanistan, far from being bombed back into the Stone Age,, if anything, was bombed OUT of the Stone Age”

“The death toll is not nearly high enough… too many (jihadists) have escaped.” (on Fallujah)

“was a strong supporter of Moslems in Kurdistan and Bosnia” –- yes we all know all about“Good Moslems” & “Bad Moslems”, definitions that depend on entirely upon the usefulness of groups of people to the Neocon Agenda;.

“you wish to portray healthy debate” .. Rather telling that you chose to defend those creatures bickering at “Harry’s Place”, as only having a “healthy debate” ! There is nothing at all “healthy” to be found at that cesspit of odious fanatics.

Suhayl, I agree with you about not wanting Christopher Hitchen to have contracted cancer. And it occurred to me that when Decca Aitkenhead interviewed him (linked earlier by Jives) it was only about a month before he was diagnosed with cancer. That might account for why she found him in such a dishevelled state; or, of course, it could easily have been the booze.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/22/christopher-hitchens-decca-aitkenhead

Macky

I wasn’t holding my breath. Just look at what was said

I said in response to Leo “The difference is that Hitchens took on Falwell while he was alive.”

You said “wrong”

I said “The Hitch said plenty about Falwell while he was alive – just seacrh for what he said about Falwell’s inane comments that the US deserved 9/11 because of its moral decline.” – in direct contradiction to your assertion that my original statement was wrong.

Your response is to prattle on about sophistry – which just demonstrates a lack of basic honesty. Your comments about HArry’s Place further indicate that you form your views about honesty based upon peoples political views rather than just accepting that they may just disagree with you.

Btw I am not making insinuations about Craig’s comments but accusations.

Thanks, John.
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Christopher Hitchens was a complex character. I think that many of the regular posters here would agree with Hitchens’s views on Palestine-Israel, for example. He remained a fervent and open anti-Zionist.
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So, while fiercely critiquing the part he played as ‘intellectual renegade turncoat’ cheerleader for recent US military exploits, on this day after his death, let’s not forget firstly his excellent writing and secondly the good work he did in his younger days.

Stephen. Please go away again. You’re undesirable.

I like the content and the style of the writing by Alexander Cockburn on Counterpunch. He weighs up Hitchens accurately but not maliciously.
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http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/16/farewell-to-c-h/

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I hope that by tomorrow all that is going to be said in the press and elsewhere is said. Getting tedious.

Back to the brilliant writer thing. Hitchens was also one of the greatest literary critics of his generation, as his monthly book review in The Atlantic or his latest collection of essays, “Arguably”, demonstrates. Rather one beautiful writer than a million agit-prop politicos. Anyway, his beef was with religious totalitarians be they Israeli, Moslem or Christian. And on this, he was quite right. God is not great. I shall raise a glass.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doKkOSMaTk4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEVA4EAP_S0

Macky
“I’m against the burning of books, except the Koran”

What is the source for this inaccurate quotation? Or did you just make it up – the only quote I can find from Hitchens on burning the Koran is calling the American pastor who did so moronic.

Kingfelix

Yes I’m sure I am undesirable in your eyes – but I’m not going to see a good man lied about just after he has died.

I’ve just seen Blair (BBC News) paying tribute to Christopher Hitchens and I’m convinced he’s had a forehead job! He used to have this big W on his forehead, which God quite justly put there to show he was a warmonger, but which others think has something more to do with onanism. I don’t think make-up can achieve this transformation, not without Polyfilla.

The best quote i read about Hitchens and his politics du jour were that his day to day opinions depended on how many drinks he’d been bought.
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I’ve met many such dandys and whisky-philosophers.Ironically enough Hitchens once explained his drinking as a way to make other people less boring.

Stephen, what is wrong with you? You come on this blog, a blog with which you clearly disagree. You make unsubstantiated insinuations about my knowledge of history, and claim not to be a troll. Just what is your problem?

The wisdom of C. Hitchens:
“I see you bought the … lies about there being no weapons of mass destruction …”.
[http://www.thenation.com/signupad/165194?destination=blog/165194/one-being-spit-upon-literally-christopher-hitchens]
You know, you weigh up the good things that this guy said, and then you compare them against the bad.
And then you make the discovery: ‘bad’ is *a lot heavier*…

M.

I’ve just seen Blair (BBC News) paying tribute to Christopher Hitchens and I’m convinced he’s had a forehead job! He used to have this big W on his forehead, which God quite justly put there to show he was a warmonger
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Awwww! I thought you’d say it was put there by George Bush to show whose property he was.
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Anyway, here’s Hitchens on Falwell. It does have him talking somewhat about Israel as well. It’s quite entertaining actually and I’m sure that Hitchens hiself wouldn’t expect people to cease-fire on him just because he’s dead.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIviufQ4APo&feature=player_embedded#!

Back in the mid-Eighties, Hitchens was hanging around with Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Rashid Khalidi. They put a book together called “Blaming the Victims” which is, perhaps somewhat appropriately enough, mostly a reaction to Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaming_the_Victims

Canspeccy,
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“Hitchens’ only real crime was to support a government as it went about the dirty business of real politic as usual, something that most of us have done at some time in our lives.
And unless you’re a pacifist under all circumstances — is anyone — the question of which wars one supports is more a matter of judgment than morality.”
.
What about moral judgement? How can you seperate them?

Suhayl Saadi,
Who is revelling in the death of someone? The expressions of joy on display; are celebration of triumph of good over evil. The demise and destruction of yet another evil character, only reinforces the principles of natural justice. Regardless of the lamentations of some fuckwits for reasons obvious, about the loss of their mouthpiece, the fact remains; Hitchens et al sold the Iraq war and mass murder thereof to the populace. This is, and would have been considered as “supreme crimes against peace”, in the Nuremberg Trials.
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Missing in the “RIP” Saint protector of the booze soaked souls, is the dirty tricks of selling a war, and giving credence, and plausibility to acts of mass murder on industrial scales, and plunder of the treasury of the aggressor nations, as well as the plunder and theft on grand scale of the assets and resources of the vanquished nation.
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Chris Hitchens by plying his craft (instinctual prostitution, for no human is born evil) did not influence those whom came out in millions and were totally ignored, and denigrated, and discounted (five hundred thousand protesters), by a coterie of similar lickspittles in the “media”. The very same kind of prrestitutes whom will pen down, and or pontificate for a price. However, the nexus of these evil operatives did manage to change the minds of those with dispositions of weaker minds, as well as giving a platform to the war mongers bent on starting the blood letting ceremonials and affording acceptability (however tenuous) to get on with their own theft and plunder, after the starting guns were fired.
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The mental pygmies and and intellectual midgets frequenting this board, and commenting can get on with regurgitation of their own distorted realities freely, because these lame of brains know not better, and to be honest are far too dim to be engaged with, in any kind of transaction. However, it is puzzling to see your contribution on the lines you have set out.
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Finally the act of murder, whether by direct contribution or indirect contribution is the ultimate crime, and does not somehow find mitigation through apparently positive attributes of the mass murderer.

John
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That’s right. Blair carries the mark of his deeds upon him till the end of days.
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Praise the Lord.
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I often think of him as a Dorian Grey figure, once young, sweet and beautiful, but now the squinting rat like features finally unmasking for the world his dark haunted inner soul.
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Hitchins, I’m afraid, fausted out too. It was quite a turn of events when his post 911 outbursts made his brother’s much more traditional, sensible and principled conservative beliefs seem middle of the road by comparison. Both had been Trots in their youth, Chris remaining longer into adulthood.
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Traditional conservatives are like angels compared to these neocons. I’ve noticed that with Peter Oborne too.
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As I mentioned in a discussion with Jon once, it wouldn’t be difficult to make alliance with trad conservatives. We do have a common enemy.

FedUp: Who is revelling in the death of someone? The expressions of joy on display; are celebration of triumph of good over evil.
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Well, it is actually the “triumph” of cancer over mortal human flesh.
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The demise and destruction of yet another evil character, only reinforces the principles of natural justice.
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You can only really believe that if you also think “natural justice” has an incredibly sadistic and arbitrary side to her when it comes to everyone else who has or has had cancer. In fact, if you look into it just a little you’ll find “natural justice” is supremely unprincipled even if, by statistical probability, she sweeps up a number of people you personally find repugnant.

Sounds like Blair’s had botox/collagen treatment.It wouldn’t surprise me.The vain little shit’s always been about style over substance-not that i thought he ever had any style i hasten to add.
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Manic-eyed,Messiah complex,with the fixed idiot imp-grin of a third-former who’s stolen the keys to the tuck shop.Just gross.

Angrysoba,
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“You can only really believe that if you also think “natural justice” has an incredibly sadistic and arbitrary side to her when it comes to everyone else who has or has had cancer. In fact, if you look into it just a little you’ll find “natural justice” is supremely unprincipled even if, by statistical probability, she sweeps up a number of people you personally find repugnant.”
.
Very true.

“You make unsubstantiated insinuations about my knowledge of history”

No I make allegations based on ridiculous comparisions of Blair with Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin which you try and support with a ridicusly glib analysis supported by insinuations and innuendo. If you want to call disagreeing and challenging such and similar viewpoints, which are on regular display here, trolling that is your prerogative. Need less to say the opportuniuties for trolling are limited in the regimes you noticeably fail to criticise, and I daresay would like introduced here given half a chance.

Fedup

Rather than delving further into your dictionary of abuse perhaps you might wish to address where you think Hitchens went wrong in his arguments for the war on Iraq – or even more constructively how else totalitarian regimes such as in Iraq (and more pertintly in Syria and Iran) should be dealt without resort to war?? Do you really think that all that abuse has the slightest impact on me – or is it just a way of releasing your angst.

Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld visualised for decades of a catastrophic and catalyzing event similar to Pearl Harbor that would trigger a clash of western civilisation against so called “fascism with an Islamic face” – an eristic manifestation of autocracy infected with the toxin of Islamic paranoia based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises life itself.
.
That became an ‘axis of evil’ that threatened to envelope the world into one great revived caliphate that resembles the mad scheme of Nazi Germany. This catalyzing event would create the moment to countermand the internationally agreed condition for war and preempt an invasion of Iraq. For Hitchens, it was the opening maneuver in a grand, imagined clash of western civilization against the Islamofascist hordes.

It would become the terrible shock, the extreme awe, a grotesque error as chaos unleashed, a war that killed hundreds of thousands and maimed millions. Dead or wounded included over a million children.
.
Hitchen would align himself with Murdoch’s headline, ‘A war to Be Proud Of’ as death squads murdered Iraqi families and young teenage girls and boys surrendered to rape and sodomy by sex hungry fighters and soldiers. When torture, murder and sexual humiliation by reckless and irresponsible American officers and troops at Abu Graib prison numbed the minds of ordinary folk Hitchen wrote, “Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad.”
.
To the shouts of lies that WMD’s threatened to nuke us or infect us with deadly toxins and that Saddam harboured al-Qaeda, Hitchen confers guilt on those dispensing – “sob-sister tripe pumped out by the Cindy Sheehan circus and its surrogates.”
.
To a world that witnessed U.S. Marines massacred 24 men, women, and children in Haditha. Hitchen’s would say, “We need not argue about the failures and the mistakes and even the crimes, because these in some ways argue themselves.”
.
Hitchens polemic and many times vitriolic style metered an articulate viciousness into the ears and minds of his opponents who he seered were not just wrong, they were mean or stupid, liars or just children.
.
Do we forgive and forget? – we forgive but never forget.

Like Stephen, I would be very surprised if this is an accurate quote:
“I’m against the burning of books, except the Koran”

.
Occasionally he did look around and notice some of the more insane people he had aligned himself with and did make some tepid admonitions towards those who vilified Muslims en bloc. But when it came to jihadists – or those who he perceived to be jihadists – he was quite happy to see many of them killed and was very direct and non-euphemistic about it. He said of his Leftist former friends that they saw bin Laden as some kind of slightly wayward anti-Imperialist and said to them something along the lines of “We are not fighting the Wretched of the Earth. We are at war with the scum of the Earth.”

Trolls are so boring. They are following an instruction manual. Dont feed them.

@ Mark Golding,
.
Read the Decca Aitkenhead/Hitchnes article if you get the chance.There’s a couple of links earlier in this post.Tellingly Hitchens wife relates that he was a wannabe man-of-action,clamouring after the clarity that he believed(as did his father)that war offers,supposedly.I found it immature and sad but also quite chilling.

Stephen: Rather than delving further into your dictionary of abuse perhaps you might wish to address where you think Hitchens went wrong in his arguments for the war on Iraq

Come on, Stephen, this is just a little silly now. There was that whole WMD thing which Hitchens argued showed that Saddam Hussein was “not contained”. In particular, he argued the case for “yellowcake from Niger” long after most people had concluded it was baseless.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries

– or even more constructively how else totalitarian regimes such as in Iraq (and more pertintly in Syria and Iran) should be dealt without resort to war??
.
Now, I hope I am not reading this correctly. Or I hope you wrote this badly. Because from what you have written you appear to be saying that war with Syria and Iran is unavoidable and, in fact, a desirable method for dealing with those two countries as it is the only option. Is this really what you mean?

Mark Golding – Children Of Iraq,
Forgiving the evildoers such as Chris Hitchens are not ours to do, that right belongs to the victims of this evil fuckwit. Not forgetting remains our only choice.
,
The notions of Pearl Harbour are appealing to the base instincts, which clearly is a window to the opinions of the proponents of the war, and their vies of anyone outside their cabal; apes to be used to kill other apes, or apes to work and pay for the cost of the enterprise of the mass cull of the apes. That filthy fascio will fall prey to natural justice too.

Well, you know, FedUp, Paul Robeson never criticised Stalin. He had a romanticised view of the USSR. But I am a great admirer of Paul Robeson, he was a great man and an incomparable talent and I was terribly sad when he was destroyed by the USA and later, when he died. So, to look at the complexities of a human being does not mean we are acquiescing in any way in relation to their views or actions. I look at Churchill, Lenin, Che Guevara, de Gaulle, Leni Riefenstahl, Tito…
.
Politics is not religion, its boundary conditions are seldom absolute.

Angrysoba
.
At the moment I’m more concerned at how we deal with the creeping totalitarianism of the US and western political class and their organ grinders.
.
Their wealth destruction, trickle up and increasing criminalisation of western populations seem to me to be a much greater existential threat than Iran or Syria, or indeed Libya or Iraq, for that matter.
.
Iran and Syria are distractions to those problems we could well do without.
.
I’m sure there’s some reasonable explanation as to why we’re being asked to look for enemies abroad when we’re being destroyed by those within.
.
Have these neocon former Trots taken power and decided to so fuck things up that at last false consciousness will dissipate and finally they’ll have the revolution they always dreamed?

Herbie,
.
I remember as a kid at the dinner table my Dad would sometimes point at something outside the window.Whenever i turned my head back i always seemed to have less chips.It’s an old trick.

An amusing comment by Gordon Duff on the demise of CH appeared in VT.

“He was compared to Orwell and nearly everyone else. Problem is, he wrote on issues spies are supposed to know about, and got so much of it utterly wrong, like he was paid to get it wrong.”

cf. http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/12/16/spies-just-another-job-but-dumber/

If some honorable contributors to this great discussion find time to read the article above, they may ask themselves who is “tasked” here, to use GDs terminology, and whether individuals like Stephen may know of “Building 7″.

Herbie, “Traditional conservatives are like angels compared to these neocons.” For Christopher Hitchens and his brother the Tory philosophy of Winston Churchill’s fits: “If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no brain.” Churchill was a great writer, historian and orator, he was also a pratt and public disgrace at times. If you like, a Dorian Gray figure, as was perhaps, Wilde himself. He was looking at the world from his own perspective, as we all do. Ted Heath, even though I demonstrated with the miners, was a traditional Tory, and I do have respect for him. On my father’s side I come from a long line of miners, who sweated and toiled in the candlelight to keep the home fires burning. On my mother’s side my ancestors were silversmiths and thespians.
.
Tonight on Newsnight it showed Hitchens being interviewed by Paxman last year, when Hitchens knew he was dying. I detected a slight sign that Hitchens might have been recanting his total atheism. It was no longer as absolute as it had been before. He said something to the effect that “if there is something afterwards, it will be a surprise. I like surprises.”
.
So yes, the maternal side of me says traditional conservatives and we have a common enemy, if that is Cameron, Hague, Osborne, Fox and crew, while the paternal side asks the workers of the world to unite. I should add here that my parents had no disagreement over politics. They were Labour – but that was not the Labour we have since Blair took control. Mum many times said she worshipped the ground my dad walked on. And he was a lovely man – with faults, of course, as we all have.
.
Are you suggesting a deal?

Yeah, Jives. I know.
.
The IRA were a much greater threat to England than these Islamist bogeymen, and there was little of the panic our leaders wish to instill in us today.
.
Funny that a real threat is less of a worry.
.
I was just wondering what Angry thought.
.
The real clou lies in the end of the IRA campaign and how MI5 and MI6 spokespeople spoke openly on tellie about the much greater threat to come from the Islam bogey, and funnily enough they even went to great lengths to indicate that the IRA somehow fought in a more civilsed way than what was to come from the Islamists. They emphasized that the IRA gave warnings and didn’t blow up tube trains and mass concentrations etc. Yes. they really were saying things like that.
.
It was almost as if the IRA were Saints compared to the great bogey to come from the East.
.
Curious, eh.

Karel, I think the dreary 9/11 conspiracy theories have been done to death many times over. There’s a whole thread in which that nonsense is debunked in the archives.

Suhayl Saadi,
Comparing apples and pears argument do not cut the mustard; A singer does not publish oodles of unconscious drivel, in justification of mass murder.
,
The list of characters you recollect, somehow did not so openly and comprehensively flout the prevailing; treaties, conventions, and the laws, in their bidding to commit their intended crimes.
,
Further, the forwarded spurious contention of absolutism, cannot mask the current open access to the torrents of information, which were not available, or were classified and out of the reach of the constituents of the rouges gallery you have conjured up.
,
The crimes against peace are absolute and no mitigating counter argument can be forwarded, that will not result in declaring the Nuremberg Principles null and void.

Herbie, please re-read my comment to Stephen as it was a response to what he was saying about “dealing with” Iran and Syria. I had meant to put the words in quotes as I did then but thought it would be obvious that I was not advocating war myself.

John
.
It’s always wise to make alliances against a common enemy.
.
The common enemy to my mind is those whose desire for profit is greater than their desire for the good of our common humanity.
.
In both trad Labour and Conservatives you’ll see those latter values.
.
You don’t see them in algorithmic trading or neocons.

Stephen, you talk about what you assume to be my “ridiculous comparisons” between Blair, Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler. Just below this comment is one by Mark Golding – Children of Iraq. I invite you not to read Mark’s comment, though his comments are always worthy of reading, but instead to click on the blue text of “Mark Golding – Children of Iraq”. Tell me then if the images you see are not the images we have seen from all dictators over the centuries.
.
As for Clare Short’s revelations about Blair as a dictator I offer the following.
.
“In the second term, the problem is centralisation of power into the hands of the prime minister and an increasingly small number of advisers who make decisions in private without proper discussion.
.
It is increasingly clear, I’m afraid, that the Cabinet has become in Bagehot’s phrase a dignified part of the constitution …
.
There is no real collective responsibility because there is no collective, just diktats in favour of increasingly badly thought through policy initiatives that come from on high.
.
The consequences of this are serious. Expertise in our system lies in departments.
.
Those who dictate from the centre do not have full access to this expertise and they do not consult. This leads to bad policy.”
.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3022139.stm
.
So almighty Stephen, what historical evidence do you have to rebuff these historical facts? Or are you, as I suspect, just piss and wind?

Angrysoba,
.
“There’s a whole thread in which that nonsense is debunked in the archives.”
.
I agree that those discussions should be kept in that thread but i must also say i don’t think anything was really debunked insofar as both sides presented their evidence and views and i don’t think many changed from their original positions.

Herbie, I agree. Negotiation, consultation, common ground is always better than conflict, conflagration or outright war.

Angrysoba

i suspect that rather than reading the GBs article you are offering us a “debunked” dance at the 9/11 conspiracy pole. Are you “tasked” by any chance? Do you know “Building 7″ or have you heard of hasbara? Are you loosing the thread or have you just received new orders?

Who dared shine a little light on this shade? When is it time to curse the wrong and when to bless all? it would seem too far…

Karel, my bosses at NWO HQ tell me that Building 7 is none of your business or mine and that I am to keep doing “hasbara”. I don’t even know what “hasbara” means! And I have no intention of reading any more BS from GB. I once went to his weird site and needed a bath after.

I also think that you have deluded yourself into thinking you have some great insight into the hidden workings of the world just because you have learnt to imitate the patter of the “surveillance world” (“tasked”, “hasbara” etc…). It is common behaviour of those who want to appear to have priveleged knowledge to use jargon like that.
.
You could just ask, “Are you paid by anyone to write on this site?”
.
The answer is “no. I am not”.

@Patrick – how amusing that you castigate Mr. Murray for his opinion, when Christopher Hitchens was infamous for loosing his caustic tongue upon the recently deceased.

When Ronald Reagan died, Hitchens eulogised him as a “stupid and cruel lizard” within 2 days of his passing, Jerry Falwell was tarred as a “Chaucerian fraud”, while for Arafat the epitaph engraved was “what a squalid and ignoble terminus, to a life of steadily diminishing returns…”

JOhn Goss

You really are infantile – every politician who is involved in a war is not Pol Pot, Hitler or Stalin. Clare Short does not employ such a description of Blair. And if she had attacked Pol Pot, Hitler or Stalin in a similar fashionto to which she attacked Blair do you really think she would still be alive? As I said please go anbd read some history – your comparison is idiotic in the extreme.

So, people are either wholly evil or wholly good, FedUp? Guevara? Tito? Nkrumah? Robeson? Castro? Graham Greene? Aldo Moro? Bobby Sands? Clement Atlee, Eisenstein? ? To you, they all may be “rogues” – perhaps, then, roguery is what humanity is about! If that were the case, there is no point in political discourse at all. Robeson was much, much more than ‘jsut’ a singer – why do you minimise him? He was a Communist, a Stalinist, an African-American icon, a lawyer, a genius. And why would being “a singer” be something of less consequence than “a writer”? Haven’t you heard of the Beatles? Or Maria Callas? Or Mehdi Hassan? Or Mohammad Rafi? Or Umm Qulsum? Have you any idea of how many people across the world, across different language groups and different cultures, were inspired and influenced by Robeson? Why do you think the US authorities stopped him from performing in public and took away his passport? Paul Robeson is still an iconic figure – rightly so – 36 years after his death and nearly 50 years after he vanished – was forced to vanish – from the public sphere. It’s not ‘mitigation’ I write about here, it’s realism. It’s the real world. It’s not a world of angels and demons, of saved and damned. How many of us can throw stones, when we all live in glass houses? Better a glass house, than the grave of absolutism, especially, perhaps, religious absolutism. But of course, the grave is safe.

Angrysoba

No I don’t think war with Syria and Iran is inevitable or desirable – but I do belive that the chances will be increased considerably if nothing is done to address the current behaviour of their governing regimes. Sitting back and doing nothing will only make things worse in the long run: and is one of the reasons why I detest those who advocate such a course of action – problems never go away by ignoring them.

I like this comment on him in “Blood and Treasure”:

“My American friends are offering fulsome memorials on Facebook etc, while my UK ones are muted or indifferent. Basically, contrarian British semi-left drunks are a very rare thing in the US media, but they’re two a penny at home.”

http://bloodandtreasure.typepad.com/blood_treasure/2011/12/the-performer-they-want-to-remember.html#comments

Suhayl:
“Politics is not religion…” (above, 16 Dec 11.45pm ). I agree; and Hitchins deserves credit for some well-aimed polemical strikes against “religious absolutism” (you at 9.33 this morning ). I also entirely agree with your reminder of Paul Robeson’s heroic status, flaws and all: have you seen Tayo Aluko’s “Call Mr Robeson”, his fine one-man dramatisation of Robeson’s battle with the FBI (see http://tinyurl.com/6xsschd ) ?

Meanwhile, it awoke Hitchins-like ire in me when Radio 4 woke me today to the item on Cameron’s “bold Christian gamble” – his Back to Christianity speech in Oxford on 16 December- together with the comment that this was the speech Tony Blair longed to give but was never allowed to because of Campbell’s fatwa: “We don’t do God.” Sad to be unable now to look forward to Hitchins’ comments on the Oxford speech.

Are there no depths Cameron’s shallowness will not plumb? Using Christianity and the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible ( see the Guardian account at http://tinyurl.com/cbo5xxk ) to stake his claims to the debatable lands of public morality is, I suppose, a logical land-grab to follow wrapping his Pyrrhic European victory – and the current Afghan War – in the flag of patriotism. One reason politicians do this – as evidence to the Leveson Inquiry confirms – is to get favourable media coverage. There is, however, a striking contrast between Blair’s hot Catholicism bubbling fervently under the surface of his premiership and Cameron’s Laodicean Anglicism (Revelation 3:14-22), pitching for his version of “regular guy” status by describing himself as a “committed but vaguely practising Church of England Christian”.

.
Now to relations between politicians and the press and the pusillanimity of the fourth estate. Most celebrity and political sex scoops are published with the public interest justification of revealing as hypocrites those who would be role models or moralistic legislators. Cameron’s latest crusade deserves mockery far more than did Mellors’ and Fergie’s toe-suckings*. Using his Christianity to sheath his party and government in prophylactic virtue while shafting the poor and giving the rich blow-jobs should mean that Cameron finds commentators and radio/TV interviewers reminding him of some of the central themes of the Abrahamic and other faiths. They could start with these ones:
.
“ If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven. (Matthew xix: 21)
.
“Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark.” (Deuteronomy iv: 26)
.
“Give just measures, and cause no loss (to others by fraud). And weigh with scales true and upright. And withhold not things justly due to men, and do no evil in the land, working mischief.” ( Sura 26 Ash-Shuara [The Poets]:181-3)

.
I’d prefer my Prime Minister to don the rags of a penitent before aspiring to the exegetic role of a scriptural preacher, whether garbed as bishop, minister, rabbi, imam or Buddhist monk. That said, in reality I would probably not enjoy being governed by a cabinet of millionaires who had given up their wealth to reduce the National Debt (rather than to media-friendly cancer and ex-servicemen charities) and agreed to live on the national average wage. I’d be stifled by sanctimonious smoke. However, it’s a fate I’d be willing to submit to for the public interest in the experiment of being governed by pure prigs, rather than by Cameroonian moneyed hypocrites and prigs.
.
*After all:
Babies and lovers’ toes express
ecstasies of wantonness;
that’s a language which we lose
with the trick of wearing shoes.
Alex Comfort (1920-2000), in his collection “Haste to the Wedding”, 1961.

“No I don’t think war with Syria and Iran is inevitable or desirable – but I do believe that the chances will be increased considerably if nothing is done to address the current behaviour of their governing regimes.” Stephen.
.
Perhaps, first, we would be well advised to consider addressing the behaviour of our own governing regimes? Problems never go away by ignoring them.

Stephen, “the chances will be increased ….”, oh my oh my, is there any chance that with the atrocities done by Israel that we will go in there and teaching them a lesson? or do we go into Saudi and Bahrain first?? oh no! I remember now! they are ruled by our SOBs, (in the case of of Israel, we are ruled by theirs).

I am from Iran originally, and a total anti present regime, but let me tell you one thing, rather them than the Shah who was Puppet of the West, and I can say with confidence my views on that regards shared by majority in Iran. The west cannot stomach that the present government of Iran, vile as it is , it is not subservient. Please just leave us alone, your governments interfered long and hard in our affairs and the fact we ended up with our regimes in the ME, is the result of their policies, and do not send your armies under false presences, the change in Syria or Iran, will come from within, not without.

Suhayl

I don’t see the addressing the problems as mutually exclusive – far from it. You make the point very well that most people are neither wholly good or bad – I thing someone said non one interesting is without contradictions or similar – but the one thing that Hitchens and Orwell made clear is that you cannot be selective in dealing with bad. Perhaps we need a little hard thinking about increasing our armoury of dealing with bad from beyond its present bare cupboard of doing nothing and war.

Azra

Does leaving alone include allowing the current regime free access to western banking systems and allowing them to buy their weapons, implements of torture and the means for devloping nuclear weapons or allowing them to sponsor Hezbollah, Hamas and Syrian thugsoutside Iran? Should Amnesty International and HRW not highlight Iranian prisoners of conscience and human rights abuses. Do you think that the Turks should stop weapons being smugled to the resistance in Syria? There is lot that can be given in the way of support before sending armies – which in the case of Iran I agree would be stupid at present.

Suggest a look at these links before HRW is quoted as a independent judge on the conditions in Iran and Syria.

.
Chapter and verse on medialens.
.

Human Rights Watch’s board of directors/senior staff. – Peter Today, 12:42 am
HRW offices located a “golf swing” (13 blocks) away from the White House… – Garry Today, 11:29 am
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/thread/1324082522.html

Is my posting below still being moderated?

Suhayl:
“Politics is not religion…” (above, 16 Dec 11.45pm ). I agree; and Hitchins deserves credit for
some well-aimed polemical strikes against “religious absolutism” (you at 9.33 this morning ).
I also entirely agree with your reminder of Paul Robeson’s heroic status, flaws and all: have you seen Tayo Aluko’s “Call Mr Robeson”, his fine one-man dramatisation of Robeson’s battle with the FBI (see http://tinyurl.com/6xsschd ) ?

Meanwhile, it awoke Hitchins-like ire in me when Radio 4 woke me today to the item on Cameron’s “bold Christian gamble” – his Back to Christianity speech in Oxford on 16 December- together with the comment that this was the speech Tony Blair longed to give but was never allowed to because of Campbell’s fatwa: “We don’t do God.” Sad that we are unable now to look forward to Hitchins’ comments on the Oxford speech.

Are there no depths Cameron’s shallowness will not plumb? Using Christianity and the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible ( see the Guardian account at http://tinyurl.com/cbo5xxk ) to stake his claims to the debatable lands of public morality is, I suppose, a logical land-grab to follow wrapping his pyrrhic European victory – and the current Afghan War – in the flag of patriotism. One reason politicians do this – as evidence to the Leveson Inquiry confirms – is to get favourable media coverage. There is, however, a striking contrast between Blair’s hot Catholicism bubbling fervently under the surface of his premiership and Cameron’s Laodicean Anglicism (Revelation 3:14-22), pitching for his version of “regular guy” status by describing himself as a “committed but vaguely practising Church of England Christian”.

.
Now to relations between politicians and the press and the pusillanimity of the fourth estate. Most celebrity and political sex scoops are published with the public interest justification of revealing as hypocrites those who would be role models or moralistic legislators. Cameron’s latest crusade deserves mockery far more than did Mellors’ and Fergie’s toe suckings*. Using his Christianity to sheath his party and government in prophylactic virtue while shafting the poor and giving the rich blow-jobs should mean that Cameron finds commentators and radio/TV interviewers reminding him of some of the central themes of the Abrahamic and other faiths. They could start with these ones:
.
“ If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven. (Matthew xix: 21)
.
“Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark.” (Deuteronomy 1v: 26)
.
“Give just measures, and cause no loss (to others by fraud). And weigh with scales true and upright. And withhold not things justly due to men, and do no evil in the land, working mischief.” ( Sura 26 Ash-Shuara [The Poets]:181-3)

.
I’d prefer my Prime Minister to don the rags of a penitent before aspiring to the exegetic role of a scriptural preacher, whether garbed as bishop, minister, rabbi, imam or Buddhist monk. That said, in reality I would probably not enjoy being governed by a cabinet of millionaires who had given up their wealth to reduce the National Debt (rather than to media-friendly cancer and ex-servicemen charities) and agreed to live on the national average wage. I’d be stifled by sanctimonious smoke. However, it’s a fate I’d be willing to submit to for the public interest in the experiment of being governed by pure prigs, rather than by Cameroonian moneyed hypocrites and prigs.
.
*After all:
Babies and lovers’ toes express
ecstasies of wantonness;
that’s a language which we lose
with the trick of wearing shoes.
Alex Comfort (1920-2000), in his collection “Haste to the Wedding”, 1961.

Mary

And who would you suggest as an independent judge on the conditions in Iran and Syria?

BTW 13 blocks would be one helluva golf swing.

Stephen, LOL, the sanctions have made Iranian government hell of lot stronger and Iran a hell of lot more self sufficient.. In shah’s time we were importing wheat from USA, and they would take our oil, now we export wheat, industries are producing everything from Car , computer or nail, you find a fraction of the items built in China or Korea, etc.. As regarding banking, thank God Iranian banks are kept away from bankrupt banks of USA and Europe. I suggest you read the latest report of IMF (whose report are normally biased against Iran). Even they could not deny it that Iran’s economic situation is a lot better than it is portrayed in the west.
Also in your response you were disingenuous, (same as many right wingers!), you did not respond to my questions re Israel , Saudi and Bahrain human right abuses, suggest you read Amensty and HRW reports on those countries first, they are far worse than Iran. But as I said our servants so why bother with them.

Suhayl:
“Politics is not religion…” (above, 16 Dec 11.45pm ). I agree; and Hitchens deserves credit for some well-aimed polemical strikes against “religious absolutism” (you at 9.33 this morning ). I also entirely agree with your reminder of Paul Robeson’s heroic status, flaws and all: have you seen Tayo Aluko’s “Call Mr Robeson”, his fine one-man dramatisation of Robeson’s battle with the FBI?

Meanwhile, it awoke Hitchens-like ire in me when Radio 4 woke me today to the item on Cameron’s “bold Christian gamble” – his Back to Christianity speech in Oxford on 16 December- together with the comment that this was the speech Tony Blair longed to give but was never allowed to because of Campbell’s fatwa: “We don’t do God.” Sad that we are unable now to look forward to Hitchens’ comments on the Oxford speech.

Are there no depths Cameron’s shallowness will not plumb? Using Christianity and the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible ( see the Guardian account at http://tinyurl.com/cbo5xxk ) to stake his claims to the debatable lands of public morality is, I suppose, a logical land-grab to follow wrapping his pyrrhic European victory – and the current Afghan War – in the flag of patriotism. One reason politicians do this – as evidence to the Leveson Inquiry confirms – is to get favourable media coverage. There is, however, a striking contrast between Blair’s hot Catholicism bubbling fervently under the surface of his premiership and Cameron’s Laodicean Anglicism (Revelation 3:14-22), pitching for his version of “regular guy” status by describing himself as a “committed but vaguely practising Church of England Christian”.

.
Now to relations between politicians and the press and the pusillanimity of the fourth estate. Most celebrity and political sex scoops are published with the public interest justification of revealing as hypocrites those who would be role models or moralistic legislators. Cameron’s latest crusade deserves mockery far more than did Mellors’ and Fergie’s toe-suckings*. Using his Christianity to sheath his party and government in prophylactic virtue while shafting the poor and giving the rich blow-jobs should mean that Cameron finds commentators and radio/TV interviewers reminding him of some of the central themes of the Abrahamic and other faiths. They could start with these ones:
.
“ If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven. (Matthew xix: 21)
.
“Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark.” (Deuteronomy 1v: 26)
.
“Give just measures, and cause no loss (to others by fraud). And weigh with scales true and upright. And withhold not things justly due to men, and do no evil in the land, working mischief.” ( Sura 26 Ash-Shuara [The Poets]:181-3)

.
I’d prefer my Prime Minister to don the rags of a penitent before aspiring to the exegetic role of a scriptural preacher, whether garbed as bishop, minister, rabbi, imam or Buddhist monk. That said, in reality I would probably not enjoy being governed by a cabinet of millionaires who had given up their wealth to reduce the National Debt (rather than to media-friendly cancer and ex-servicemen charities) and agreed to live on the national average wage. I’d be stifled by sanctimonious smoke. However, it’s a fate I’d be willing to submit to for the public interest in the experiment of being governed by pure prigs, rather than by Cameroonian moneyed hypocrites and prigs.
.
*After all:
Babies and lovers’ toes express
ecstasies of wantonness;
that’s a language which we lose
with the trick of wearing shoes.
Alex Comfort (1920-2000), in his collection “Haste to the Wedding”, 1961.

@Stephen/Angrysoba – I stayed up to almost passed my bedtime last night searching for the Hitchens quote, but to no avail; I come across it on a Quotes site years ago, at the time of the big Galloway-Hitchens debate, and I took it as authentic as it was the sort of typical offensive smart-arsed comment that he makes, and it was framed more pseudo-intellectually than I have written it, again another characteristic of his. This was long before the issues of the Koran burning US Preacher, but all the search engines bring up now are tons of references to this. I can only conclude that either too deeply buried in the Preacher reports, or it was a remark that he made, and so no written record exists, or that it was a mis-quote, or a bogus quote. However this is very superfluous to my point about Hitchens being an Islamophobe.

His very opposition to Religion in general in itself is Islamophobic by definition, and it’s very telling that his was vitriolic about Islam for quite a time before he widen his criticism to include all religions. 9/11 seems to have such an effect on him that it appears to have caused a complete polar-switch in his political beliefs & views, and seems to have brought out his obviously upto then, latent hatred of Muslims.

@Angrysoba, the Youtube link you gave iro of his comments on Falwell’s death was not the clip I recall seeing, but it may well have been this one;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doKkOSMaTk4

Incidentally I posted a further comment to you on the Mary Poppins and Newt Gingrich thread.

Stephen, why does not west take an active interest in Zimbabwe? is it because 1) they do not have oil and 2) they are not next door to Israel?

You ask me whether Amnesty should not highlight the HR abuses in Iran, yes they should, and they do, but it seems the interest is only in Iran’s HR abuses and not in other countries, look at our government in the west, now kissing backside of Karimov the most vile, vicious dictator in the world. Let’s sort him out first..oops I forgot, he is friend of Israel, and he allows the western government use his country to send troops/arms/everything to Afghanistan, so they can kill innocent people, and above all at the moment he is our SOB.. right?
and what do you mean at the moment attacking Iran is stupid? it is stupid at any time, the way it was stupid to invade Iraq, the way it was stupid to go to Afghanistan, and the rest. And let’s talk about Israel Nuclear capability, Iran does not have nuclear weapon, there is a timeline from 1981, every year in the west it is claimed Iran is 6 month, 1 year, two year, five years from making a nuclear bomb. How many years it is now since 1981??? if you can work out..

This man’s passing,
his passion,
his lesson in compassion?
Not for me to judge,
I will have my own soon enough.

“I rant”, “you rant”,”he rants”.
Some rant facility,
but fewer and fewer,
- unless they have something to sell.

Some rant Ayn Rand.
“I am without compassion.
- that is my wall, the Apartheid in my soul,
for God abandoned me to other Nazis.”
- not the ones we see today –
those we have become.

Stephen, piss and wind, as I suggested.

The ziofuckwit has a lot more pressing stuff in his mail box from GIYUS; the paragon of Human Rights, and the Only Democracy in the Known Universe (I should cocoa) has troubles in kidding the world about the way it treats Arab “Minority” so the report says.
,
,
The European Union should consider Israel’s treatment of its Arab population a “core issue, not second tier to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” according to a classified working paper produced by European embassies in Israel, parts of which were obtained by Haaretz.
,
Well he is off to stephen about along with the other ziobots cutting and pasting oodles of “antisemite, antisemite Nazi, Nazi, antisemite, ….. attack Iran …. torture not us……. Iran torture yey…….why are you not leaving us to get on with our own apartheid…. antis…..our own private genocide of Palestinians, antisemite, antisemite.
,
‘
Meanwhile this awful shit on the barn door example of the ZBC (do these bastards get their license fee from Isreal?).
,
These are the headlines for you perusal note the “vandals” ZBC uses, whilst everyone else has used “Settlers”;
,
Secret EU paper aims to tackle Israel’s treatment of Arab minority
Haaretz – ‎Dec 16, 2011‎
Paper states EU should consider Israel’s treatment of its Arab population a ‘core issue’, and not second tier to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By Barak Ravid Tags: Jews and Arabs The European Union should consider Israel’s treatment of its Arab …
,
Israel Leader Sets Curbs on Settlers for Violence
New York Times – ‎Dec 14, 2011‎
A protester trying to enter an apartment where settlers live, in the Kiryat Moshe neighborhood in Jerusalem, while a police officer conducted a search. By ETHAN BRONNER JERUSALEM — After two days of settler violence that shocked much of Israel, …
,
Settlers Riot, Attacking Israeli Base and Post
New York Times – ‎Dec 13, 2011‎
By ETHAN BRONNER JERUSALEM — Dozens of radical Jewish settlers, reacting to a rumor that several of their outposts would be dismantled, attacked an Israeli Army base in the West Bank on Tuesday, lighting fires, vandalizing vehicles and throwing stones, …
,
Israeli military base attacked by Jewish extremists in West Bank
The Guardian – ‎Dec 13, 2011‎
A gang of 50 Jewish settlers and rightwing activists have broken into an army base near the Israeli settlement of Kedumim in the West bank, setting fire to tyres and hurling rocks at both Israeli soldiers and Palestinians. One settler forced open the …
,
Israel pledges action against extremist settlers
Financial Times – ‎Dec 14, 2011‎
By Tobias Buck in Jerusalem The Israeli government announced a plan to crack down on extremist Jewish settlers in the West Bank on Wednesday, amid warnings from the country’s defence minister that Israel was facing a new threat of Jewish “terrorism”. …
,
Vandals attack disused Jerusalem mosque
BBC News – ‎Dec 14, 2011‎
Vandals have set fire to a disused 12th Century mosque in the centre of Jerusalem and left graffiti insulting the Prophet Muhammad on its walls. Jerusalem’s mayor denounced the attack, which caused no structural damage. The incident is being linked to …
,
Arab women filmmakers shine at Dubai festival
AFP – ‎Dec 14, 2011‎
DUBAI — A tale of forbidden love in the Gaza Strip won the top prize at the eighth Dubai Film Festival on Wednesday, where a new generation of Arab women directors stole the spotlight. “Habibi” (My Love in Arabic), directed by Susan Youssef, …
,
EU concerned over Israel’s Arab minority: report
AFP – ‎Dec 16, 2011‎
JERUSALEM — EU ambassadors in Israel are concerned over Israel’s treatment of its Arab minority and about poor prospects for relaunching peace talks with the Palestinians, according to a working paper disclosed by daily newspaper Haaretz on Friday. …
,
Vandals try to start fire in West Bank mosque
BBC News – ‎Dec 15, 2011‎
By Yolande Knell BBC News, Jerusalem Vandals have started a fire in a mosque in a West Bank village, in the second such attack in two days. Officials in Burka, east of Ramallah, said that carpets and chairs were burnt in the local mosque and Hebrew …

Norman Finkelstein reports a Big Loss
{http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/big-loss/}
linking to

http://www.flickr.com/photos/haddadmedia/3499375451/

Note the disordered shirt neck button and bow tie. A nod to the other Intellectual Giant, Bernard-Henri Levy perhaps?

The media’s sycopantic eulogizing over this apologist for the mass slaughter of over a million Iraqi’s, is truelly stomach churning. Channel 4 news was particularly guilty of this having cut to an interview with Blair who praised him for sticking to his principles…Nuff said.

How charming of the dear departed one.
.
In Arab culture there is a strong imperative to not speak ill of the dead, but I’m going to have to make an exception for Christopher Hitchens. Knowing Hitchens, I’m sure he’d approve.
[...]
.
After his talk, I took Hitchens aside and asked him why he didn’t feel the same way about the other religious fundamentalist regime in Palestine: Zionism. If he was so concerned about Hamas’s religious fundamentalism, why was he silent about the religious fundamentalism that is driving millions of Palestinians out of their homes, occupying their land and denying them freedom because of their religion? Shouldn’t America deal with Jewish fundamentalism in the same way he wants it to deal with Islamic fundamentalism?
.
For once, I saw him flustered and speechless. It was clear he genuinely had not thought of this and now he felt thoroughly embarrassed. He smiled, looked around, tried to find something to say, but came up with nothing. He then tried to ignore me by going back to his comfort zone and engaging in a shouting match with a Muslim and calling him a “####ing peasant.” (That man was Ashraf Laidi, a currency trader and author whose CV indicates he’s never really been a peasant.) I asked Hitchens if he’d make my point in his next talk about Palestine/Israel, and again, he had nothing to say. I ended with: “well, either tell me why I’m wrong or admit you’re wrong and that in your next speech you’ll denounce Islamic and Jewish fundamentalism in the same way.” The stupid smirk left his face, and he walked away.
.
This was post-2001 Hitchens. The over-riding directive of his life was to make money by pleasing American right-wingers by dressing up their idiotic nationalism, chauvinism, and jingoism with Big Words and an English accent. It was a highly rewarding career, because he sold to morons who watch Sean Hannity the illusion that they are not complete cretins, and they pay top dime for that sort of intellectual deceit.
[...]
.
Christopher Hitchens’ ‘Fundamentalist’ Exemption for Zionism
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2011/12/16/christopher-hitchens-fundamentalist-exemption-for-zionism/

“The world will undoubtedly be a duller place without Christopher Hitchens. Oh, and a better one too.”
.
(It is with truly great sadness that I have to write the next sentence about another human being.)….I have to concur with the last five words above.

Well said Craig, and so true. Again, you hit the nail on the head. I am awaiting your future piece on Cameron which I very much hope is in preparation.

Hitchens discription of Mother Theresa who did more good than he could imagine
“A lying thieving Albanian dwarf”. The world is better without him.

“Stephen, piss and wind, as I suggested.”

John Goss – infantile as i said.

Moderator

Has my post below (first sent in this morning) offended against one of this website’s rules? Is one not allowed to imitate Punch’s young curate and find something good to say about bad egg Hitchens? [I've altered one figurative expression in case it might have led to Cameron suing Craig, or me; and I have removed one link, in case only one is allowed per comment.]

Suhayl:
.
“Politics is not religion…” (above, 16 Dec 11.45pm ). I agree; and Hitchins deserves credit for some well-aimed polemical strikes against “religious absolutism” (you at 9.33 this morning ). I also entirely agree with your reminder of Paul Robeson’s heroic status, flaws and all: have you seen Tayo Aluko’s “Call Mr Robeson”, his fine one-man dramatisation of Robeson’s battle with the FBI?

Meanwhile, it awoke Hitchens-like ire in me when Radio 4 woke me today to the item on Cameron’s “bold Christian gamble” – his Back to Christianity speech in Oxford on 16 December- together with the comment that this was the speech Tony Blair longed to give but was never allowed to because of Campbell’s fatwa: “We don’t do God.” Sad that we are unable now to look forward to Hitchens’ comments on the Oxford speech.

Are there no depths Cameron’s shallowness will not plumb? Using Christianity and the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible ( see the Guardian account at http://tinyurl.com/cbo5xxk ) to stake his claims to the debatable lands of public morality is, I suppose, a logical land-grab to follow wrapping his pyrrhic European victory – and the current Afghan War – in the Union Jack. One reason politicians do this – as evidence to the Leveson Inquiry confirms – is to get favourable media coverage. There is, however, a striking contrast between Blair’s hot Catholicism bubbling fervently under the surface of his premiership and Cameron’s Laodicean Anglicism (Revelation 3:14-22), pitching for his version of “regular guy” status by describing himself as a “committed but vaguely practising Church of England Christian”.

.
Now to relations between politicians and the press and the pusillanimity of the fourth estate. Most celebrity and political sex scoops are published with the public interest justification of revealing as hypocrites those who would be role models or moralistic legislators. Cameron’s latest crusade deserves mockery far more than did Mellors’ and Fergie’s toe-suckings*. Using his Christianity to sheath his party and government in prophylactic virtue while shafting the poor and brown-nosing the rich should mean that Cameron finds commentators and radio/TV interviewers reminding him of some of the central themes of the Abrahamic and other faiths. They could start with these ones:
.
“ If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven. (Matthew xix: 21)
.
“Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark.” (Deuteronomy 1v: 26)
.
“Give just measures, and cause no loss (to others by fraud). And weigh with scales true and upright. And withhold not things justly due to men, and do no evil in the land, working mischief.” ( Sura 26 Ash-Shuara [The Poets]:181-3)

.
I’d prefer my Prime Minister to don the rags of a penitent before aspiring to the exegetic role of a scriptural preacher, whether garbed as bishop, minister, rabbi, imam or Buddhist monk. That said, in reality I would probably not enjoy being governed by a cabinet of millionaires who had given up their wealth to reduce the National Debt (rather than to media-friendly cancer and ex-servicemen charities) and agreed to live on the national average wage. I’d be stifled by sanctimonious smoke. However, it’s a fate I’d willingly submit to for the public interest in the experiment of being governed by pure prigs, rather than by Cameroonian moneyed hypocrites and prigs.
.
*After all:
Babies and lovers’ toes express
ecstasies of wantonness;
that’s a language which we lose
with the trick of wearing shoes.
Alex Comfort (1920-2000), in his collection “Haste to the Wedding”, 1961.

“re Israel , Saudi and Bahrain human right abuses, suggest you read Amensty and HRW reports on those countries first, they are far worse than Iran.”

I am not in the game of two wrongs make a right – I have no problems in acknowledging that Israel , Saudi, Bahrain, Uzbekistan, the Palestinian Authority (oh yes they have their own Amnesty International report as well) have all committed human rights abuses. Whether they are far worse than Iran’s is debateable – but is still not a reason for ignoring Iran. Don’t you think that only sensible approach is to work for proper international institutions that stand up to all abuses of human rights by totalitarian regimes rather than trying to pick and chose favourites? If you think that allowing Iran to become a nuclear power will make it any easier to control Israel’s nuclear threat you are clearly not dealing with reality.

Hi Craig

I think you’ll enjoy this link. Anyone who thinks YOU were being harsh on Hitchins ought to steer well clear of it though…

http://exiledonline.com/who-can-forget-christopher-hitchens-fake-waterboarding-stunt/

Hitchens had the right to his opinions and justified them better than most of us, even as we may not have shared all of them.

I happen to think he was spot on about the Clintons and Mother Teresa, and pretty good on atheism and against religious fundamentalism.

But I like to remember him best from a C span talk I happened upon at some local journalism award ceremony where he spoke inspiringly of the importance of alert local reporting, using the example of US reporters who had discovered that their military base was being used for training foreign military in interrogation techniques. Their reporting was important.

Hitchens was courageous, articulate and right about a lot. What a pity about the smoking and drinking!

“two wrong do not make it right” in that case, let’s go and invade them all,or is it just because we do not like Iran and Syria we can treat them differently!
and yes in the absence of anyone even hinting that Israel should get rid of their nuclear weapons, I do believe Iran having it too will help to balance the power. As one of papers said once, “Israel concern is not that Iran will ever attack them, their concern is that if another country in the ME is nuclear, then they will not be able to call all the shots!). But all the same in previous comments I did not say Iran should have nuclear weapons, what I said was why is Iran under investigation but Israel is not , when it is know that they have it. Also I said since 1981, in the west it has been claimed that Iran is one step away from making a bomb, so please do not twist my words.

Might I suggest that one reason that Saifedean Ammous was rebuffed by Hitchens on the claim that he did not address Zionism is that it simply isn’t true and it is pretty ridiculous to claim otherwise. If anyone bothered to look at what Hitchens’s actually wrote they will see that this is not the case. I could give many references both pre and post 2001 – but his 2002 Vanity Fair essay on Jewsih Power, Jewish Peril will perhaps demonstrate the range and depth of Hitchen’s thinking on Zionism.

I’m sorry Mary much as you might wish the Hitch will not fit into your two dimensional view of the world.

Macky

“His very opposition to Religion in general in itself is Islamophobic by definition”

This really is a ridiculous argument – one can oppose something in many ways e.g. by logic, reason, belief/moral code, evidence without resorting to phobia. Many here oppose me in general but I wouldn’t say that all of them have an irrational phobia of me!

Angrysoba,
as you refuse to read the original article in VT, presumably to avoid having to take another shower, you obviously do not understand what I meant.

As your pseudonym and comments suggest, you seem to have obvious difficulty understanding satire. You may be surprised to hear that this is a common symptom of an onset of a serious neurological condition. Well, be happy and get angry sob.

Passerby

If you think I want to ignore the abuses of the Israeli govt and some settlers you are totally wrong. But if you think they from a valid argument for ignoring those of the Iranian regime you are really employing a perverted set of moral values.

Stephen, As you seemed not to be averse to attacking Iran/imposing further sanctions , I just simply wanted to know on what grounds you justified that position
1) HR abuses (in that case, lets invade Uzbekistan first, if you read HRW or Amnesty’s various reports
2) Nuclear weapons, in which case we should tell Israel, India, to get rid of theirs or we will attack them, (as we are already causing mayhem in Pakistani, I will leave that one out).
I would be interested to know!

“As your pseudonym and comments suggest, you seem to have obvious difficulty understanding satire. You may be surprised to hear that this is a common symptom of an onset of a serious neurological condition. Well, be happy and get angry sob.”

Comments like this are a symptom of a common condition called being a nasty little prat.

Coming out like bullets from an IDF automatic tonight.

Moderator

I’ve been trying to post a comment since this morning. The latest message that flashed up instantly was, as earlier, “Duplicate comment detected; it looks as though you’ve already said that!” However, the comment has still not appeared. I’m not aware of any rules that it offends. Is there a technical glitch? Should I post it again?

Azra

I am averse to attacking Iran – and have already said so. I would justify other actions against Iran and others based on abuses of the UN Charter of Human Rights – what actions, when and how is dependent on what is likley to be the most effective in stopping the abuse, what those most affected want and by what is achievable. First point you have to get to is in acknowledging that an abuse has occurred – then you can start to try and deal with the problem. At the moment we are in a silly game where one set of human rights abusers seeks to justify trheri position by pointing to someone elses abuses.

Stephen, I am not justifying HR abuses in Iran, far from it. I have close family members who have been tortured at the hands of both regime, Pahlavi as well as the Mullahs, the point us am making is that sanction has never been effective, it was not effective in South Africa, and it is not effective in Iran (except hurting the very same people, west is claiming to want to help),what more , it has strenghten the position of Mullahs.All the same, my fuming is at the Hypocrisy of the west. Why imposing sanction on Iran, and not other countries with the same or even worse HR abuses? or with same nuclear issues, is it because the government of Iran is not hand picked by the west?

Azra
I am not in the game of two wrongs make a right – I have no problems in acknowledging that Israel , Saudi, Bahrain, Uzbekistan, the Palestinian Authority (oh yes they have their own Amnesty International report as well) have all committed human rights abuses. Whether they are far worse than Iran’s is debateable – but is still not a reason for ignoring Iran.
,
So the baby killing, grandma bombing, concentration camp owning, apartheid system Isreal is not all that bad in HR, imprisoning children and torturing them is only good HR record .
,
What is wrong with this hate filled wanker who can discount so much and conclude; Iran is the worst? It is suffering from ziofuckwitry syndrome, a disease with no known cure.

Karel 911 conspiracy is a favourite subject of angrysobas – he has even recalled going to a conference to check it out. Numerous commentors, sophisticated and less so, have tried to engage with him on the subject and he jumps on it and whoever/whenever it crops up. I have never seen him take it seriously – it looks like its sport to him. There is no point in getting into namecalling, that is sport to that type too.
.
iirc Craig has never commented in any depth on 911 conspiracy, just briefly washed his hands of it and ushered it into a single thread. Many commenters here believe it was a black OP and that 7/7 was likely one too, Lockerbie, and the assasination of Robin Cook and David Kelly… the list goes on. I dont recall Craigs position on all of these, his focuses are elsewhere mostly but iirc he thinks David Kelly was killed, and of course someone tried to assasinate Craig and almost did kill him in Uzbekistan.

Iain Orr – The spam filter is apparently a law unto itself and looses posts. Post again with a little change, an extra comma or whatever, and I believe Jon or other mods will remove obvious duplicates when they come across them.

Azra

So what is effective do nothing and wait? One problem with that approach is that it actually leaves much of the debate open to those who see war as the answer. Do you really think that there should be no restrictions whatsover on the sale of miltary/torture equipment to the Iranian regime?

Fedup

When you end up putting words in the mouth of someone you view as a ziofuckwit – perhaps you should give up and try something a little less taxing.

@Stephen; “This really is a ridiculous argument – one can oppose something in many ways”

I’m using the term “Islamophobia” is usual understanding of its meaning, ie prejudice against Moslems. If you cannot see that a militant Atheist is by definition, going to have a bias against Moslems (& all other people of faith), then it is you that is being “ridiculous”.

It’s no accident that given Hitchens, who was living in the US, where Right Wing Christian Fundamentalism is rift, chose to call his book, not “Our Father who does not art in Heaven” or some other Christian oriented titled, but instead chose “God is not Great”, as a deliberate provocative insult to Moslems, the original, and real target of his hatred. But as I said before, if you’re really putting forward the argument that Hitchens was not an Islamophobe, I think you will find not many people agreeing with you.

debateable

A superb article in FPJ,” Needed: An Arab Spring for America”
http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/12/16/needed-an-arab-spring-for-america/

Actually we need one here as well!

Stephen,That is exactly what I am saying! for two reasons

1) because there is an absolute double standard when the west have normal ties with all the other countries whose governments are as bad as Iran (and some are worse, among them Uzbekistan)

2) sanctions if hurt, it only hurt ordinary people, Iran or other countries can always buy their arms from elsewhere (in case of Iran, they actually produce lot of it themselves now, thanks to sanction ).

Macky

Even if you wish to take the fear element out of Islamophobia, which is a somewhat unusual approach, I still think it will be difficult to say Hitchens had a prejudice against Moslems – he did not pre judge any religion he considered the arguments and then arrived at his opinion. I’m afraid you are ending up labelling anyone who disagrees with Islam for whatever reason as an Islamophobe.

And “God is not Great” is not a provocative insult – it was Hitchen’s view based on what he thought and understood. Might I kindly suggest that if you find people expressing views different to your own, which they are more than happy to support, to be insulting and provocative then you avoid the blogosphere. If you actually read Hitchen’s book you would actually find that Islam is far from being his only target – and that his case against religion is based on countering the arguments used by religion rather than hatred. And I say that as an agnostic who was not entirely convinced by what the Hitch said. The Hitch was clearly against Islam but not in the way you think.

Azra

The manufacturers of arms and torture equipment will I’m sure support you. And I presume you would apply the same logic to Uzbekistan and Israel? How do you feel about regimes calling in assistance from their friends – is that ok as well? Is their any point in having a UN Charter of Human Rights? Was Britain right to go to war over Poland, were all the International Brigades wrong in going to Spain to defend it from Fascism?

And what happens if some groups in Iran, or elsewhere for that matter, ask for assitance – what should the response be? You didn’t answer the question – I asked previously about whether Turkey should stop the smuggling of arms to the Syrian resistance?

Crab

Thanks for your advice. My post in it’s most tidied up version (and now with no link to the Cameron speech, which all of us must now know about) is below. I’ve not amended it to take into account the many other posts during today. Readers should note that it was originally sent at about 11.00am today, Sunday 17 Dec.

“Suhayl:
.
“Politics is not religion…” (above, 16 Dec 11.45pm ). I agree; and Hitchens deserves credit for some well-aimed polemical strikes against “religious absolutism” (you at 9.33 this morning ). I also entirely agree with your reminder of Paul Robeson’s heroic status, flaws and all: have you seen Tayo Aluko’s “Call Mr Robeson”, his fine one-man dramatisation of Robeson’s battle with the FBI?

Meanwhile, it awoke Hitchens-like ire in me when Radio 4 woke me today to the item on Cameron’s “bold Christian gamble” – his Back to Christianity speech in Oxford on 16 December- together with the comment that this was the speech Tony Blair longed to give but was never allowed to because of Campbell’s fatwa: “We don’t do God.” Sad that we are unable now to look forward to Hitchens’ comments on the Oxford speech.

Are there no depths Cameron’s shallowness will not plumb? Using Christianity and the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible ( see the Guardian and BBC accounts) to stake his claims to the debatable lands of public morality is, I suppose, a logical land-grab to follow wrapping his pyrrhic European victory – and the current Afghan War – in the Union Jack. One reason politicians do this – as evidence to the Leveson Inquiry confirms – is to get favourable media coverage. There is, however, a striking contrast between Blair’s hot Catholicism bubbling fervently under the surface of his premiership and Cameron’s Laodicean Anglicism (Revelation 3:14-22), pitching for his version of “regular guy” status by describing himself as a “committed but vaguely practising Church of England Christian”.

.
Now to relations between politicians and the press and the pusillanimity of the fourth estate. Most celebrity and political sex scoops are published with the public interest justification of revealing as hypocrites those who would be role models or moralistic legislators. Cameron’s latest crusade deserves mockery far more than did Mellors’ and Fergie’s toe-suckings*. Using his Christianity to sheath his party and government in prophylactic virtue while shafting the poor and brown-nosing the rich should mean that Cameron finds commentators and radio/TV interviewers reminding him of some of the central themes of the Abrahamic and other faiths. They could start with these ones:
.
“ If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven. (Matthew xix: 21)
.
“Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark.” (Deuteronomy 1v: 26)
.
“Give just measures, and cause no loss (to others by fraud). And weigh with scales true and upright. And withhold not things justly due to men, and do no evil in the land, working mischief.” ( Sura 26 Ash-Shuara [The Poets]:181-3)

.
I’d prefer my Prime Minister to don the rags of a penitent before aspiring to the exegetic role of a scriptural preacher, whether garbed as bishop, minister, rabbi, imam or Buddhist monk. That said, in reality I would probably not enjoy being governed by a cabinet of millionaires who had given up their wealth to reduce the National Debt (rather than to media-friendly cancer and ex-servicemen charities) and agreed to live on the national average wage. I’d be stifled by sanctimonious smoke. However, it’s a fate I’d willingly submit to for the public interest in the experiment of being governed by pure prigs, rather than by Cameroonian moneyed hypocrites and prigs.
.
*After all:
Babies and lovers’ toes express
ecstasies of wantonness;
that’s a language which we lose
with the trick of wearing shoes.
Alex Comfort (1920-2000), in his collection “Haste to the Wedding”, 1961.”

This board must be the target of one of those Isrealy army posts; the recruits keep a presence spamming for a shift then hand over to the next shift. As they change over so the debate spam trend changes too.
,
Earlier, ziokeyboard guard must have overdosed on horlicks, and was advocating war with Iran, later stephen abouters came up with Iran and Syria are the worst ever HR abusers ever. Now this latest one just cutting and pasting irrelevant bollocks, and still going on about HR, regardless of what has past.
,
The night shift pay must not be all that good.

“And ‘God is not Great’ is not a provocative insult – it was Hitchen’s view based on what he thought and understood.”
.
You are denying a clear fact here. You are saying that he was “just saying” – but he was composing as a skilled writer, he knew how different peoples would recieve his wording. He knew this choice of wording would resonate mostly with speakers of the phrase “God IS great” -a famously revered phrase of the muslim word.

Christians have no habit of saying “god is great” they say “god is love”, sometimes.

Ian Orr – a very fine post, im glad you persevere!

@Stephen— I repeat that I used the term in the commonly accepted meaning of it’s usage, that of a prejudice against Muslims; yes the literal term translate as a fear of Islam, which when you think about it, it ultimately the same thing in the sense that if you fear something, you automatically have a negative feeling towards it also, ie a bias against it.

However with Hitchens, it was not a case of just “disagrees with Islam”, but a venomously hateful decade long series of vulgar & ugly anti-Muslim rants, coupled with a demonic blood-lust which with he advocated the mass murder of Muslims in Iraq & Afghanistan, often justifying this on the pretext that any Muslim who resisted foreign invasion & occupation was a “Jihadist”, and making it plain that he care not a jot for (Muslim) civilian “collateral damage”.

Post 9/11, once his core-values & principles had undergone a complete 180 degree turn to the Right, Hitchens was a mess of shifting & contradicting views as he continually tried to justify his new principles/prejudices, as Norman Finkelstein has carefully documented here;

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=4&ar=6

I just Googled “Hitchens Zionism” to see what came up. This You Tube clip seems like a clear expression of his thoughts on this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQxhyy9Wpb4

Hitchens had an amusing response to Finkelstein as well.
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http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/000558.php

Hitchens was an alcoholic.These types blow with the wind of their chosen poison,winding up those foolish enough not to see past their impish game.Integrity or consistency is not their game,just attention seeking and sales figures.

Fedup Stephen has already been outed as a troll by Craig some time back. A solicitor somewhere away from the mainstream. I think it was Redditch. Their purpose is to divert and squelch.

Fedup
“Earlier, ziokeyboard guard must have overdosed on horlicks, and was advocating war with Iran, later stephen abouters came up with Iran and Syria are the worst ever HR abusers ever.”

And where exactly did I make such statements – halucinating again old boy I’m afraid.

Mary

“A solicitor somewhere away from the mainstream. I think it was Redditch.”

Evidence has never been your strong point has it – just a word from your masters is sufficient truth.

Macky

Could I suggest that you actually read Hitchens – if nothing else it will show you how the English language should be used. Of course this ability to interpret what you want into the English language goes a long way to explaining why fatwas are issued against great writers such as Salman Rushdie. On a considerably lower level it also explains why the likes of Fedup and Mary can just make up things about me and what I’ve said that I’m sure they believe to be true.

Stephen. You suggested I read some history so I justified my remarks by giving you links to the proof that Blair was, in his own way, as nasty as Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler. I invited you to give a logical counter-argument using historical proof. You could not do so. Not everybody in Soviet Russia knew what Stalin and Beria were up to, as we did not know what Blair was up to. People die under suspicious circumstances in this country (and the US) too, Dr. David Kelly, Bob Cryer and Robin Cook, for example. You just throw in a few of your weasel-words and try to convince people what you say amounts to logic. Did you look at the Children of Iraq pictures? No. Have you read any accounts of toture in western gulags? No. What did you understand of what Clare Short of “diktats” when she resigned? Nothing. The “piss and wind” addendum was meant to prompt you to give your account of history that proves the lying, cheating, thieving, murdering Tony Blair is any different from other ogres of oppression. You could not do it. When you could not do it I simply pointed out, as everyone commenting on this blog can see, that you are all “piss and wind”. There’s nothing infantile in that. What is infantile is somebody with no sense or knowledge of history inviting somebody who has studied history to read history. That’s infantile. Take it on board.

John Goss: You suggested I read some history so I justified my remarks by giving you links to the proof that Blair was, in his own way, as nasty as Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler.
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Yes, I remember well when Brother Number One, aka Tony Blair, forced the entire population of Britain into agricultural slavery except for all the intellectuals and/or those wearing glasses who were tortured and murdered in killing fields. I remember also the man-made famine that killed off 5 million people as a punishment for disobeying his orders on collectivization not to mention his systematic mass extermination of scapegoated ethnic minorities.
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But the supreme crime, that you brought back to us, is his snubbing of poor Claire Short, who he was so beastly and horrible to. Only in a Totalitarian State could she have no recourse to this treatment than various media outlets such as the Guardian, the state broadcaster and a free press. You have more than proved your point, Mr Goss.
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*eyeroll*

It is not that he propagandized the Iraq war, it is that as a “contrarian” who might be expected to recognize the manifest lies of the governments of both the UK and the US, Hitchens chose not to. He was intelligent enough to see what many others did – that the intelligence was being invented to suit the politics – but he preferred for whatever reasons to ignore it. In that sense his position on Iraq was dishonest and hypocritical. He could have said “I do not believe the intelligence; I do not believe that Saddam is a threat to the US or the UK, but I believe that we should remove the tyrant.” At least it would have been honest. After all he was not a politician seeking to persuade the electorate to go along with an already made decision. He was a commentator with some obligation to inform. Instead he said, “It must be obvious to anyone who can think at all that the charges against the Hussein regime are, as concerns arsenals of genocidal weaponry, true.”From that point on, no-one should have believed another word he said. Either he was stupid or malicious. I group him with Blair in the latter category. As I read on another blog, the three letters on his tombstone should not be RIP but WMD.

Thank you Angrysoba – I suspect dissident Goss is choking on his meagre toast and marmalade rations in whichever wifi gulag zone to which he was despatched.

Stephen, look at the list of items that Iran or other countries under sanction cannot receive. torture equipment or military hardware are only 2 of hundreds of other items (medicine, agricultural equipment,,,etc..etc..and as I am sure you know Torture and military hardware are in great quantities sold to Uzbekistan and Israel,Saudi, Bahrain, therefore the focus should be not to supply any of these countries with it if we are really sincere in our quest for democracy and justice, but we are not are we?)…. and for the sake of arguments, if you really want to impose sanction then pick few things including the two you mentioned, stopping the banks trading with Iran, so do you think that will stop Iran buying it from elsewhere? just a silly , headline grabbing gesture by our desperate government in UK

Groups asking for assistance, You mean like of Ahmad Chalabi groups who asked the west to invade Iraq? NO THANK YOU. Majority of people in Iran or Syria do not want that assistance, how do we know that this resistance group represent the people? what form of assistance you are talking about? Should Turkey stop smuggling arm into Syria? I do not know answer to that, but I do not trust anything in the western media any more, I have come to realize they are just as much the organ of governments as they are in the East, the only difference is that in the East we know that, in the west there is a presence that the press are free and unbiased. Syrian so far have asked the west to stay out (have learned their lesson from Libya I guess) but has anyone asked for arms? and what do you think would happen if arms are supplied through Turkey or anywhere else? there will be actions and reactions, look at the number of unarmed civilians already killed, what do you think if they armed? that the army/police will just go away? there will be more severe reactions and more and more killings so in principle I am against supplying arms.
above anything else what I am trying to get across is sanctions, exclusion do not lead to reform or change in a government, if anything it will strengthen them.
And the 2nd point I am trying to get across, is that the west do not do anything out of goodness of their heart, and that the double standard is astounding one rule for their friends/servants, no matter how vile those friends are and one rule for everyone else!

“It must be obvious to anyone who can think at all that the charges against the Hussein regime are, as concerns arsenals of genocidal weaponry, true.” — Traced quoting Hitchens
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Ahh, I see. Now I, who have neither read nor heard very much from the man, finally understand how clever he was and why he was considered such a great writer. I was marching in the streets in protest, and he was saying the above. It all makes perfect sense!

Going back to Craig’s original post, what’s clear is that he and Hitch share deep polemical instincts. Both are combative – powerful but fat boxers who prefer to win by KOs rather than puffing at the end of 12 rounds and waiting for the ringside judges to tot up the points on each side. As for their views on different topics and people, it’s not so much taking each on their merits – I like to find polemicists championing my causes. Did my dog in the fight take a chunk out of the other or did s/he bite on air (or – if back to heavyweights – was it a good punch or a bit below the belt)?

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As effective polemical writers they articulate clearly arguments that anyone on the other side needs to take into account. They are often delivered with venom since good lovers make good haters. But as good writers they also have bursts of – for those on the other side – dismayingly impeccable logic – like sound positional chess moves to develop their pieces or gain an important tempo.

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Another point both share, as far as I know, is that – pace Craig – they do not change their point of view depending on who is paying them. (“Intellectual prostitute” is anyway a misdirected insult: a prostitute may accept that those who pay call the tune, but s/he does not admire the customer or the pimp.) There is another rather obvious point that, sadly, many more editors have been prepared to pay for Hitch’s views than for Craig’s. That’s not a reflection of the quality of the writing, just that editors in “free market” democracies are depressingly scared of/off encouraging genuine debate.

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I wonder where both would be – one from beyond the grave – on Cameron’s Christian Britain speech? My initial instinct is to remind Cameron [ as I did Jack Straw and others participating in a skewed hustings debate in Blackburn Cathedral – Craig as an Independent, UKIP, BNP and Greens were all excluded - during the by-election campaign in May 2005] of the good man Jesus’s instruction to “Render therefore unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s.” (Matthew xxii: 21). In this context, the Archbishop of Canterbury is the appropriate authority of the established church in England and Wales – so Cameron should listen to him and the leaders of non-established denominations about Christian Britain … rather that take cheap pot-shots at him. But that would be to invest spiritual leaders with an authority which they don’t and should not have in 21st century Britain.

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What we do not need is Cameron bleating that “the hungry sheep look up and are not fed” and attempting to play the spiritual warrior himself – niche politics on a megalomaniac scale, worthy of a son of Blair. [Shades of another Conservative politician play-acting with “the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play”.] No need to get into a multicultural morass of head-counting those in churches, mosques, synagogues, temples .. or Tesco’s. If Cameron wants to be the champion of Christian Britain can he please start off with humility and contrition? A good traditional expression of this would be for him to sit in a Westminster village stocks in Parliament square and invite the public to pelt him with rotten eggs Lion-marked: “Iraq Vote”, “Libyan Lies”, “Parliamentary expenses”. Ideally there would be companion stocks on either side of vaguely Christian David – one for Rupert and one for Fred.

“where exactly did I make such statements”
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Do you expect me to read through the oodles of cut and paste to “prove” what? I am afraid, I may have misled you, and I apologise for that! You have an impression of me as someone who gives a fuck about what a ziofuckwit thinks.

I see the multi dimensional Stephen is at again this morning. No rest.

Iain Orr, absolutely, excellent post. I am reminded of John Major’s idiotic ‘Back to Basics’ campaign, which backfired spectacularly on that particular govt. Funny that no-one in the media seems to have brought that up – not even on the Dimblebey programme, ‘Any Questions’, even though Michael Portillo, a key memeber of that very govt, was on the panel! Also, many socially-aware ministers of religion have criticised the monetarist ecnonomic policies promulgated by all of these post-1979 govts in the UK, and much else, and routinely are told to ‘keep out’. And now, Cameron has the gall to lecture them! Pathetic. We really ought not to hang of every word uttered by this waxen ‘used bank’ salesman.

If I may venture to suggest and at the risk of sounding patronising, it might be most useful to engage with one another’s arguments, rather than resort to the all-too-easy accusation of “Troll!” just because someone persistently disagrees with one’s views on something. There was a time, before the dawn of moderation on this site, when there were genuine invasions of posters intent on disrupting the mechanics of the site/ Craig and/or of various of the other posters and in those circumstances it sometimes became necessary to probe and expose the sources of such activities. Now that practical, systemic threat has receded considerably. A plea, therefore: Let’s just get on with discussing the issues, eh? Thanks.

mary,
Stephens are everywhere. Just look out of your window. It is odd why anyone tries to enter into a serious discussion with the two hasbara trolls, Stephen and angrysoba. For a moment I thought they are just one person but after reading through several contributions it is obvious that the former is somewhat sillier than the latter. Hence, we may deal with two individuals, unless the smarter one pretends to be Simplicius . Perhaps Stephen is the wife of angrysoba or, not to offend our lady contributors, it may also be the other way around. If so, then I have just uncovered a dangerous nest of trolls. Dear Craig, are there any prizes to be won for such a great achievement on Sunday morning?

@Stephen — Quite amusing that you urge me to read Hitchens ! I have read quite a lot of his writing, mostly before he had that 9/11 knock on the head, and I agree with Galloway that back then “he wrote like an Angel”; in fact, having a personal connection with Cyprus & the events of 1974, I still consider his book on the subject as the best I’ve read on the subject. Post 9/11 however, although he did occasionally manage to reach a semblance of his former brilliant writing skill, it was a steady decline, and it seemed that the further to the Right he lurched, the more his writing skills deteriorated. You only have to compare quality of the writing in the Finkelstein article that I linked to, with the Hitchens attempted rebuttal that Angrysoba provided, to see that very clearly illustrated.

(Incidentally, although I have not read his book against Religion, I do know that logically his choice of the title “God is not Great” cannot be “Hitchen’s view based on what he thought and understood”, as you assert, because his professed point was that God does not exists at all ! Perhaps you should take your own advise & actually read what he wrote ! So I repeat that his choice of title was a calculated insult aim at Muslims, and a direct manifestation of his obsessive Islamophobia).

Suhayl at 18 Dec – 12:11 pm:
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Agree, absolutely.

@Angrysoba, just for the record do you agree with the points that Hitchens is making in the clip you’ve posted ?

Karel,
FYI, Angrysoba has been around here for a long time, and Craig has made him welcome. While he often disagrees with people’s ‘worldview’ here, he is on the whole good humoured and debatable. (Except for last Christmas when he seemed to have a wee bit too much to drink …)
I advise against making assumptions.

Thanks, Nuid. On which note, I wish everyone a peaceful Christmas and a Happy New Year, when it comes!
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Incidentally, Stephen has been psoting here for quite a while too, on and off and he’s generally also been affable and rational, even if one disagrees with some of his views; but that is one of the main points of having a working blog, no? It would be informative (for the posts), but boring, to have an echo-chamber. It would be informative (for the posts), but boring, to have an echo-chamber.
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See…?
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Yes, on a seasonally ‘panto Dame’ note, one can state categorically that Stephen is most definitely NOT angrysoba’s wife! Oh no he’s not…!

I see the keyboard defence brigade for the keyboard defence brigade are fighting a rearguard action there. Everybody is entitled to their opinion so long as it is what we say principles applied, on goes the fucking charade.

Suhayl Saadi: Yes, on a seasonally ‘panto Dame’ note, one can state categorically that Stephen is most definitely NOT angrysoba’s wife! Oh no he’s not…!

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Not that I know of. It would be an awfully funny name for a lady to have as her pseudonym on a blog.
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It would be informative (for the posts), but boring, to have an echo-chamber. It would be informative (for the posts), but boring, to have an echo-chamber.

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I stay around as a public service. I’m so selfless. But, speaking of boring…
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Fedup: I see the keyboard defence brigade for the keyboard defence brigade are fighting a rearguard action there.
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A wave of yawns ripples through the blogosphere.

Suhayl, best wishes to you for the season of peace and goodwill. As for panto dames . . . They’re behind you. Oh no they’re not!
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While I’m happy to hear other points of view it would be good to hear arguments that are backed up by evidence, not just bland rhetoric – with the emphasis on bland. The two commentators you mentioned are only engaged by me because I’m trying to find out if there is intelligent life on the other side of the wall. Neither of them has convinced me. The arguments are anti-arguments, like I cannot compare Blair with Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin because in this country you don’t get a knock on the door in the middle of the night. At least that’s the kind of argument. But people in this country, mostly Muslims, do get a knock on the door. One has been held in prison for more than seven years without being charged. This kind of anti-argument would be like me saying Tony Blair is no Mahatma Gandhi therefore he must be like Stalin, Pol Pot or Hitler, which I did not say, but I did refer to the lying, cheating, thieving, murdering Tony Blair, all adjectives of which I can back up with historical evidence. I found it unbelievable that Blair in his debate with Hitchins could separate himself from the other monsters of history who also thought themselves saviours.
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I have never written grafitti on a toilet wall, or any wall, but I was amused one Yuletide to find a message on one wall: “A Merry Christmas to all our readers and writers!” So I wish that to you all, including Stephen and Angrysoba, and I hope the Hanukkah brings them the gift that Solomon asked for and received from God.

Macky: @Angrysoba, just for the record do you agree with the points that Hitchens is making in the clip you’ve posted ?

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Partly. I am going to finish up a post to you on the other thread which hopefully will clarify things.
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But, just as a further point, I think that Hitchens did upset a few of the hardcore right with this Slate article which is pretty strong even by Hitchens’ standards:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2010/11/israels_shabbos_goy.html
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In light of what is quite demonstrable about Hitchens’ stance on Israel/Palestine I can only imagine that the article Mary posted from the Anti-War site was written by either a liar or someone who over-estimated the clarity of their question. One thing I agree with Hitchens on is the way that there were far too many people uttering “anti-war” statements one minute and then in the next expressing support for Hamas, Hizbollah, the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran or else demanding that criticism of them be attenuated or evened-out with criticism of Israel. This is somewhat reminiscent of George Orwell’s Notes on Nationalism of which there is a good quote which I’ll try and find in a minute.

John Goss: So I wish that to you all, including Stephen and Angrysoba, and I hope the Hanukkah brings them the gift that Solomon asked for and received from God.

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Errrr… thanks. And Happy Chanukah to you too. By the way, that reminds me of a Hitchens article about this little festival. As you may be surprised to learn, Hitchens wasn’t a fan. According to him, “The holiday celebrates the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness”. Oh dear! Its title is “Bah, Hannuka!”
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2007/12/bah_hanukkah.html

Comical if it wasn’t so tragic. Remember Baghdad and the wads of dollars that went walkies by the million under the Bremer version of a transitional government?

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Libya militias and army clash over control of runways after UN decides to fly newly printed currency

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Tripoli airport is currently held by the militia from Zintan, a mountain town 90 miles to the south, who captured it on the way to liberating Tripoli in August. But the Libyan national army, controlled by Gaddafi-era generals, is determined to take control, in what is shaping up to be a defining power struggle. Meanwhile, amid the growing tension the ruling National Transitional Council has become a target for mass protests across the country and the object of deep suspicion outside its Benghazi power base.
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Last weekend the army tried to storm the airport and was stopped in a battle at the main airport checkpoint, which left two militiamen wounded and flights suspended as tracer fire arced over the runways. The army tried again midweek, summoning reinforcements from eastern Libya, only for the column to be stopped 200 miles west by units from Misrata, which are allied with Zintan.
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More fighting is expected after unidentified gunmen shot and wounded a son of army commander General Khalifa Hifter in a battle outside Tripoli’s biggest bank, then kidnapped another on Friday.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/17/libya-tripoli-airport-assets-un

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PS Some people here need more training in joining up the dots and making the connections.

Angrysoba, from what I’ve read and seen recently Hitchins wasn’t a fan of any kind of religion, though after he learnt he was dying there was the slightest hint of a change of optimism “I like surprises”. I’m not fond of his prose-style which is “academically” boring. I much prefer yours. Rabbi Debbie Young was on radio this morning explaining the miracle of the seven days oil. Wouldn’t be enough for Blair’s miracles, methinks.

John, Angrysoba, from what I’ve read and seen recently Hitchins wasn’t a fan of any kind of religion, though after he learnt he was dying there was the slightest hint of a change of optimism “I like surprises”.
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I think this is a remark he made often when asked if he believed in an afterlife and I think he said it before he became ill. His remarks are explicit enough here:
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbBVB66DC5k
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In fact, when god is not Great came out he was told it was obviously the work of a “seeker” (!)
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I’m not fond of his prose-style which is “academically” boring. I much prefer yours.
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Thank you. That’s very nice of you to say.

I agree, Angrysoba, unequivocal disbelief in March but Paxman interviewed Hitchens on 29 November. Unfortunately I can’t locate a working Youtube of it.

John Goss : Paxman interview with CH on 29/11/2010

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULHlyafo9P4

sorry John, just the preview, 7 minutes of it only, seems the actual hour long interview was removed by the uploader!

John Goss:
here is the full half interview on the news night website.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/9233571.stm

Stephen said this,
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” ..how else totalitarian regimes such as in Iraq (and more pertintly(sic) in Syria and Iran) should be dealt without resort to war??”
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I remind you Stephen war *is* “bad taste, profound ignorance and increasing detachment from reality.” Your first comment on a thread that describes the utter devastation of Iraq. So many children are now hungry orphans still searching for anything to sell. The water is still polluted in many villages.
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1.3 million violent post-invasion Iraqi excess deaths.
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1.0 million non-violent post-invasion Iraqi excess deaths (non-violent avoidable deaths).
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0.6 million post-invasion under-5 year old Iraqi infant deaths.
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Post-invasion Iraqi refugees total 6 million out of a population of 28 million.
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2.3 million Occupied Iraqi violent and non-violent excess deaths constitute an immense war crime.
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4.2 million violent and non-violent Iraqi excess deaths and 1.8 million under-5 year old Iraqi infant deaths under war and Sanctions 1990-2009.
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4.2 million Iraqi excess deaths (1990-2009) versus 5-6 million Jewish deaths (1941-1945).
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2.3 million Occupied Iraqi excess deaths and 6 million Iraqi refugees constitutes an Iraqi Holocaust and an Iraqi Genocide (UN Genocide Convention).
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US Alliance deaths in Occupied Iraq total 4,577 giving an Occupied Iraqi/Invader military death ratio of 503.
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US-bankrupting Iraq War accrual cost totals $3 trillion (Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz).
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Just reparations for 2.3 million Occupied Iraqi excess deaths (at a US EPA valuation of $6.9 million per person) total $16 trillion.
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Sources: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya210309.htm
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{http://vimeo.com/33755968} – an American soldiers story
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Mark Golding – Children of Iraq Association

Mark, What a legacy.
The today’s children should grow up to be thoroughly ashamed of us.

Mary,
You have a better memory than some around here, do you recollect the aluminium boxes stuffed with one hundred dollar bills, and welded shut, belonging to Saddam? These were hidden in various places in Baghdad, and the US invasion forces kept finding these. The unconfirmed reports maintain three C5 cargo airplanes fully loaded with these boxes took off from Baghdad airport, but there are no confirmed landings of these crafts and their precious cargo anywhere in US.
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Also do you recollect a US Sargent sending a Humvee back home to his family? Or the UK SAS sergent with eleven million pounds stuffed in an ornamental vase in the front of his house?
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Wars are rackets for the unscrupulous sick bastards to make money and indulge in human hunting. However the bigger theft took place through the sequestration of the sanctioned “Gaddafi” accounts which are not likely to be made available all that easily to the Current Libyan authorities, these amount to about $150 billion.

Mark Golding,
and still some advocating war in Iran!

“… the keyboard defence brigade…” FedUp
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What is that, a branch of the WI? And charades? Didn’t you know, Christmas is the season for Charades!

Mark

If you look at the sentence of mine that you quoted it had two question marks at the end. The reason I asked the question was that I was looking for alternative ways of dealing with totalitarian regimes (such as Iraq, Iran and Syria) without resorting to war – which as we all know is to be avoided. My problem with much that you and many here say is that you fail to recognise that one of the lessons of history is that delay in dealing with totalitarian regimes actually makes war more inevitable – similarly the appeasement and ignoring the behaviour of said regimes. The behaviour of other regimes/states should also never be used as an argument for ignoring the behaviour of totalitarian regimes.

The real answer to avoiding wars means developing new forms of international institutions and sanctions which mean that totalitarians are nipped in the bud – I am afraid I see absolutely nothing in your approach that would in retrospect have changed how Iraq slid to war – or more pertinently would change a similar momementum in Syria and Iran.

At time you behave almost as if you were the dream opponent of the neo-cons. Rage and anger have their role – but sometimes there has to be a liitle creative and constructive thinking as well.

And we’ve now lost Vaclav Havel – if there is someone up there he appears to have it in for writers who oppose totalitarianism at the moment. If there was ever a man who demonstrated the importance of sticking to the truth through thick and thin it was Vaclav Havel.

John Goss

Since I don’t know your religion – seasons greetings and the gift of being able to see things at their face value. Btw – I’m not Jewish – but an agnostic from a long line of non-conformists mainly from Yorkshire (hence the stubborness).

@Angrysoba–I’m guessing that this is the Orwell quote you’re referring to;

“All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. . . . The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

However you are mistaken if you think this applies to the anti-war left who have opposed the recent wars waged by the West; instead if you think about it clearly Orwell remarks fit more the “humanitarian” pro-war supporters. Or put it another way, do you think that if Orwell was still alive, that he would be one of the so called & self-termed “Decent Left” ?!!

This supposed profess support you claim for the groups you mention is probably some anti-war people highlighting the hypocrisy & dishonestly in the pro-war arguments

I used to have a certain level of respect for you, Craig Murray, but this post puts you beneath contempt. You are a fucking idiot. Christopher Hitchens was a premier league writer. You are a nobody.

Suhayl Saadi,
You don’t say, everyday is a Xmas day on this board, the games they play.
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Eddie,
Seeing as you are a somebody with a fucking anonymous name and a fake email address, you bet Craig is really upset now, and sure as hell he will change his ways, and be apologetics to the scum bag full of shit turned into puss bag full of shit ex C. Hitchens.
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What is up Eddie why don’t you fucking hang yourself and join the freaky hero of yours C. Hitchens?
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Make me sick the fucking lunatics worshipping a loud-mouth war enabler.

@Eddie— “was” being the operative word, as in pre 9/11, but even if his writing haven’t gone to pot, he is still drenched in the blood of more people then even he has stiff drinks, and yet say he WAS another Shakespeare, I’ll still spit in his eye if he asked me for forgiveness, as some things are beyond ever being forgiven.

Macky

Thanks for digging out the quote by Orwell – if you think Orwell would not spot a little of the “nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them” in what you see as the “anti-war left” you are sadly mistaken. May I present as my first piece of evidence Mr George Galloway. And where is the disapproval of the behaviour of the Syrian regime among many commenters here – on the whole we get silence or even worse when it is blamed on foreign provocateurs.

Stephen, I could not help but to respond to that. If there was not this double standard, and the west would deal with ALL totalitarian regimes, then I would be the first one to applauding them. But we pick and choose, those who are with us, let them off, and this is the BIG problem, this is what has created so much resentment towards our governments. I was involved in helping prisoners in Egypt few years back. there were 20,000 political prisoners there, some of them for couple of decades and not even charged. Did we ever even criticize e Hosni? our esteemed PM the biggest criminal of all , God curse him, was the guest of Mubarak in Sharm 4 consecutive summer. We have been propping up dictators for ever , yet we now want to support people of Syria or the opposition in Iran, and imposing sanctions. Do you think if by our intervention we topple up the government of Iran, we will do the same for Saudi, Bahrain? NO we won’t, as long as they serve us first and put us before their own national interest who cares what kind of HR abuses goes on inside our “friendly” countries. I guess what I am saying is that the policies in the west is influenced by two things , one is “what is best for Israel”, and two “which government tows the line”.

Glenn Greenwald on Hitchins and “don’t speak ill of the dead” etc. He and Craig are in agreement. I recommend the piece to Eddie (and others).
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http://www.salon.com/2011/12/17/christohper_hitchens_and_the_protocol_for_public_figure_deaths/
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————————
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Stephen,
“I am afraid I see absolutely nothing in your approach that would in retrospect have changed how Iraq slid to war”
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Iraq “slid into war”? Which war would that be?

Stephen said to me,
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“I am afraid I see absolutely nothing in your approach that would in retrospect have changed how Iraq slid to war – or more pertinently would change a similar momementum in Syria and Iran.”
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Sorry Stephen, I have not witnessed anything helpful or imaginative, visionary, stimulating or cool from any of your posts. You punch the clock only to deride, taunt, sneer, put down and accuse. I am neither angry or vehement, I *am* troubled, disturbed and dumbfounded by your naiveté and ignorance towards other countries that do not follow the hypocritical and deceitful democracy of the West. Your ‘real answer’ is wrong. ‘Sanctions’ cause great distress, illness and death to innocent civilians (Iraq?) and many ‘international institutions’ exist such as the UN, UNSC, IAEA and others chaired by Western puppets and stooges, whose internal membership and voting procedures are biased and need reform, and whose resolutions are ignored (Israel) or wrongly interpreted and ignored (Britain & America: Coalition of the Willing).
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No, Stephen it is clear to me in this and previous threads you are here out of resentment, your acrimony stinks of miff. Own up to it; let’s have an honest Yorkshireman.
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Shame, honesty and truth, uncovering deception and the power of intention will stop wars. My best advice to you, Stephen, is to read my posts as the reality unfolds. That is my last word.

@Stephen— The more I read of your Posts, the more I realise the manifest disconnection you have with the World; one perfect illustration of this, is that you just casually stated that “Iraq slid to war”, as if Iraq just happened to carelessly fall into what was a carefully long planned & criminally conceived & justified barbaric bombardment, invasion & occupation. Now you want me to equate the “nationalists” that Orwell was writing about to the anti-war Left (!); I think you will find that people who care enough to worry about people living aboard, who are about to be “liberated” (from life!) by our bombs, are internationalists rather than nationalists. Ironically you present as your example Galloway, but he is always stating that his detests nationalism, and actually often calls himself an “Internationalist” when discussing this issue on his radio show.

You moan about the apparent silence from the Left about abusive regimes, well do you really think that people who oppose strangers being killed by us, really don’t mind them being killed by others ?! The apparent silence is only silence because you don’t have it blasted in your face by the MSM when it is not deemed newsworthy, for instance did you know that your “first piece of evidence Mr George Galloway”, was actually an active campaigner, and a lone voice in Parliament, against the Saddam Regime, at a time when our Government & Arms Merchants were busy making money in doing business with him ? Also as it seems that you have never heard of the practise of employing provocateurs, I suggest you read up on the reports like the following, which the MSM somehow fails to present to you on a plate like all their other reports, a fact that probably accounts for your disconnection with reality;

http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2011/12/07/washingtons-secret-wars/

Azra, thanks for the Hithens Paxman interview. Hitchens does quite a lot of talking about how he would defend himself were he to be proven wrong and there was life after death. But I guess when you’re dying there is not much on which you can defend yourself afterwards, except the legacy of words you left behind. As I said earlier, I think his prose-style is too academically boring to be worthy of attention, almost as boring as his mate’s, Salman. (Rushdie’s prose is so boring it is almost unreadable. Yawn! Yawn!) Hitchen’s spoken style is articulate, and there’s quite a lot of video footage, and if his reputation survives it is more likely to be resting on this than on the pen-pushing. His spoken word is much more worth listening to than his written-style is worth reading. He ought to have read Sir Ernest Gowers “The Complete Plain Words”, but he clearly didn’t, or to have taken a leaf out of Craig Murray’s book, a man whose prose-style is consistently readable. What I think he tried to do was address the intellectual snobs who he sees as superior and more worthy than we common folk. In that respect he can be equated with the poet Geoffrey Hill, who appeals to a select coterie of English poetry academics who palpably soar to greater heights than mere mortal skylarks, but do not sing so sweetly.
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Which brings me to Vaclav Havel. Agreed, Stephen, he was a poet and politician who to quote Tennyson, or misquote him, according to my memory, was one of “those who held their heads above the common crowd”. He flourished in the twentieth century as a poet, playwright and reformer, from what we know, shone. I might wager it was a big eye-opener for him to see how politicians behaved. No wonder he went back to being a playwright.

This is a few days old so don’t know if it has already been posted. It is Michel Chossudovsky on the Iran war postulations.
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http://youtu.be/_FokA3jwKVM

@John Goss: “was one of “those who held their heads above the common crowd””

What’s with this lavishing of praise on people with the blood of countless innocent people on their hands ?! Or does that not matter if they could string a flowery sentence or two together ?

Vaclav Havel: “Saddam Hussein’s regime poses a major threat to many nations and to his own people … there should be international intervention.”

Stephen, you’ve been getting quite a bit of flak tonight. Unfortunately people like you and Chris Hitchens lay yourselves open to it, even encourage it, I suspect. Hitchens claimed that it was a good thing to get rid of the once darling of the west, Saddam Hussein, but now the Yanks have, allegedly left, with their tails between their legs, as I wrote they would at the start of the war in 2003, having left countless bodies in their wake, I am proud, as I wrote two days ago of research from my university. It’s about how much worse things are for women since Bush and Blair’s war.
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The research is that of Dr Haifaa Jawad.
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http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/latest/2011/06/07JuneWomensufferingfromworstviolenceinhistoryofmodernIraq.aspx

Mark

My resentment is that nothing you say or do will do anything whatsoever to deal with the totalitarians that plague much of the Middle East and the rest of the world for that. You cannot select good and bad totalitarians. I only believe war should be used as a last resort against such – thats why other alternatives have to be thought about and developed. If you want the obscenity of Assad firing shells at Palestinian refugee camps (how about some honesty about that??) – then fine just carry on.

If you really think the lesson of Iraq is some kind of jihad against the USNatoIsrealMIC (or whatever you call what you see as an axis of evil) then you can go to hell in a handcart

And for the avoidance of doubt – I have so problem whatsoever with anyone uncovering deception and abuses of power in Western government and holding to account those responsible (shaming is meaningless mob rule stuff) – my gripe is that your authority to do so is undermined if you cannot recognise abuses on your side.

Macky

So Galloway having stood singlehandedly against Saddam ended up supporting his courage and indefatigability and having his political campaigns (not charities btw – or that is at least what he told the Charity Commissioners ) supported by money from said regime. What changed his mind – was the gassing of the Kurds or the Iranians or the tears that he shed on the break up o fthe Soviet Union. And I’m the one who has a disconnection to the World.

Strangely enough when I was a student involved in campaigns to support Iraqui students being beated up on British University camnpuses by Baathist thugs back in the late 70s and 1980s your lone voice was absolutley no where to be seen.

On Orwell – do you think he kept quiet about abuses by allies when he fought in the Spanish Civil War or later in WW2? So do you really think he wouldn’t say anything negative about Assad, Ahmadjinedad or the Palestininian Autrhority for that matter. Seems to me that you have something of a manifest disconnectiuon from Orwell as well.

Macky, I should have give the full quote, as I remember it. I must be some kind of politician selectively misquoting. “”In our schoolbooks we write of those who helt their heads above the crowd, he flourished then, or then, but life in him could scarce be said to flourish, only touched on such a time as comes before the leaf, when all the wood stands in a mist of green, and nothing perfect.” Great poet, Tennyson.
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You’ve got to remember that Havel, once he got out of politics was being fed by a media machine, though he had a mind of his own. This machine took in some very bright people. I am happy to say it did not take in me. Soon I will reveal all.

“At least 30,000 people were killed and 50,000 wounded in Libya’s six-month civil war, the interim health minister said, offering a first detailed estimate of the high cost in lives of bringing down Moammar Gadhafi.”
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/08/libya-war-died_n_953456.html
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{http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/9835879}

I’m sure there’s some worm trawling this blog. What kind of a word is “helt” and where is the n off “given”? It’s a pity there are no editing facilities. That’s my biggest problem with the blog. It even screws up comments by the so-called trolls.

John

Of course it was a good thing to get rid of Saddam Hussain and any other dictators for that matter – regardless of who may or may not have supported them in the past. The real questions is how the disposal should be achieved and then how the transition to a new government should take place (and if you look at what Hitchens actually said he clearly acknowledges this). Any rational person can recognise that Iraq was not a good model for doing so (and if you look at what Hitchens actually said he clearly acknowledges this). But where is the thinking as to what are better models for achieving the transition – might I suggest that those who ignore the problem and chose to rant and rage about Iraq/ Israel/Tony Blair etc. etc. are going to contribute precious little in the way of a solution.

Macky,
Vaclav Havel was a prick whom turned Czech Republic into a drive-in whorehouse, destroyed the infrastructure and then went back to write the shite he used to, without much success, by then the communists were no more, and his “dissent” was no more in the vogue.
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Who was it who said Rushdie is boring? Dog on you, I should also like to add; boring, unimaginative and worst of all, fucking pretentious little prick trying to sound intellectual, that really raises my hackles, when I see pratts trying to sound “intelligent” by stringing words that sound “heavy”, and are to be found in the “Dictionary” in a grandiloquent fashion, following the formulae of pontifications for bought and paid for morons.
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The typist drone stephening about around this board, and its support team have been busy pushing the party line emailed to them from the HQ (GIYUS). Hence the circular cut and pastes that always are defending; War criminals, such as that putrid C. Hitchens, and anyone else who has aided and abetted the crimes against peace, by being a dutiful war enabler.
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In addition to their main task of war propaganda for new wars in Syria and Iran, Pakistan, China, etc. The unconscious drivel cut and pasted is similar to computer generated story lines; absolute bollocks that only makes sense to a particular mindset only associated with the standard issue ziofuckwit.
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As well as stopping any meaningful discussion about the shitty little strip of land, and sponsors thereof, included the venal politicians in the ziofuckwit pockets, as well as agents and promoters of the ziofuckwitistan.
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Finally, if the drone is a lawyer, boy I hope it is in conveyancing arm of the law, because reading the bollocks it has pasted here, proves he is pretty shit fucking useless.

Stephen, then, if it is OK to get rid of Saddam Hussain, who was never properly tried for his alleged crimes, it would be a good thing to get rid of Tony Blair, which we still have not managed to do? You do not live in Iraq so again I ask you to look at Mark Golidng’s pictures of little children who did live in Iraq and who were killed and maimed by NATO bombs, again I ask you to read about how much more domestic violence there is against Iraqi women since the war. Saddam Hussain, however much people might despise him, had a pluralist Iraq, something much more admirable than the mess the US retreating troops have left in their wake. Similarly Gadaffi had a much better Libya than the mess NATO and the NTC (who are they?) have tried to establish (this misery is still ongoing). When Hitler was doing nasty things outside Germany few people spoke up. But there were some.
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Most commentators on this blog are trying to ensure we have no more Tony Blairs, no more Hitlers, no more Pol Pots, no more Stalins. I invite you to join the crusade.

Macky, that’s a good quote from Orwell, but it wasn’t the one I was thinking of. Here is the one in which Orwell castigates those who consider themselves “pacifists”:
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The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough.
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I submit that the quote is still accurate if you alter, say, Tony Blair for Churchill; Iran, Hamas and Hizbollah for Russia, China and India.

John Goss, the Paxman interview took place in November 2010 and the debate on the afterlife with the rabbis occured in February 2011 so I propose that we take his remarks in that debate as definitive.

obfuscation …… obfuscation…… Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries. …….conflation, …… bollocks, I sub……
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Who is defending the West against what? Orwell was not talking about banksters evidently, because they are the only source of danger to the West, that so far has not been subject to any kind of defence activities.
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There are no dangers to West, Isreal can screech all it wants but there are no dangers to the West from anywhere.
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Epic fail

In a nutshell, Mr Murray.

“You cannot hope to bribe nor twist -
Thank God! – the British journalist.
But, seeing what the brute will do
Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.”

Except that Hitchens took the zionist shekel too. He would have
sold his granny for sixpence. His piggy-backing on Orwell was shameless, as he epitomized Orwell’s detested comfortable armchair apologists for slaughter, in Hitchens’ case, the
legions of dead Iraqis. Always a pickled Dorian Gray, he left Oxford [my contemporary] with a third-class degree FFS. It is almost impossible to get a third, unless you are superhumanly dense. He specialized in attacking people who were too
grand to respond [Kissinger, Clinton, God] or else dead, especially if they were friends whose kindness he could betray, like Edward Said, or 85-year-old Gore Vidal. He left England
because the Brits are wise to the blustering rubicund saloon-bar bore, and he would have ended up as a lampoon in Private Eye. In 30 years in the US, he never let an American vowel flatten his plummy accent, lest it dilute the brand of the alcoholic English sage abroad. Rather than live in New York,
which would have seen through him, he chose DC, where he could be a shrimp among krill. He was a tory through and through,
but pretended to be a Trot because he felt superior to the realtors down the golf club. Alcoholism was the key to his record, since it affects the brain, and causes childish, petulant and erratic behaviour. [The alcoholic is the
last to realize]. He affected the mature voice of experience – statesman, minister, diplomat, general – but never held any office. He was just a scribbler with endlessly changeable opinions, but no ideas – the phoney baloney.

Always a pickled Dorian Gray, he left Oxford [my contemporary] with a third-class degree FFS. It is almost impossible to get a third, unless you are superhumanly dense.
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One of our prime minister’s got one of those. I think it was Bonar-Law or Douglas-Home. There’s no way they could be called superhumanly dense.

Oh, it’s always the good ones who die young!
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Hitchens, Vaclav Haval and now, Kim Jong-il!
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16239693

FedUp: There are no dangers to West, Isreal can screech all it wants but there are no dangers to the West from anywhere.
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Well, the US was attacked on September 11th, of course. Now, it may be true that the response was incredibly exaggerated, if not downright loopy, but you cannot argue that there was no attack.
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Boniface: He affected the mature voice of experience – statesman, minister, diplomat, general – but never held any office. He was just a scribbler with endlessly changeable opinions, but no ideas – the phoney baloney.

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Yep, he was a bit of a poor man’s Conor Cruise O’Brien, who you no doubt also hated.

Tony Judt was a better essayist as well.

I don’t think Vaclav Havel salivated as Hitchens did, at the ability of cluster bombs to penetrate a Koran in a Muslim’s coat pocket.

“Those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. So they won’t be able to say, ‘Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.’ No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words.”

Just another imperialist armchair warrior drooling over wog corpses.

I see the Jong-Un’s taken over the reigns in North Korea. I didn’t even know his daddy was Il.
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Remember, let’s not speak Il of the dead.
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Things are inevitabrery going to change.

John Goss,

On Rushdie You and I are of the same mind, I remember my old boss who is an avid reader, was held up in Kuwait and had to hide inside his house for 4 months. He said “even when I run out of all the reading materials, I could not finsih his (Rushdie) book!” I believe the only reason his book (Satanic verses) became a best seller was people’s curiosity, and the Fetwa! so in fact Khomeini did him a favour, imagine all that publicity

angryssssssssssssoba:
uso tsssssssssssukanaide.

Well, the US was attacked on September 11th, of course
I have seen your vehement denial of the 9/11 truth, and your constant put down of anyone who has started to debate the sham “attacks” on 9/11, now it clicks well together, because without the myth of the attacks, there are no dangers to the West, and your kind are in dire straights for finding an excuse to route the Muslims from the face of the Earth.
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PS Loopy, bananas, and a whole bowl of fruit cocktail , but all the same you can tear your arse and be as angry as you like, fact is 9/11 was an inside job.
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Now run along and find a Palestinian to demolish his house to make you feel better.

“uso tsssssssssssukanaide.”
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Are you calling me a liar? Fine! What did I lie about?

I have seen your vehement denial of the 9/11 truth, and your constant put down of anyone who has started to debate the sham “attacks” on 9/11, now it clicks well together, because without the myth of the attacks, there are no dangers to the West, and your kind are in dire straights for finding an excuse to route the Muslims from the face of the Earth.

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The reverse is obviously true of you. Because you know such attacks are unjustified you have to believe they were perpetrated by the Israelis or someone else. If it turned out you were wrong your world would fall apart. That’s your problem. Deal with it because I don’t care for your silliness.

“Because you know such attacks are unjustified you have to believe they were perpetrated by the Israelis or someone else.”
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So the doubts are there, and thoughts have crossed your mind, but, you are rationalising the evil plots that turned 21st century into the century of genocide.
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Dancing Israelis caught on the 9/11 in the sight of the burning and smoking WTC obviously were so upset, grief stricken as they highfived and danced to celebrate “Mission Accomplished”.
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Isn’t it time to stop projecting; “silliness”, and stopped being so insane

“One of our prime minister’s got one of those. I think it was Bonar-Law or Douglas-Home. There’s no way they could be called superhumanly dense.”
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Do you actually remember Douglas-Home? There was no other description for him.

Passerby/FedUp: So the doubts are there, and thoughts have crossed your mind, but, you are rationalising the evil plots that turned 21st century into the century of genocide.
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More idiocy from whatever rock you crawl out from under. As it happens, I think the theory that the Israelis dun 9/11 is one of the most ludicrous of all ludicrous tinfoil plots.
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Dancing Israelis caught on the 9/11 in the sight of the burning and smoking WTC obviously were so upset, grief stricken as they highfived and danced to celebrate “Mission Accomplished”.
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Yeah, yeah, and that makes you suspect given that you were caught on camera masturbating over the atrocities.

Komodo, there was a lovely description of Douglas-Home by a contemporary of his, according to Wikpedia, “in the eighteenth century he would have become Prime Minister before he was 30: as it was he appeared honourably ineligible for the struggle of life”.
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Then again, according to Francis Wheen, Douglas-Home was the first person to notice that President Nixon had bugged the Oval Office. He thought it most unusual that Nixon and he had conversed for many hours without Nixon even bothering to make any notes. He concluded that Nixon must have been secretly recording what was being said while everyone else concluded that Douglas-Home had said nothing worth remembering.

“Yeah, yeah, and that makes you suspect given that you were caught on camera masturbating over the atrocities.”
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Insanity at its height, projections continue,through baseless assertions, crazy assumptions, concluded in vehement and violent denunciation. Delusional and unconscious drivel; “given that you were caught on camera masturbating”, this is passed as rational lines of debate, only in ziofuckwitistan.
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Stamping your feet and throwing around insults do not alter the fact that ziofuckwits have a long form on this kind of treacher; as in the case of USS Liberty. Dancing Israelis were later on the Israeli TV and admitting they were there to film the attacks, ie they had prior knowledge. But that is not going to change the line of crap you have been stringing together as comments, is it now?

“this is passed as rational lines of debate, only in ziofuckwitistan”
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Fedup is rather fond of the term “ziofuckwit” also. And if I’m not mistaken, he too mis-uses the word “whom” all over the place.
Dum dee dum …

I see the keyboard defence brigade for the keyboard defence brigade are fighting a rearguard action there. …. on goes the fucking charade.
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Dee dum dee
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the perspicacity and hermeneutics associated with “ziofuckwit” and variances thereof, are far too elegant to be overlooked.
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“Yeah, yeah, and that makes you suspect given that you were caught on camera masturbating over the atrocities.”
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The outburst provides further proof that convincingly and overwhelmingly holds; West is in no danger.

@Stephen, against my better judgement I have accorded you the respect to engage in a grown-up debate, but finally I sorry to say that I have to agree with the verdict of several others, the latest being Mark Golding, who has recently summed you up, & what you are about, succinctly & accurately; that you have seen fit to posit those knuckle-dragging, lies, slanders and misrepresentations about Galloway, here, instead of cess-pits sites like the one you have defended, Harry’s Place, where they are endlessly reheated & regurgitated, is a good indicator of where you should really be posting. Your ignorant comments about both Galloway & Orwell, can easily be exposed for the nonsense they are, but I resent wasting time having to educate somebody who is clearly not debating in good faith.

Incidentally I am aware that Angrysoba is also H.P “Saucer”, but unlike you, he can bluff his way here by cleverly holding back to a certain extent, enough to permit a fairly worthwhile & serious debate, so far (not counting “Yeah, yeah, and that makes you suspect given that you were caught on camera masturbating over the atrocities”) !!

@Angrysoba, well I’m somewhat relived that it was not the quote you had in mind, otherwise I would have to class you as having the same level of disconnection with rationality as Stephen, who cannot realise that Orwell is clearly writing specifically about “My County Right Or Wrong” types. With presenting this other quote, I’m hoping & assuming that you are not trying to paint or stereotype all the anti-war Left as white flag waving pacifists, but instead are, for whatever reason, concerned with the small minority who would classed themselves as pacifists. You have to be aware that Orwell wrote this in 1942, and has since become commonly summed –up & shorted to just the quote “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist”; however less well know if the fact that barely two years later, he repudiation this argument. Orwell has become to be regarded as an iconic authority figure on political discourse & theory, but he was not above making errors, a famous one being his belief at the time that England would necessarily have to become socialist in order to win the one, but at least his had the integrity to confront his own mistakes & prejudices. A quote that I think many here should think about when posting, is this;
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“To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like.”
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Finally Orwell would be spinning in his grave if he knew what he has become the pin-up boy of the “Decent Left” Humanitarian Bomber ! Goodness even Bush’s “Either you are win us or with the terrorists” is an echo of Orwell’s “‘he that is not with me is against me”, a line from the very same repudiated essay mentioned before; Orwell was a determined anti-imperialist at a time when this was not a common position on the left, and to think that our present day supporters of imperialist war, laud him as their hero is deeply ironic & indicative of their shallowness .

@Angrysoba, I’ve responded to your Orwell quote, and posted it twice now, but still not showing; if it doesn’t show soon I’ll try later.

Re the Dancing Israelis, what do you think they mean when they say “Our purpose was to document the event” ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRfhUezbKLw

Macky: Incidentally I am aware that Angrysoba is also H.P “Saucer”, but unlike you, he can bluff his way here by cleverly holding back to a certain extent, enough to permit a fairly worthwhile & serious debate, so far (not counting “Yeah, yeah, and that makes you suspect given that you were caught on camera masturbating over the atrocities”) !!

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I’m not having that. I don’t see why you should make a dig at my remark to Passerby/Fedup when they’re hostile and call me a “ziofuckwit” repeatedly. If they can say that, and I don’t care if they do, then I can snipe back and not expect someone like you to have a go at me for doing so.
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As for, “we were there to document the event” I have no idea. Is that actually what they said? Do you have the requisite language abilities? Have you any friends who do who might be able to help you out for this? It seems to me if you think you have a very serious lead on this then you would make very serious inquiries but unfortunately in all my time of chatting to “Truthers” they seem to satisfy themselves with the most outrageously slender evidence.

I’m not having that. I don’t see why you should make a dig..
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Why is that then nuid/Angrysoba?
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Is ganging up and fly by commenting only to be your weapons in the keyboard wars?
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As for the “Do you have the requisite language abilities?”, do you know what is meaning of “is”? Just waffle in the way of obfuscating the facts; “there are no dangers to West”! 9/11 was an inside Job and the world knows it, deal with it, and stop being so pushy.

“Yeah, yeah, and that makes you suspect given that you were caught on camera masturbating over the atrocities.”

Funny how they always resort to childishness when they lose their fragile zionist tempers. Like Butch Hitch with his ‘fat slags’, or any zionist robber frothing about the ‘Pals’.

Only a fool or a knave doubts the role of the Mossad in the 9/11 events. The dancing Israeli secret agents? Silverstein’s cancelled breakfast meeting in the twin towers? The president left in apparent danger because they knew there was none? The world’s shortest book, ‘Jewish Casualties of 9/11′?

@Angrysobs; Re “I’m not having that “, actually it was more a case of timing than anything else, as I was just about to submit my Post about you “holding back to a certain extent” , when your masturbating comment appeared, and I amended my Post by just adding the qualifier in brackets, more as an attempted humorous line, rather than as a real dig at you.

Anyhow re the Dancing Israelis, I think we can take it that the translations are correct, for many reasons, but especially that Anti-Truthers Sites that set out to dispel “conspiracy claims”, have not tried to discredit this on phoney translation grounds. Instead they come up with a) the cameras were not set-up prior, so they were filming the event happening in front of them just like thousands of others, or b) they were indeed Israeli Agents on a specific other mission, and did set-up camera to film that other mission, which is the “event” referred to, and just happened to be a prefect place to also film the Twins Towers being attacked ! Both of these explanations are seriously far fetched for many reasons, such as the camera were professional items which take time to set-up, and that either of these explanations account for the bizarre joyous celebrations of these people, as they watched the tragedy in front of their eyes unfolding.

BTW my Orwell response finally appeared (see above); which means I can correct a little typo; “…a famous one being his belief at the time that England would necessarily have to become socialist in order to win the War, but at least he had the integrity to confront his own mistakes & prejudices.”

@Angrysoba, my Orwell response has now appeared (see above), but not my last Post (yet) that I just submitted to you; anyhow I see that your fellow “Saucers” are having a few pokes at Craig now;

http://hurryupharry.org/2011/12/18/translation/#comments

‘A great loss to humanism’: BHA mourns Christopher Hitchens

The British Humanist Association (BHA) is today mourning the death of Christopher Hitchens, a great loss to humanism, who brought some of the clearest, most eloquent arguments for reason, political secularism, and humanist ethics to a worldwide audience.

A prolific writer and inspiring orator, Hitchens brought his own brand of unbelief to mass audiences, becoming part of the ‘new atheist’ publishing phenomenon with his 2007 work ‘God Is Not Great’, but had for many years been an activist for secularism and many of the other causes dear to humanists.

BHA Chief Executive Andrew Copson said:

‘The life and contribution of Christopher Hitchens will be celebrated not only by humanists but all those who prize freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of belief were all things valued and defended by him. Hitch was fearless in his challenges to authority, orthodoxy and conformity and his death brings the loss of a great cheerleader for liberal as well as secular causes.

‘His attitude to death and his resolute maintenance of the non-existence of a god or afterlife became an extra inspiration for non-religious people in his final months, bringing to mind words of Bertrand Russell which he himself quoted with approval:

“Religion, since it has its source in terror, has dignified certain sorts of fear and made people think them not disgraceful. In this it has done mankind a great disservice – all fear is bad. I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation… Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about our place in the world.”

‘Christopher Hitchens helped millions to think more truly about our place in the world and he will be missed.’

http://www.humanism.org.uk/news/view/950?utm_source=e-bulletin+subscribers&utm_campaign=324e79ef41-BHA_e_bulletin_2011_12_19&utm_medium=email

And the National Secular Society reports:

Christopher Hitchens dies
Journalists have had months to prepare their obituaries and salutations, so much is already in print about Christopher Hitchens, who was for many years an honorary associate of the National Secular Society, and has died at the age of 62. There is little more we can add to the acres of newsprint except our admiration for his courage, tenacity and humour in the face of huge opposition for his ideas.

We take a leaf out of his book in our own efforts, when he said: “The noble title of ‘dissident’ must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.”

We didn’t agree with everything that Christopher said. Many of us took issue with his support for the war in Iraq. But that’s the joy of freethinking – there is no dogma, you can disagree and even oppose another person’s viewpoint without feeling the need to kill them.

The media worldwide is lauding Hitchens’ intellectual rigour, his polemical skills, his thrilling oratorical outbursts, so we won’t repeat it all here. My own vivid memory of Christopher is seeing him a couple of years ago in a debate involving such theological pygmies as Ann Widdecombe, in which he reduced all opposition to rubble while sipping generously on a tumbler of whisky.

We have lost a valued colleague and a formidable champion. He’ll be impossible to replace.

There are some great videos and, of course, in this week’s New Statesman there is an account of the final conversation he had with his great friend and compatriot Richard Dawkins.

http://www.secularism.org.uk

Craig, Hitchens did nothing to start or continue the Iraq war, I do not understand the intemperate vitriol on a commentator who explained his position exhaustively.
It is incredible to read such aggressive posts here.
Almost as incredible to see that anyone who disagrees that Hitchens was a warmonger is labelled as a Zionista.
Hitchens was imo the greatest and most courageous in his challenge to religious idiocy and sense of entitlement.
I am disappointed that you do not recognise the value in that position.

@Barbara, I know that you are trying to upset a few stomachs with your links, but after reading this BBC Bimbo’s “tribute”, I’m too busy laughing to be affected;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16222995

For one second only, I thought that the author here was the neocon-admiring, zionist-loving Canadian PM!

.
Christopher Hitchens: A Nationalist, Imperialist Bully
by Stephen Harper / December 19th, 2011
.
So the author and journalist, Christopher Hitchens, has died aged 62. All day the mainstream media have been broadcasting glowing tributes to Hitchens. One reporter on Britain’s Channel 4 News even claimed that Hitchens had consistently taken a “stand against abusers of power”. But at least one dissenting view made it through the airwaves. In an interview for BBC News, Hitchens’ erstwhile fellow traveller Tariq Ali talked of Hitchens’s shameful support for Western imperialism. The interviewer’s unease was palpable, and predictably enough, the interview was terminated rather abruptly when Ali moved on to the matter of Hitchens’ narcissism.
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For the last quarter of a century, Hitchens’ hard-drinking, tough-talking image has made him the poster-boy of the liberal intelligentsia in the UK and US. Hitchens could certainly be a lot of fun. He delighted in pointing out the hypocrisy and mendacity of certain powerful individuals – such as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (so-called ‘Mother’ Teresa), Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton – and he did so with aplomb. Indeed, there is no denying that ‘the Hitch’ was a consummate prose stylist and a seductively sonorous public speaker. But, as Richard Seymour notes, Hitchens, for all his svelte polemic, was a rather conventional sort of thinker who had “difficulty in handling complex arguments”. And more importantly, like his champion, the British writer and comedian Stephen Fry (for who can forget Fry’s attempts to reassure the British public, following the MP’s expenses scandal in 2009, that all is well with liberal democracy), Hitchens abused his persuasive powers in support of the status quo.
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It is a common misconception that Hitchens drifted rightwards following 9/11. In fact, Hitchens was always on the side of capital, starting out as a Trotskyist and ending up, only slightly more conventionally, as a liberal. He was also a consistent pro-imperialist, supporting the British invasion of the Falklands in the 1980s, the brutal attacks on Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the equally savage invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the following decade. Indeed, Hitchens consistently supported US and British national interests, making a mockery of his claim to be an internationalist.
.
Moreover, as Glenn Greenwald reminds us, Hitchens’s viciousness and bellicosity were remarkable. Writing about Iraq, Hitchens celebrated the ability of cluster bombs to penetrate any Koran, and he admitted to being exhilarated by the 9/11 attacks, on the grounds that they provided him with an opportunity to launch his literary war against ‘Islamofascism’ (like a querulous teenager, Hitchens saw ‘fascism’ everywhere – or, to be more precise, everywhere that Western interests were threatened). He even called the Dixie Chicks ‘sluts’ and ‘fucking fat slags’ for mildly criticising the US president. These are all reasons why, despite his literary achievements, Hitchens should be remembered as a repugnant propagandist for the rich and powerful.
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Dr Stephen Harper is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the School of Creative Arts, Film and Media, University of Portsmouth. Read other articles by Stephen.
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http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/12/christopher-hitchens-a-nationalist-imperialist-bully/

But that’s the joy of freethinking … you can disagree and even oppose another person’s viewpoint without feeling the need to kill them.’
Unlike ol’ Butch, who wanted to drill them pesky islamists full of holes [see above]!
‘…fearless in his challenges to authority, orthodoxy and conformity.’
Ooh, get him. So fearless, his armchair wasn’t even armoured. From it, he bravely challenged ‘fat slags’ ‘islamofascists’ and working-class oiks like George Galloway, who had the nerve to
take supplies to Gaza. So unorthodox, he got the odious zioNazi Cherthoff to bless his U.S. citizenship rite. Oi gay!

‘A great loss to humanism’: BHA mourns Christopher Hitchens’
They have an office in Fallujah I imagine.

A hard bard.
Wrote King Leer.

Ah yes – third class Alex Douglas-Home, the man that called President Nasser ‘an idiot’ when he declared the Straits closed to Israeli shipping. Nasser was fully aware how Israel had ‘stolen’ Palestine in an attempt to create ‘Eretz Yisrael ‘ by driving the Palestinians out and killing the remainder. Douglas-Home was however involved in something much more sinister, a deception in the same vein as the cunning involvement of Saudi ‘terrorists’ to strike the twin towers as a catalyst for war or the recreant duplicitous plan to create civil war in Syria as a stratagem to attack Iran we witness today.
.
British intelligence were fully aware of Nasser’s desire to subdue Yemen and push on into the rest of the Arabian Peninsula effectively uniting the Arabian Peninsula into a pan-Arab federation led by Egypt. British spies monitoring border clashes also passed word that Nasser would again close the Straits of Tiran after military ties to Russia strengthened his armies. Nasser was quite prepared to confront Israel again after the Suez crisis in the late fifties.
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I now know Britain had a secret plan to tie down a huge part of the Egyptian armed forces for four years in a bloody coup and create a grisly conflict to dissolve the morale of the Egypian army. Britain’s command knew that would lead to poor performance in any future war with Israel.
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The plan required using an operational base in Aden and an intelligence liason and recruiting office in London that would send encrypted commands to the base in Aden. Recruiting would be handled by a former SAS soldier, Jim Johnson, with the tacit support of the British Government, but under conditions of complete deniability.
Funding came from Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia, subsequently to become King Faisal.
.
British intelligence became involved after the initial recruitment of about forty ex SAS and friends of Johnson ensuring the ‘mercenaries’ would keep schum by brain-washing their psyche with interviews drenched in British national interest concerns. MI6 liased with Israeli intelligence to provide deniable logistics support by covert airdrops of weapons and ammunition, unknown to the Saudis, who would have withdrawn support for the operation if they had discovered Israel’s involvement.
.
British support for the intervention was from her concerns for the British military base and Naval port of Aden on the Yemeni coast together with it’s oil refinery. Britain could not admit to this tacit support of the Yemeni tribal forces and use of mercenaries because it did not wish to fall out with the Americans who coveted Egypt because they wanted to draw Nasser away from his reliance on Russia who was interested in securing Middle East oil and minerals. Britain revealed the operation to the Shah of Iran who gave support because he was also afraid of Nasser’s burgeoning empire. [source]
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The Yemeni Imam fought a guerilla war against the Egyptian forces from the mountainous regions of the country. He and his commanders spent most of that period living in caves, bribing tribes while the British mercenaries fought against Egyptian incursions and used regular forays into the plains to destroy Egyptian transport, heavy artillary and tanks with land-mines. They regulary sent dispatches on Egyptian casualties to the Aden base.
.
Hostilities finally ended after the Six-Day War in 1967, in which Israel destroyed the Egyptian army and air force – as well as the Jordanian and Syrian air forces – and annexed the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights.

Try No.2:

@Angrysobs; Re “I’m not having that “, actually it was more a case of timing than anything else, as I had just about to submit my Post about you “holding back to a certain extent” , when your masturbating comment appeared, and I amended my Post by just adding that as a qualifier in brackets, more as an attempted humorous line, rather than as dig at you.

Anyhow re the Dancing Israelis, I think we can take it that the translations are correct, for many reasons, but especially that Anti-Truthers Sites that set out to dispel “conspiracy claims”, have not tried to discredit this on phoney translation grounds. Instead they come up with a) the cameras were not set-up prior, so they were filming the event happening in front of them just like thousands of others, or b) they were indeed Israeli Agents on a specific other mission, and did set-up cameras to film THAT other mission, which is the “event” referred to, and just happened to be a prefect place to also film the Twins Towers being attacked ! Both of these explanation are seriously far fetched for many reasons, not least being that the cameras were professional items which take time to set-up, and that either of these explanations account for the joyous celebrations of these people as they watched the tragedy in unfold in front of their eyes

Macky

What you don’t realise is that you have mutated into a “my country right or wrong type” its just that the country you have adopted is not the country of your birth on which you have now turned. Orwell was more than aware of the similarities between “fellow travellers” and our conservatives and drew the parallel more than once. If you think Orwell would have allowed his support for anti-imperialism to allow him to turn a blind eye to the abuse of totalitarian states you really understand nothing of Orwell’s thinking after Burmese Days – don’t you understand that this was exactly the argument being employed by many of the fellow travellers as to why we had to turn a blind eye to the excesses of Stalin. Unlike yourself Orwell (and Hitchens for that matter) was able to judge each particular situation on its merits rather than indulging in the warped moral relativism that you favour. As well as being unable to master a dictionary you appear to be having some trouble with Orwell as well.

As for Galloway – well lets just take this one quote from yourself “Galloway, was actually an active campaigner, and a lone voice in Parliament, against the Saddam Regime.

Well here’s a little challenge go and look at Hansard from Galloway’s entry to Parliament in June 1987 until the 1st Gulf War (when George started supporting the Iraqi cause or rather using to oppose the US) and see how many times this “lone voice” raised the issue of the Saddam Regime. The answer you will find is a big fat ZERO – but please carry on looking until you find something. Perhaps you might then begin to realise that your hero is not above creating a few myths about himself.

Boniface Goncourt

And here’s a little task for you my second class Oxford mind (if it was first class I feel pretty confident that you would have told us already) – let’s have a look at your Hitchen’s quote about cluster bombs. First of all ask yourself does it really sound like Hitchens – did he really lapse into the American vernacular so much when trying to impress his US audience with hios plummy accent. Secondly, do you really think he said this when he had condemned the use of cluster bombs by Milosevic in Kosovo ( did you or your friends – or if you take the more recent opprotunity to do so when Ghadaffi used them in Misrata?? And finally perhaps if they told you one thing in Oxford it was to check your sources so that you can read such comments in context – well good luck because at present all the sources appear to go from one anti Hitchens writer to another – so perhaps you can identify where Hitchens made the original quote. Or is it the 2nd made up Hitchens quote I have found on this thread?

While Oxford may have give you an education it clearly hasn’t told you much manners. Slimeballs of course know that libeeling the dead is not a crime, but of course do not have the courage to do so when a man is still alive.

And re childish remarks – lets just say I (and Angrysoba) receive considerably more here than we give out – and I indeed take the general view that such remarks should be taken as a compliment for winning the argument.

John Goss

“Saddam Hussain, however much people might despise him, had a pluralist Iraq.”

So Saddam was a pluralist and Tony Blair was as bad as Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler. Mossad was responsible for 9/11, Hitch was a Zionist and I’m the one with a tenuous grip on reality. The lunatics have truly taken over this asylum – perhaps it is time for me to leave once I have seen whether Macky and Bonacourt are up to the tasks I have set them.

“Fedup is rather fond of the term “ziofuckwit” also” says Nuid,
,
What gives, you are again picking on my comments? Has someone pissed on your parade again?
,
,
Wehhhhhheeeeeey this one takes the fucking biscuit;
,
“Yeah, yeah, and that makes you suspect given that you were caught on camera masturbating over the atrocities.”
,
Epitome of a ziofuckwit cornered, given any situation, is this a ziofuckwit thing?
,
9/11 or more to the point a clumsy attempt at Reichstag Fire the rerun has fake stamped all over it, yet the ziofuckwits grasping at straws are busy shoving the 9/11 commission drivel the official story. The same commission that was supposed to be chaired by none other than the famous flimflam merchant and war criminal Henry Kisssinger.
,
,
,
Barbara pasted;
“Hitchens did nothing to start or continue the Iraq war”,
Very true that chicken shit warrior was far too clever to go and get “blooded”, the Baghdad Cakewalk was not all that easy as it was made to look, by the likes of the wanker suffering from full of shitness C. Hitchens.
,
So far as his poxy degree goes, Josef Rudolf Mengele had a Doctorate, and Saif Gaddafi has a PhD. Sadly when it comes to pissing contests, a degree these days is a prerequisite for an ASDA shelf stacking job, therefore the “intelligent maverick” shit do not cut the mustard. That shitbags was a war criminal, and ought to have been put on trial and not eulogised.

Mary

Since you quote it as well – and so like finding sources you do can do the little test I set Boniface on the supposed Hitchens cluster bomb quote.

Fedup

You are Dave Spart, now retired to a nursing home with terminal incontinence, and I claim my £5. Or are you the love child of Ron Knee and Doris Bonkers?

Mary,
Thanks for the laugh, I am rolling on the floor, this shit is so funny.

If Barbara can advertise her undertaker business by eulogising the booze sodden war criminal C. Hitchens.
,
So too I can advertise O’Houlihan and Sons The Cobblers are the best in county Tyrone and are petitioning ICC to prosecute in absentia the deceased imperialist and war criminal Christopher Hitchens. Anyone signing the petition will be gifted a cloth polisher.

Stephen: “Well here’s a little challenge go and look at Hansard from Galloway’s entry to Parliament in June 1987 until the 1st Gulf War”

Ollie Kamm of the Times once set me the same challenge, and I spent ages collecting a handful of very early Hansard anti Saddam Regime quotes from Galloway, and the shameless slime ball not only didn’t allow my Post through, but he also permanently blocked me ! What was more annoying was that like a fool I had not kept a copy of the records I had found.

Anyhow I’m not going to all that trouble for you, instead have a look at these which are ready at hand;

Etc. Hansard, 1991-03-15:
George Galloway wrote:There are those of us, such as myself, who have been Saddam Hussein’s bitter opponents for as long as he has been in power in Baghdad. There are people, such as myself, who have marched, petitioned, written, railed and ranted at the dictatorship in Baghdad, and it is bitterly difficult for us to see the attitude of those Conservative Members who did not want to hear what we were saying and who wanted to say little and do even less about the bestialities that were committed by the dictatorship in Baghdad. For them, the dictatorship was merely a bloody good customer. That is the truth of the matter.
…
The vast majority of human beings who made up that mountain of dead people never supported Saddam Hussein, never voted for Saddam Hussein, never voted for the war, and never in any sense offered any support to the Baathist regime in Baghdad, yet they were shot “like fish in a bowl”. They were massacred “like rabbits in a sack”. Other disgusting metaphors were plastered across our newspapers over the past few weeks. No one can talk about environmental damage or damage to the atmosphere without coming to terms with the fact that the massacre on the Basra road will haunt the world…

Hansard, 1993-12-13:
George Galloway wrote:For the record, I am a founder member of the campaign against oppression and for democratic rights in Iraq. I was marching, petitioning and picketing for democracy and against dictatorship there long before this and other Governments were converted to opposition to the regime in Baghdad. I stand in second place to no one in my opposition to the bestialities of that regime.

He goes on to argue against the effect of sanctions. Other speeches of interest – Galloway criticises US/UK policy as strengthening Saddam and leading to festering fundamentalism

Hansard, 1993-01-21:
George Galloway wrote:Just as the blitz by the Luftwaffe and Irish terrorism succeeded only in galvanising patriotic feeling, so the latest spasm of violence against Iraq by the west has actually strengthened Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The attack was a blunder because it has contributed seriously to a wave that will continue for years of further instability, radicalisation and sweeping fundamentalism across the middle east and the broader Islamic arena. I do not know where some of the authorities obtain their information. On Arab streets, in the slums of Algiers, in Aden, in the slums of Cairo and in the mosques of Saudi Arabia, the attack has led to the beatification–if Muslims can be beatified–of that blood-soaked tyrant, Saddam Hussein. His stock has never been higher.

Believe me, that wave of radicalisation and fundamentalism has been under way in the Arab area for a considerable period. Anyone who is aware of the Palestinian question and who has watched the steady march of the fundamentalist movement, Hamas, gaining ground at the expense of the secular, moderate, nationalist leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, knows exactly the despair and humiliation felt by the Arabs that is leading to the festering problem of fundamentalism.

Azra, your father had taste. Rushdie is unreadable. My suspicion is that the only people who have read the Satanic Verses are Rushdie, and his editor (poor sod!) I guess the Booker judges must have read “Midnight’s Children” but nothing would surprise me.
.
Angrysoba, re: Paxman interview, I agree the interview to which you refer was later, but Hitchens must have said something after that, and when you are in love with your own words you do not stay silent on any subject. I would be genuinely interested to hear what his last thoughts were.
.
Suhayl, my mother and father heard Paul Robeson sing in Blackburn Town Hall, I think it was, but somewhere in Blackburn. They came back full of it, and were particularly impressed that he could take the microphone away and still project.
.
Stephen, I think less people will grieve the departure of you than that of Saddam Hussain, Muamur Gadaffi, Osama Bin Laden, Christopher Hitchen, Kim Jong Il, Ho Chi Minh and a whole host more of the dear departed. But I doubt you can stay away.

Jon, or whoever the mod is. I appear to have lost a comment within the last five minutes. If you cannot find it the blog has definitely been compromised.

Macky

Fail – all your quotes are from Galloway after the 1st Gulf War saying what his position used to be (i.e trying to create the myth). To say as you did that “he was a LONE voice in Parliament, against the Saddam Regime” and then not produce a single quote from the period he was in Parliament before the 1st Gulf War (even you will need to acknowledge there were plenty of voices in Parliament against the gasser and torturer Saddam after that.). Galloway went into Parliament in June 1987, the first Gulf War was from August 1990 to February 1991.

What you should have said is that George said bugger all in Parliament about the Saddam Regime and then afterwards he created the myth that he was the only one campaigning in Parliament against Saddam so that his position of supporting that fascist after the 1st Gulf War didn’tr look as bad as it was because at least he had always opposed the US.

So you wouldn’t have bothered even taking Kuwait back off Saddam just like gorgeous George. And what do you think Saddam would have done for his next trick if he had got away with the invasion of Kuwait. When would the appeasement have stopped??

Macky,
.
I admire George for his eloquence and coherence as observed in your post. A good friend with a unique combination of Scottish and Irish blood, he does not suffer fools gladly striking them down with a vociferous voice.
.
Referring to the Iraq war he accused the American Senate of creating ‘the mother of all smokescreens’ intended to divert attention from the ‘crimes’ of the Iraq war. In 2005 he said to Sen. Coleman, “Senator, in everything I said about Iraq I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong – and 100,000 have paid with their lives, 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies,”
.
I say to Sen. Coleman now a director of RJC. I agree with:
.
Senator Max Cleland
Senator Mark Dayton
Congressman Ron Paul
Congressman Curt Weldon
Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney
Director of the FBI, Louis Freeh
Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, Paul Craig Roberts, PhD
Assistant Secretary of Housing, Catherine Austin Fitts
U.S. Army Intelligence officer, Federal Prosecutor, Office of Special Investigations, U.S. Department of Justice, John Loftus
Foreign Service Officer, George Kenney
Foreign Service Officer, J. Michael Springman
Deputy Attorney General, State of Pennsylvania, Philip J. Berg,
Major General U.S. Army, Commanding General of U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, Albert Stubblebine
Col. Ronald D. Ray, U.S. Marine Corps – Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense
Col. Robert Bowman, U.S. Air Force, Director of Advanced Space Programs, PhD
Col. George Nelson, U.S. Air Force
Major Douglas Rokke, PhD, U.S. Army
Capt. Russ Wittenberg,
Lt. Col. Karen U. Kwiatkowski, PhD, U.S. Air Force, Office of the Secretary of Defense, staff of the Director of the National Security Agency
Senior Military Affairs Journalist at the Naval Postgraduate School, Barbara Honegger, MS
Capt. Gregory M. Zeigler, PhD, U.S. Army, U.S. Army Intelligence Officer
Capt. Eric H. May, U.S. Army, Intelligence officer
Former Chairman, National Intelligence Estimates, CIA, Raymond L. McGovern
National Intelligence Officer and Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis, William Christison
U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer, case officer CIA. Robert David Steele.
.
The US Commission report on the second attack on America’s shores is deeply flawed at best, at worst, a pack of lies.
.
Gandhi said: – An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because very few choose to see or acknowledge it.

If anyone wants to help Macky recreate his early Hansard searches – searches can be made from here – the results can be sorted in date order. Try Galloway with or without any combination of words you may wish – all explained on the search help page.

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/

Yes Mark – the eloquent and coherent lone silent voice in Parliament against the Saddam regime before the 1st Gulf War.

“So you wouldn’t have bothered even taking Kuwait back off Saddam”
What an absolute bunkum?
Saddam was given the green light by US and then once he walked into Kuwait the trap was sprung on him. This wilful distortion of history even though the public domain data bear witness to Ambassador April Glaspie, and her role in encouragement of Saddam’s attack on Kuwait.
,
…. appeasement …. bollocks… crap….rubbish.
,
The drone typist next will paste about the Kuwaiti infants and the incubators story that was all set up courtesy of Hill & Knowlton and their manufactured witnesses for the benefit of cameras in the congressional hearing.

Of course given Galloway’s worst day was whne the Soviet Union broke up – it is a little more understandable why some here have it in for Havel who did more than a little to accelerate its break up.

Yep Fedup – and the US is to blame for the gassing of the Kurds and Iranians and the slaughter of the Marsh Arabs, or was that Mossad/Israel. Yes we all salute the courage of Saddam in the face of such provocation – they even built his large palaces and corrupted his sons while at school. Yes its all documented here in Building 7 in Redditch in the conveyancing room.

“US is to blame for the gassing of the Kurds and Iranians and the slaughter of the Marsh Arabs, or was that Mossad/Israel. “
,
,
US did seek Saddam on Iranians, and did provide the precursors and chemicals for Saddam’s chemical weapons production and then denied the fact Saddam was using these weapons. In fact the little US, ie UK was broadcasting Panorama programs about the “myths of Saddam’s use of chemical weapons”. (the seventeen thousand pages of evidence of Iraqi chemical and nuclear programmes en route to UN, were grabbed taken to state department laundered and on return to UN only three thousand pages made it to the SC, who was trying to clean up and why?)
,
US provided Michael Cardeon the Chilean arms manufacturer with a complete line for manufacture of cluster bombs, as well as the blue prints for the weapon, so that each bomb could be manufactured for as low as $12,000, half the lowest going rate. Also provided by US were the satellite downlink station in down town Baghdad, that is post using King Hussain as a courier to take the Satellite images to Saddam. Less said about the two billion pounds Thatcher lavished on Saddam for his war efforts. Not forgetting the various Generals (UK/US/Nato) planning and executing Saddam’s battles.
,
That is trouble with ziofuckwitry syndrome the shite resulting form oh so superior race virus leaves very little room for real information and the truth, hence the infantile comments peppering the board.

“Slimeballs of course know that libeeling the dead is not a crime”
I wouldn’t go so far as to call Snitchens a slimeball, but the`cap fits…
Boy, there are some comedians on here. I assume ‘stephen’ is a composite name for the hasbara squad at the Iswaily embassy. Who else would read Hansard, let alone wade through a decade’s worth? LOL. Anyway, old Bitchens was honest about one thing.
He was a Jew all right.

@Stephen, it’s amusing that you can’t realise that with every post you lose even more & more of the very little creditibity then you had before; not only do you make totally vacuous assertions, and sly misrephetations, meaningless comparisons, false straw men, etc, but all delivered with the grace of a football hooligan at a chess match, mostly loud booing, and ocassionally clapping loudly for anybody who you think may have written something vaguely supporting your points of view; your childish “challenges” and requests for proof of qoutations is indicative of your inability to engage in rational discourse.

Once more against my better judgement, and actually because I feel sorry for you (always been too kind hearted for my own good!), I’m going to indulge you once again.

Do you really think it is likely that if wasn’t true that Galloway, when he appeared before that US Senate Committee, would make a show, in front of the world’s cameras, of handing over to Norm Coleman, a man who was trying to nail him, a stack of papers, and state very loudly, “You will see fron the official Parlimentary Record – Hansard- from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have rather a better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein, than you do, and any members of the British or American Goverbments do.” ? He enemies were so desparate to pin anything on him, to catch him out on anything, that they even wants to the lengths of fabricating stuff, yet this verifiable record was never contested. When he says that in 1979 he helped found the Campaign Against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq, a movement opposing the regime’s suppression of leftist political parties, that if was not true, somebody would have found out ? Do you think Tam Dalyell, a respected Labour party MP, was lying when he said: “There was only voice I can recall during the 1980s standing up for human rights in Iraq, and that voice was George Galloway’s.” ?

Re the Hitchens quote, it seems to stem from a conversation he had with a then fellow writer on The Nation, called Adam Shatz; they eventually fell out, but never did Hitchens ever deny that he made that statement, which Shatz published quite a few times.

I leave you with this;

http://coreyrobin.com/2011/12/18/yes-but-more-on-hitchens-and-hagiography/

Macky, the “dancing Israelis” story has a few holes in it. The most that can be confirmed is that some guys with a van were arrested by the police because they were seen filming the events and “looked happy” (!)
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There are no witnesses saying they were dancing or high-fiving. That just seems to have been an embellishment. Also, what kind of cameras are you talking about? How do you know how long it took to set them up? Also, the “our purpose was to document the event” sounds ambiguous at best. It could be, “when we saw it we decided to film it”. But we don’t know because the English voiceover makes it difficult to hear what they are saying.
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It seems you are convinced that they were Mossad agents who knew or planned the event or were simply told by Mossad HQ to film something on 9/11 and then after being questioned by police decided to go on Israeli TV and give the whole game away. Now, that sounds far-fetched and is an incredibly slender foundation on which to build your “The Jews did it!” conspiracy theory.
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By the way, have you noticed just how much some of the commenters here are dropping their anti-Zionist figleaf and exposing their Judenhass for all to see. Not a pretty sight. I am referring specifically to FedUp, Boniface and the makers of that video who clearly deeply despise Jews qua Jews.

RE: Dancing Israelis.
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As a follow-up I should say that there is not even any evidence that they were “filming” the events. Even the quote they were supposed to have made on Israeli TV only said that they “documented” the event. That might be enough to convince a person with a particular frame of mind but I know a quote-mine when I see one. The clip has all the impression of having been edited manipulatively. If you could find the whole programme you may find that they were removals men who were arrested for two months along with many other people from the Middle East. Anyway, all their names are available and any investigative journalist interested in the story should be able to contact them and find out more. My hunch, however, is that fabricated evidence is more satisfying for Truthers rather than anything that risks falsifying “the Jews did it!” theory.

A few late comments on Hitchens:
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He was fat. He was quite short. He drank too much. He was sexually confused. His mother committed suicide. Put all of that together and you are bound to end up with a very complex or, some would say, messed-up individual. It probably also explains his frequent nastiness.
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I don’t doubt his intelligence. Or his wit. But he was not a genius. A genius would not have had to submit himself to waterboarding (on camera, naturally) to figure out it was torture. I certainly didn’t have to. Nor would a genius have launched or encouraged the launching of such a disastrous war against Iraq.
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He was also very patronising. He wrote that book entitled Why Orwell Matters. Surely if you want to understand why Orwell matters, you read Orwell and save yourself the pompous tedium of Hitchens prose.
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But he was not always wrong. And I enjoyed his TV appearances. He was, however, a deeply flawed man and as a Christian, I have the confident pleasure of informing the Hitcherati that that Jesus Christ will be remembered long after Christopher What’s-his-name-again.

Good night.

Classic ROFL from the zionist school of history……

“…the “dancing Israelis” story has a few holes in it. The most that can be confirmed is that some guys with a van were arrested by the police because they were seen filming the events and “looked happy” (!) There are no witnesses saying they were dancing or high-fiving.

The witnesses were the office workers in Bergen County, NJ, who called the cops in the first place, precisely because of dancing and high-fiving! Duh…

That is great zio-vision. Take an event which is amply
documented. First, claim it is not amply documented; then, it is not documented at all; finally, it never happened!

For example, the evolution of Operation Cast Lead, 2008, in which the Israelis killed 1400+ Gazans.

1. They were all warned to stay indoors, or stay outdoors!

2. Those who died were anti-semites who walked into our bullets, just to embarrass us!

3. They killed themselves with their own bombs and bullets! We never fired!

4. Nobody got killed at all! Nothing happened!

5. Gaza? No such place!

Let Holocaust Impostor Extraordinaire Elie Wiesel explain:

‘Some events do take place but are not true; others are—although they never occurred.’
(Elie Wiesel: Legends of Our Time (New York: Avon, 1970)

That’s zionism!

There are no witnesses saying they were dancing or high-fiving.

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No need for any links?

Angrysoba:

You say there were no witnesses to the dancing israelis.

Please look at this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRfhUezbKLw

It seems that someone did see them.

I am not one of those who believes the Jews set up 9/11. But I think there are many unanswered questions. And I am sure that there are many people who think, and quite objectively, that 9/11 has benefited Israel. It has certainly crystallised American support behind Israel.

I actually believe that Mossad was onto the hijackers but couldn’t convince the Americans to do anything about them because they were double-agents, ie. on the CIA payroll so they had some sort of US security clearance.

No wonder some Israelis were dancing.

Njegos,
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Please read my post. As it happens I am responding to Macky because he linked to exactly the same neo-Nazi video that you are linking to.
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I said, “There are no witnesses saying they were dancing or high-fiving.” At least in that video, this is true. There are NO witnesses saying that they were dancing or high-fiving. She only says that they “looked happy”. Then there is a commentator asking Were they dancing? Etc… Were they Mossad? Then it cuts to the interview in which the alleged Mossad agents have decided to go on TV and tell the world that they were there to “document the event”. No mention even of any video cameras. Nobody says they were filming and yet Macky says he knows what kind of video equipment they were using. Well, where is his source? Macky says they were “dancing”. Where is the source?
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Boniface, on the other hand has decided not even to bother finding any sources but has decided to lecture us on his own racist theories. Because he is a racist and Jew hater.

Angrysoba:

To further clarify my comments above:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS89vNH-eeY&feature=related

Please note that this report was hauled off the FOX news archives. Someone received orders to bury it. This was publicised by Antiwar.com at the time. It obviously touched a raw nerve.

Angrysoba:

What is the evidence that this is a neo-Nazi video? And does it really matter if the Israelis were dancing or high-fiving? I would think that the important thing is that they seemed pleased to see the Twin Towers collapse.

Orwell was scathing about armchair warriors like CH, and imagined them being despatched to the front, where you might see
that rare sight, ‘a jingo with a bullet hole in him’. In his essay ‘Inside the Whale,’ he sneered at the leftist poet Auden’s casual mention of ‘the necessary murder’.

“To me, murder is something to be avoided. So it is to any ordinary person. The Hitlers and Stalins [Bushes and Blairs] find murder necessary, but they don’t advertise their callousness, and they don’t speak of it as murder; it is ‘liquidation’, ‘elimination’, or some other soothing phrase. Mr Auden’s [Mr Hitchens'] brand of amoralism is only possible, if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing [right-wing] thought
is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot. The warmongering to which the English intelligentsia gave themselves up in the period 1935-9 [after 1945] was largely based on a sense of personal immunity.”

Hence CH’s nickname of ‘the barstool bombardier’.

One reporter writes of his “spiteful, sneering and vindictive contempt for anyone who thought differently, whether it was the Dixie Chicks (‘fucking fat slags’) or Cindy Sheehan, whose anti-war campaign was dismissed by Hitchens as ‘the sob-sister tripe pumped out by the Cindy Sheehan circus and its
surrogates’. [Cindy Sheehan had lost her son in Iraq the previous year.] This casual misogyny was absolutely about Hitchens’s social location as a white male.”

- a white male who was gayer than he liked people to think.

He left no body of thought or self-analysis, just obsolescent journalism larded with insults, which always become embarrassing as time passes. Was he any more than a pimped-up
Roger Melly, the Man on the Telly? Or, for American readers of a certain age, Tom Snyder with attitude?

What is the evidence that this is a neo-Nazi video?
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At the end of the video is a website address for “occidental dissent”. Google it if you like. It leads to a racist website which has as “blog-buddies” such websites as Stormfront and Political Cesspool.
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And does it really matter if the Israelis were dancing or high-fiving? I would think that the important thing is that they seemed pleased to see the Twin Towers collapse.

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It proves that the meme that everyone keeps repeating is basically a lie and those spreading it should not be trusted. The more you look at this story the more obviously baseless it is.
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That FOX News report also seems to offer absolutely nothing as evidence and in fact says nothing at all about the “Dancing Israelis”.

Yup, as per usual….where’s the link, the video, the evidence? I’ve never heard of any Israelis in New Jersey on 9/11! I’ve only had TEN FUCKING YEARS to look at thousands of news reports! And anyway they don’t count, as they were all PRODUCED
BY NAZIS! Argument lost – cue ‘Anti-semitism! Anti-semitism! Boo! Hoo!’

Boniface, boring strawman there. I had heard of the “Dancing Israelis” but I am still not getting the significance. The implication is clearly that if there were Israelis in New Jersey then 9/11 must be an inside job (?) Of course, you must have more evidence than that as that is a completely wild extrapolation. Presumably the fact that they are Israeli is good enough for you.
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Anyway, it seems that the police documents have been released this year. There’s some stuff redacted though – obviously the bits where the Israelis confess to 9/11, right? Although I can see that in the first one someone does say “they appeared to high-five”. Other than that it becomes much clearer from what I’ve looked at that the witnesses didn’t notice the Israelis until after they had been looking at the attacks on the WTC. The Israelis’ story is that they saw the first attacks and then drove up onto the roof. The Truthers’ argue that the Israelis were already filming. The documents the police made said they found no video cameras. And while one woman thought she saw them using a “small” video camera, other witnesses said that they were using a digital camera. The one found was a Canon Eos Rebel 2000 so it could look a bit like a video camera for someone who doesn’t know much about cameras.
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http://www.911myths.com/index.php/Dancing_Israelis#FBI_and_police_documents

Stephen: are you conveniently forgetting who supplied Saadam with chemical and arms? to kill Kurds as well as when he was fighting Iranian the west kept him topped up with all kind of weapons.
You contradict yourself, go back to your own comment “I am sure the manufacturers of arms and torture ….” it was us who supplied him and we still supply all the other tyrants.. As long as they are our SOBs, and as long as they stay subservient to us, once they show a bit of independence we will do to them what we did to Saadam, Gaddafi, and any other who dares to challenge our supremacy

“There are no witnesses saying they were dancing or high-fiving.”

On goes the lies.
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Who was the person who rang the cops and informed them of five dancing men?
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No that is not a witness, at all, and later on when she appeared on the telly talking about it, she was just being antisemitic.
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Do these ziofuckwits take us for chumps? Their simplistic and disjointed story seems to indicate thus.

I’m afraid that the conclusions most likely to be drawn from angrysoba’s protestations are:
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(a) 9/11 was an inside job
(b) Israel had something to do with it
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I’d always suspected (a) – but never (b) until we began to hear from angrysoba. Remember Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby!

Angrysoba:

I think you are splitting hairs – ‘they were happy but they weren’t dancing’. Why would anyone be happy about the collapse of the WTC? (Incidentally, it is quite easy to see if someone looks happy with a pair of binoculars)

Neo-nazis or no neo-nazis, the truth is that the mainstream news media is too scared to touch the subject. If you don’t believe me, then ask yourself why Karl Cameron’s 4-part series on Israeli espionage in the US was shelved and no longer available for viewing. As you saw, the allegations are that the Israeli intelligence had inside knowledge of the plot and refused to share its intelligence with the US. Of course it could be that US intelligence is covering its backside having ignored Israeli warnings.

You don’t have to be a neo-nazi to smell something fishy here.

PS. Do you know if it was a neo-nazi who interviewed the witness or the police officer?

Boniface -

Good post re Hitchens. Some useful facts to remember the next time one crosses swords with the Hitcherati.

Christopher Hitchens: Reason in Revolt

By Robert Scheer

Hitch is dead. Not, obviously, his brilliant body of work, or the stunning examples of a grand and unfettered intellect that will forever survive him, as will the indelible record of his immense wit and passion. But, sadly, a life force that I had assumed as an indissoluble part of our political and literary landscape, as well as my own close circle of friends, has ended, and with it an indispensable element of our collective moral code.

Christopher Hitchens could be wrong; we had harsh public debates about the Iraq War, but I never doubted that, even then, he was coming from a good place of humane concern. In that instance, he allowed his great compassion for the Kurds and his justifiable loathing of Saddam Hussein to overwhelm a lifetime of opposition to the arrogant assumptions of America’s neocolonialism. Despite the vehemence of our debates, both public and personal, he and his saving grace and wife, Carol Blue, held a gathering at their home to discuss a book I wrote on the subject. This was a man unafraid of intellectual challenge and committed to pursuing the heart of the matter.

That was his driving force, a seeker of truth to the end, and a deservedly legendary witness against the hypocrisy of the ever-sanctimonious establishment. What zeal this man had to eviscerate the conceits of the powerful, whether their authority derived from wealth, the state or a claim to the ear of the divine.

Hitch was the opposite of the opportunistic pundits who competed with him for public space. He took immense risks, not the least in offering himself for waterboarding before concluding it was unmistakably torture, or challenging the greatness of God, knowing full well that he was exposing himself as an object of wildly irrational hate.

So it ever was with the Hitch I knew for decades, going back to the young ex-Trotskyite challenging ex-Communist and fellow Brit writer Jessica (Decca) Mitford through nights of lively debate about everything, and then joining that equally grand and kindred spirit in several drunken and rousingly heartfelt renditions of “The Internationale.” Much like Mitford, Hitchens became world famous and well rewarded and, like her, Hitch was to the end singing that worker’s anthem on behalf of the deluded and abused masses with whom, for all of his personal success, he most profoundly identified.

Advertisement

He was a great man, perfect in his intellectual courage, but I am reminded more of the writer, profoundly dedicated to his craft and committed, for all of his sparkle and bouts of excess, to a prodigious workaday effort at making this a better world. In his memory I offer these lyrics from “The Internationale,” as I recall his somewhat inebriated and ever bemused, but no less heartfelt, rendering of these verses:

Arise ye workers from your slumbers

Arise ye prisoners of want

For reason in revolt now thunders

And at last ends the age of cant

Away with all your superstitions

Servile masses arise, arise

We’ll change henceforth the old tradition

And spurn the dust to win the prize.

That was him. A slayer of superstitions, thundering reason in revolt.

Lift a glass to comrade Hitch.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/christopher_hitchens_reason_in_revolt_20111216/

Actually that should – it is quite easy to see with a pair of binoculars whether someone looks happy. Sort of a “Hercules the bear was spotted flying over Scotland” error!!

Give up advertising your undertakers business Babs, a link would have been sufficient.
Why don’t you go join him in the after life? Oh we are not that lucky; you are a humanist (my foot, more like a misanthropist), fawning over the war enabler fuckwit C. Hitechens.
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PS do you think you are the only one who knows how to surf, cutting and pasting shite all over the place?
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PPS anyone else notice, any time the ziofuckwits get beat comprehensively, suddenly Babs appears and starts the operation cut and paste fawning over the shitbags CH?

‘I always think it’s a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem.’

Hitchens

“Whilst pissed everyone sees more than one, in fact depending on the alcohol proof seeing itself becomes a whole new ball game”
next drunkard to Hitchens in the gutter.
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Victory in which war he was enabling, Babs?
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Your contribution has been cut and paste and even when it came to retort you cut and pasted that too? Babs/stephen/angrysob/nuid which are you?

@Angrysoba, your 911 myth buster site is quite funny; it seriously puts out that being happy & high-fiving is because “people react to situations in different ways” & “That kind of black humour to break tension in a group isn’t at all unusual” !! So the tons of footage we have of hundreds of people looking in shocked, horrid disbelieve, many openly crying, must be very, very unusual & freaky, because not one face in all these hundreds is similing & laughing !!

At least this Site gives links to the declassified, but very redacted police reports; I don’t really have the time at present to examine these, but just skimming not even half of the first document, tells us that the police were actively looking to find a video camera, hardly action based on a dopey witness confusing a photo camera with a video camera; photos recovered do show “visible happy” people; at leastmore than one “removal van” proweling around; no tools associated with the removal business being found; most, if not all of the people associated with this removal business were Israeli; that accoring to an ex-employee there was a lot of anti-american sentiment present with the other employees. Goodness me, enough to chew on already !

@Barbara, you seem to have a great sense of humour equating “Humanist” with that narcissistic misanthrope, followed by the killer line of said misanthrope who specialised in the most venomous ad hominem attacks, complaining about ad hominem attacks ! Ho ! Ho ! Ho !

Here is something else to tickle your funny bone;

http://exiledonline.com/who-can-forget-christopher-hitchens-fake-waterboarding-stunt/

In total agreement with Craig Murray. Alcoholics,and I’ve had the misfortune to have had close familial relationships with two,tend to be bombastic belligerents with deeply unnerving mood swings.What is most striking in Hitchen’s case is his apparent ignorance or refusal to acknowledge the history of the U.K.’s involvement in Iraq. We bombed it throughout the twenties ,thities,fourties and fifties.We were finally forced out in 58 or 59 but ten years later we organised a coup which brought the Baath Party and Saadam to power,he was the creature of the West and it was the Americans who encouraged his war against Iran and supplied the gas used against the Kurds.This obscene war was fought,as usual, for money. My name for it is Caponeomics.How such apparently sane men as Richard Dawkins can deliver tributes to such a one is a mystery.I truly hope he died as painful a death as the children of Fallujah. And why will no-one mention the War Crimes Tribunal in Kuala Lumpur?

Dudes, with those high-fiving Israelis, you don’t get it. In Zio Zio Land, if it wasn’t witnessed by eLie Weasel, it never happened!

I see Stephen has returned back to the Cess-Pit that he came from, with a few snipes at Craig & us on this Board !;

“The comments on Murray’s blog also contain a number of attacks on Vaclav Havel – but nothing as yet on Kim il Jong – they must still be in deep mourning.”

http://hurryupharry.org/2011/12/18/translation/#comments

“@Stephen, it’s amusing that you can’t realise that with every post you lose even more & more of the very little creditibity then you had before; not only do you make totally vacuous assertions, and sly misrephetations, meaningless comparisons, false straw men, etc, but all delivered with the grace of a football hooligan at a chess match, mostly loud booing, and ocassionally clapping loudly for anybody who you think may have written something vaguely supporting your points of view; your childish “challenges” and requests for proof of qoutations is indicative of your inability to engage in rational discourse.

Once more against my better judgement, and actually because I feel sorry for you (always been too kind hearted for my own good!), I’m going to indulge you once again.”

This what is called smoke and bluster, mixed up with the usual patronising put downs – a not dissimilar debating style from your hero George.

Sop lets get to the substance. Well first of all re Norm Coleman, I suspect that he was going after rather bigger fish with Galloway like how the proceeds from the UN Oil programme were going to fund George’s political activities (not charitable as we note since the Marriam Appeal wa smost definitely not a charity) – which does raise the little side question as to why George didn’t declare such donations to fund his political activities to the Electoral Commission – but that is by the by.

Clearly you haven’t been able to find amything in Hansard from when George became an MP in June 1986 to the 1st Gulf War showing that our George expressed any opposition whatsoever to Saddam in Parliament (you don’t have to wade through Hansard to check this as their is a nice little search engine which our 2nd class Oxford commenter clearly failed to appreciate. The only related quote I could find from George was on 30 June 1988 when he complained about the Isrealis bombing the nuclear reactor in Baghdad in 1981 (finishing the job the Iranians couldn’t manage – but that is hardly showing opposition to Saddam is it? There are of course plenty of other statements by MPs attacking Saddam throughout the period in question on such matters as gassing his opponents, human rights abuses, Farzad Bazoft who Saddam murdered etc form a wide range of MPs including Teddy Taylor, Dennis Healey, Ann Clwyd (the leader by some distance), Harry Cohen, Gerald Cohen, Frank Field, Jeremy Corbyn, Pat Wall, Teddy Taylor, Dafydd Wigley, Gwyneeth Dunnwoody, Pat Wall, No Mowlam, Chris Mullin and even on one occaison Tony Benn. But not a dickby bird from gorgeous George.

So what is the conclsion from this – the only possible one is that your statement that Galloway was the sole voice in Parliament against Saddam before the Ist Gulf War is absolutely without any substance whatsoever – and raises the subsidiary question as to what George was really doing about Iraq after he was elected to Parliament.

And as an interesting aside, perhaps we should have a little look at you Tam Dayell quotation – which is in fact a mis quotation because you have omitted the word “mid” before 1980s – now leaving aside the fact that Tam may have got a little muddled on dates given that George didn’t become an MP until June 1887 – it doesn’t really support your argument since we are talking about the late 1980s when George was an MP. Now I wonder why the misleading misquotation occurred?

On the cluster bomb quotes – I suspect that you may be right about it being Adam Shatz’s verbal quote since it doesn’t feature anywhere in Hitchen’s writings, and as I said it doesn’t sound like Hitchen’s voice so it may well have been garbled and quoted out of context. It was also refreshing to see you relying on the Kissinger/Nixon of plausible deniability – what I dont think you realise is that Hitchens left the Nation shortly after that article, and he was probably following the older doctrine of loyalty to his employer and not washing its dirty linen in public.

Anyway unless you have anything constructive to add – I think I have had enough of this pantomine of a blog, which I don’t think has much chance of moving the world forward one bit, and I’m now leaving of my own volition. Many thanks to small number with open minds who have debated in the proper spirit of the word, and possibly despite appearances to contrary have inforemed and changed my minds on many things. And for all the others thanks for the occasional amusement and for helping me to avoid low blood pressure. Seasons greetings to you all – and just remember the slippery slope starts when you allow the ends to justify the means.

Boniface Goncour, said:”Dudes, with those high-fiving Israelis, you don’t get it. In Zio Zio Land, if it wasn’t witnessed by eLie Weasel, it never happened!”
,
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Very true, history starts when of one of the sacred ones has declared its start. Sort of like a taximeter, if none of the sacred ones is there to declare its start, then history does not happen. Also in Zio Zio land, ziofuckwits are always grieving after bombing the crap out of the Palestinians, ziofucktards high five, and laugh and joke, just like those grieving at the sight of the WTC on fire and smoke and tumbling down.
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Also not happened was the phone call in Dubai/Kuwait from PLO taking responsibility for the WTC events. Obviously there too, a bunch of grief stricken ziofuckwits had thought best to get the enemy/Palestinians implicated while the WTC fires were still burning.
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,
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Macky,
Probably stephen also lies in bed calling us all, for he hath got beat so fucking badly here, he has to resort to get the bile and venom out of his system somewhere. Therefore cutting and pasting away in another blog, its a ziofuckwit thing!

Barbara seems to have a great sense of humour equating “Humanist” with that narcissistic misanthrope, followed by the killer line of said misanthrope, who specialised in the most venomous ad hominem attacks, complaining about ad hominem attacks ! Ho ! Ho ! Ho !

Here’s something else to remind us what a complete hypocrite he was;

‘Saddam Hussain — who has sprung from being an underground revolutionary gunman to perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser.’

http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2007/07/iraq-arab-saddam-iran-hitchens

As stated on Medialens; “George Galloway must be wondering why interviewers never reminded Hitchens of this”

@Stephen

“Anyway unless you have anything constructive to add..”

Yes, try to learn the magic of logic, and rational thought, you’ll find that this will make the World a less confusing & frustrating place; start here & try to see if you can see where this let you down just in one aspect of our little discussion: you made a comment decrying the apparent silence of those whose oppose Western wars, iro abusive/totalitarian regimes, and you presented Galloway as your best example; only problem, for you, is that you couldn’t have picked a worse example for your false argument. I pointed out that the reason you believe in this apparent silence, is because the MSM not only spoon-feeds you with official propaganda, but suppresses voices, thus creating this apparent silence, otherwise why would you not know that Galloway has a very long & public track record of opposing the Saddam Regime, and instead believe that he supported him, and even took his money ? I informed you that at a time when our Government & Arms Dealers were doing business with Saddam, Galloway was actually campaigning against him; Instead of properly looking into this, you immediately get hung up on me saying that at this time he was a lone voice in Parliament voicing opposition, seizing on the unimportant pedantic fact that should of stated “virtually a lone voice” , as if , illogically, this somehow negates the point that he was voicing opposition; further, just because you couldn’t find Hansard records prior to the first attack on Iraq, you assumed this also negates Galloway’s opposition ! The Hansard records actually do exists, I know because some years ago I spent several hours wrestling with the very un-user friendly search facility, and found such records, (which were the ones that I presented that to that shameless clown Ollie Kamm). However you didn’t need these to realise that there are other factors that rationally do confirm Galloway’s early opposition to Saddam’s Regime, and I presented some of these you, ie his handing over Hansard records to Coleman that shown this track record of opposition going back to least early 1990, his references to helping fund an Iraqi Human Rights organisation back in 1979, and Tam Dalyell recollection of Galloway being a “the only voice” he remembers campaigning against Saddam. Yet even after this, you again irrationally insist in dismissing despite me actually spelling out for you that if any of this was not true, it would have been long exposed by his very determined & inventive enemies. Stephen, you have to come to terms that your pre-conceived prejudices, and incomplete knowledge, are causing you to reason & think irrationally.

“and I’m now leaving of my own volition”,

Oh well, cheerio then; but tell me was it something I said, as I’m getting a worried as I think I was the last to address Ken (the guy who had a crush on Mary), before he disappeared !

“the ends to justify the means”, funny you end on that, as that is really the motto & creed of pro-war humanitarian “bombing Decent Left”, of which you & your pals at HP certainly belong to.

Angrysoba is right about the dancing Israelis, of course. He’s informed, reasonable and sane. Those spouting the conspiracy nonsense are none of the above and no arguments will change them. Calling them insane just encourages them and confirms their bigoted world view. They have a right to their view and a right to speak but they do a disservice to those who genuinely seek to confront government wrongdoing – especially over the aftermath of 9-11 and the Iraq war.

And to get back to Hitch. I also thought he was a great writer, articulate speaker, independent thinker etc. But then what’s the point of that if he still manages to get it wrong on major issues and be an arse? Great thinker but unfortunately unpleasant and on the wrong side of history? What’s the point of thinking, then? Quite depressing, really…
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And peoples’ reactions to his death as well. It’s just intellectual tribalism. To those who are strong atheists, he was a hero despite his wrong views on Iraq. To those who feel strongly about Iraq, he was despicable despite his rather clear-headed views on religion. To strong Christians, etc etc. What’s so intellectual about liking those similar to oneself and hurling abuse at those who are different? Again, quite depressing, really…
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And as for speaking ill of the dead, what complete bollocks that is. Hitch would not have held back.

David H, two excellent comments. I second your opinions of Hitchens and of my sanity.
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I agree that there’s no need to hold back on criticism of Hitchens and to take offence at people who hated his Iraq War stance is more than a little rich given Hitchens’ own gleeful grave-pissing and his expressing sorrow that he wouldn’t get to write the obituaries for Kissinger and the Pope.
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I also agree that he was a hugely entertaining speaker and I’ll still miss him whatever his faults were.

“Angrysoba is right about the dancing Israelis, of course. He’s informed,reasonable and sane.”

Not another 9/11 Iswaili nutjob. In Zio Zio land, of course, evidence isn’t evidence, facts aren’t facts, lies aren’t lies, the laws of physics aren’t laws, and a cigarette lighter
will vaporize Mount Everest. Welcome to Ground Zio!

“Stephen, you have to come to terms that your pre-conceived prejudices, and incomplete knowledge, are causing you to reason & think irrationally.”

To an Iswaili that is a compliment. One squirt from the aerosol of truth sends them scuttling off to Bloomingdale’s for clean panties.

Macky:
At least this Site gives links to the declassified, but very redacted police reports; I don’t really have the time at present to examine these, but just skimming not even half of the first document, tells us that the police were actively looking to find a video camera, hardly action based on a dopey witness confusing a photo camera with a video camera; photos recovered do show “visible happy” people; at leastmore than one “removal van” proweling around; no tools associated with the removal business being found; most, if not all of the people associated with this removal business were Israeli; that accoring to an ex-employee there was a lot of anti-american sentiment present with the other employees. Goodness me, enough to chew on already !
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A witness says that she saw some guys filming the Twin Towers after the impacts. She based this on the idea that they were using a small, handheld video. On the other hand, YOU have stated that they were using “professional items” that “take time to set up”. You haven’t presented any evidence for these claims and your whole “foreknowledge” claim seems to rest on the idea that they may have set up the video recorders in advance and they were using “professional items”.
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Apparently you are also suspicious of the fact that the removal company had more than one van and that these vans were seen driving around in the vicinity of the removals firm. (?)
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And “there was a lot of anti-american sentiment present”. …oh, gosh!
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Earlier Macky said, Anyhow re the Dancing Israelis, I think we can take it that the translations are correct, for many reasons, but especially that Anti-Truthers Sites that set out to dispel “conspiracy claims”, have not tried to discredit this on phoney translation grounds. Instead they come up with a) the cameras were not set-up prior, so they were filming the event happening in front of them just like thousands of others, or b) they were indeed Israeli Agents on a specific other mission, and did set-up cameras to film THAT other mission, which is the “event” referred to, and just happened to be a prefect place to also film the Twins Towers being attacked ! Both of these explanation are seriously far fetched for many reasons, not least being that the cameras were professional items which take time to set-up, and that either of these explanations account for the joyous celebrations of these people as they watched the tragedy in unfold in front of their eyes

Boniface Goncourt – Ha Ha. You’ve said quite enough on this topic for me to make a few judgements on you. Not visa versa. The fact that you are willing to call me a “9/11 Iswaili nutjob. In Zio Zio land…”, based on my few sentences above, shows all we need to know about your concepts of evidence and reasoning.

Hilarious Macky re ‘Stephen’. I am sure he had said previously that he was going but like that rubber ball, keeps on bouncing back. Wonder what the name of the next one will be. I am just surprised that some here conversed with him when his provenance was so obvious.

Ahem! Still waiting for an answer from Angrysoba.

@Mary re “I am just surprised that some here conversed with him when his provenance was so obvious.”

Yes, I know but I just can’t stop myself from being just too damned kind hearted !

It’s too bad he is not around so he can verify if the following quote is really from “The Hitch”;

‘Saddam Hussain — who has sprung from being an underground revolutionary gunman to perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser.’

http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2007/07/iraq-arab-saddam-iran-hitchens

As they said on Medialens; “George Galloway must be wondering why interviewers never reminded Hitchens of this”

“Ahem! Still waiting for an answer from Angrysoba.”

I know the feeling; very good on moving on by throwing up new questions himself, but conveniently leaving unconvenient questions behind unanswered. Still awaiting his reponse about the I/P points Hitchens made in the clip he provided, and still awaiting a response on an older Thread.

“Those spouting the conspiracy nonsense are none of the above and no arguments will change them.”

I’m actually an Agonist on 9/11, and although I keep an opened mine, I really don’t like my intelligence insulted by absurdities over manifest problems & inconsistencies surrounding the official narative.

Njegos: “Ahem! Still waiting for an answer from Angrysoba.
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What answer are you looking for?
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Mary: “I am just surprised that some here conversed with him when his provenance was so obvious.”
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I don’t even understand what Mary is on about. I have a feeling that Mary is an anti-Semite. Certainly George Orwell would have considered her so. I can find an article in which her slurs are given as examples of “anti-semitism” according to him.
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Anyway, Macky, you still have to give evidence that the Israelis had set up video cameras, IN ADVANCE, of the attacks and were behaving as they did because of such things. Of course, you cannot and have not done that.

By the way, for all you fantasy dissedents, look at what I do say when I think someone is trying to abuse the term “anti-Semitism”. I will not stand for it. I will not be cowed or pushed around by stupid idiots who have no idea what the term means. If anyone ever accuses me of the same I shall smack them hard in the face.
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I have already been clear in this Harry’s Place comments box what I will stand for and what I shall not.
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http://hurryupharry.org/2011/12/18/mps-challenge-antisemitism-in-the-uk/
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@Angry, I will certainly respond iro camera question, but to do it justice I need to clear some time, which is what I guess you must have/are doing all this time, clearing time to find time in order to properly address outstanding issues.

And in memory of Stephen;

http://blogs.dailyrecord.co.uk/georgegalloway/2011/12/lets-just-hope-god-is-merciful-chris.html

Oh, and also, you do know that those “Dancing Israelis” have tried to sue the US government or the arresting officers for physical abuse etc…
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I think that if they were genuinely averse to opening up their role in 9/11 they would have done nothing at all.
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Me, if I were a New York Police Department cop who arrested these guys and found pictures of them celebrating the deaths of thousands of New Yorkers then I would have taken them into a basement and called the Boys in the NYPD choir to come down and give them a rendition of “Galway Bay”. I would have allowed them to be savaged this way and that and still renewed my subscription to Amnesty International. I hate official torture but even you must know that sometimes you will turn a blind eye.

And yet, when you do that you have to realize that when you cross that Rubicon then you no longer stand for the things that we know Craig Murray stood for. Then, you have to realize that if there are certain people that you hate so much then it is perfectly acceptable to torture them and do the most disgraceful things upon them because you KNOW somehow that they are evil and not deserving of the human rights you have campaigned for your whole life.

…then you would not be a person who hates torture on principle. Then you would know that you only hate torture when done to those you sympathise with. In other words you would not be principled at all.

I have a feeling that Mary is an anti-Semite. Certainly George Orwell would have considered her so
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rofl,rofl,rofl,rofl,
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Also the list of antisemites includes; Bishop Desmond Tutu, along with a whole host of others whom have dared to ever question the Sacred Ones (voice over).
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However 9/11 attacks could not have happened without the implicit aid , an complicit collusion of the Israeli Security companies in all three airports involved, and in WTC too. So letting the fox guard the hen-house is a practice that is so “Normal”, just like the “grieving” dancing Israelis, who were not seen by anybody, but were picked up by the cops all the same because the cops were antisemites too.
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Further those Israelis picked up in a van loaded full of explosives in the vicinity of the bridge, were Arabs dressed as Israelis!!!!!!!!!!
,

This must be my sixth attempt to post this to the lady who apparently is in the undertaking business & is trying to increase her business by posting suicide inducing tributes!

She certainly at least seem to have a great sense of humour, equating “Humanist” with that narcissistic misanthrope, followed by the killer line of said misanthrope who specialised in the most venomous ad hominem attacks, complaining about ad hominem attacks ! Ho ! Ho ! Ho !

Here’s something else to tickle her funny bone;
http://www.exiledonline.com/who-can-forget-christopher-hitchens-fake-waterboarding-stunt/

BTW Angrysoba, I agree with you about torture; what was the name of that souless journalist in one of the “respectable” papers, who wrote that it would be ok to torture the children of terrorists, for the greater good ?

Macky:
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I have no interest in George Galloway’s gloating over Hitchens’ carcass.
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The man did, by the way, say that Saddam Hussein and Nasser would live in history long after “the dogs” Bush and Blair would be forgotten.
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Now, I don’t have to like Bush and Blair to know that Galloway had praised the guy that you spent a lot of time finding evidence that he didn’t like.
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Why, if Galloway hated Saddam Hussein, would he appear to praise him here?
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooXE6EKfgzY
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Probably of no interest to you, of course. I understand. How “Zionist” of me.

Passerby,
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Boring as ever, you are.
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I have never called Desmond Tutu an anti-Semite.
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I called Mary an anti-Semite. She knows she is and doesn’t care that she is. Probably just like you. You are, after all, a well-known racist against black people and anyone else who doesn’t fit into your narrow WASPish viewpoint.
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I hope you hate me. I welcome your hatred. Now fuck off!

This must be my seventh (!) attempt to post this to the lady who apparently is in the undertaking business & is trying to increase her business by posting suicide inducing tributes!

She certainly at least seem to have a great sense of humour, equating “Humanist” with that narcissistic misanthrope, followed by the killer line of said misanthrope who specialised in the most venomous ad hominem attacks, complaining about ad hominem attacks ! Ho ! Ho ! Ho !

Well for something else to tickle her funny bone; type “christopher hicthens fake waterboarding” into google, and enjoy the first article.

BTW Angrysoba, I agree with you about torture; what was the name of that souless journalist in one of the “respectable” papers, who wrote that it would be ok to torture the children of terrorists, for the greater good ?

Anyway, happy Christmas, you arseholes!
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooXE6EKfgzY

And listen to this if you haven’t clicked on. Ye bastardS!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K3zMupWtmM

Fucking stupid English idiots.
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Go, fuck off!
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT0yoo9B2Bc&feature=related

Of course, I am just joking. I am half-English myself so I don’t want English people to “fuck off”. Although, I do enjoy the rebel songs.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gxQaKYFx-4&feature=related

Oan yersel, angry!
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y

High-Fivers and Art Student Spies
What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?

By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM
http://www.counterpunch.org/ketcham03072007.html
On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, an FBI bulletin known as a BOLO – “be on lookout” — was issued with regard to three suspicious men who that morning were seen leaving the New Jersey waterfront minutes after the first plane hit World Trade Center 1. Law enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area were warned in the radio dispatch to watch for a
“vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack”:
White, 2000 Chevrolet van with ‘Urban Moving Systems’ sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold for prints and detain individuals.

At 3:56 p.m., twenty-five minutes after the issuance of the FBI BOLO, officers with the East Rutherford Police Department stopped the commercial moving van through a trace on the plates. According to the police report, Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli approached the stopped van, demanding that the driver exit the vehicle. The driver, 23-year-old Sivan
Kurzberg, refused and “was asked several more times [but] appeared to be fumbling with a black leather fanny pouch type of bag”. With guns drawn, the police then “physically removed” Kurzberg, while four other men – two more men had apparently joined the group since the morning – were also removed from the van, handcuffed, placed on the grass median and read their Miranda rights.

They had not been told the reasons for their arrest. Yet, according to DeCarlo’s report, “this officer was told without question by the driver [Sivan Kurzberg],’We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.’” Another of the five Israelis, again without prompting, told Officer DeCarlo – falsely – that “we were on the West Side Highway in New York City during the incident”. From inside the vehicle the officers, who were quickly joined by agents from the FBI, retrieved multiple passports and $4,700 in cash stuffed in a
sock. According to New Jersey’s Bergen Record, which on September 12 reported the arrest of the five Israelis, an investigator high up in the Bergen County law enforcement hierarchy stated that officers had also discovered in the vehicle “maps of the city with certain places highlighted. It looked like they’re hooked in with this”, the source told
the Record, referring to the 9/11 attacks. “It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park.”

The five men were indeed Israeli citizens. They claimed to be in the country working as movers for Urban Moving Systems Inc., which maintained a warehouse and office in Weehawken, New Jersey. They were held for 71 days in a federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York, during which time they were repeatedly interrogated by FBI and CIA counterterrorism
teams, who referred to the men as the “high-fivers” for their celebratory behavior on the New Jersey waterfront. Some were placed in solitary confinement for at least forty days; some were given as many as seven lie detector tests. One of the Israelis, Paul Kurzberg, brother of Sivan, refused to take a lie-detector test for ten weeks. Then he failed it.

Meanwhile, two days after the men were picked up, the owner of Urban Moving Systems, Dominik Suter, a 31- year-old Israeli national, abandoned his business and fled the United States for Israel. Suter’s departure was abrupt, leaving behind coffee cups, sandwiches, cell phones and computers strewn on office tables and thousands of dollars of goods in storage.

Suter was later placed on the same FBI suspect list as 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and other hijackers and suspected al Qaeda sympathizers, suggesting that U.S. authorities felt Suter may have known something about the attacks. The suspicion, as the investigation unfolded, was that the men working for Urban Moving Systems were spies. Who exactly was handling them, and who or what they were targeting, was as yet uncertain.
It was New York’s venerable Jewish weekly The Forward that broke this story in the spring of 2002, after months of footwork. The Forward reported that the FBI had finally concluded that at least two of the men were agents working for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and that Urban Moving Systems, the ostensible employer of the five Israelis,
was a front operation. Two former CIA officers confirmed this to me,noting that movers’ vans are a common intelligence cover. The Forward also noted that the Israeli government itself admitted that the men were spies.
…. at the end of November 2001, for reasons that only noted they had been working in the country illegally as movers, in violation of their visas, the men were flown home to Israel.

An Iswaili failing a lie detector test! Whatever next?

Sounds as if Angry has burst his boiler or else has had too much sake.

No Mary, I think he just got to the end of his 6 pack.
Odd that Hitchens’ death brought so many out of the woodwork.
I’d had no idea he was a zionist.
If this had been a game of tennis , it would’ve been a cracker.
Death is a tragedy for those left behind,but an opportunity for the deceased.
He gets the chance to be better in the next life as do we all.

Anti-semites are the worst criminals in the universe and need more punishment than just a smack in the face! In the 115 AD Hebrew rebellion, as historian Dio Cassio informs us:
“…the Jews in the region of Cyrene were destroying both the Romans and the Greeks. They would cook their flesh, make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood, and wear their skins for clothing. Many they sawed in
two, from the head downwards. Others they would give to wild beasts and force still others to fight as gladiators. In all, consequently, two hundred and twenty thousand perished.”

It’s the only language the goyim understand! Happy Hannukah.

The Israeli’s are kicking 30,000 bedouin out of the Negev. Anti Semitism is a crime. The Bedouin deserve to be allowed to wander where they always have.

“There comes a point where what some people say just becomes self- discrediting and requires no further comment”

Overdosed on horlicks the ziofuckwit has turned to a regular rampaging antisemitefinder pursuivant.
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Has Angry over-imbibed?..lol
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No worries fella,it happens to us all at times.
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Peace.

Sorry but I can’t resist: Angrysoba but positively bonkers drunk.

The five dancing Israelis really danced as all Israelis do when they are happy. While analysing the foxed comments of sobbing angry it has become clear to me that he must have been one of them. How else could he have known that the story, or whatever he said, had “holes”? And wait, Stephen was most likely another one of the five clowns. Can these two be by any chance arrested to stop their danse macabre? Craig may know who they are and his contacts may help.

@Angrysoba, firstly I’m going to put down all your posts of today, were due to you having a breakdown, or being high, or intoxicated, or all three, and therefore best ignored.

Now that I’ve just finished scanning the declassified docs, the “Dancing Israelis” !; Firstly, I stress that I of course don’t know anything for certain; I’m groping for answers, just like everybody else. The key thing is that explanations/events/whatever, must al least be rationally credible: for a long time the “Dancing Israelis” were dismissed out of hand by those branding everybody who question the official story as Conspiracy Nuts, the Dancing Israelis being just a fabricated modern urban myth, but since the release of official FBI & Police reports, they can no longer brush this off , so they are forced, as like the Truthers, to closely examined the details.

Re the video camera question; why did I say it had been set-up? Because I recalled reading that the New York Times had first reported that “officials said the men had apparently set up cameras near the Hudson River and fixed them on the World Trade Center”. There were of course other similar reports, such as;
“Israeli Foreign Ministry informed by their Consulate in New York, that the 5 Israelis had been arrested for “puzzling behaviour”, having been caught video-taping the disaster, and shouting as to what was believed to be cries of joy and mockery.” & “Article in Tel Aviz newspaper (in Hebrew) reports that the five had gone up to the roof and started videoing the scene, telling “macabre jokes”

Why did I say that it appears that it was set up in advance ? Because they were spotted by witnesses who stated that they were filming within only five minutes of the first plane impacting; so allowing for hearing/seeing the impact, getting onto the roof, preparing & getting all their cameras operational, all within just five minutes seems pretty superhuman to me.

Why did I say that it seemed like a professional camera ? Well the aforementioned NYT report stated that cameras had been set-up, implying to my mind tripods etc; however now reading the declassified Police/FBI docs, according to one witness it was “Small dark coloured, with a pop-out screen that displayed the image coming through the lens”, which for 2001 seems quite an expensive bit of gear to me, but I may be wrong on that being as good as professional gear.

Although no video camera was eventually found, because of the strong witness statements (I think three people in total), Maria & these two;
“believes it was a video recording device rather than a camera, it was been moved slowly from side to side, as if panning the area”
“Small dark coloured, with a pop-out screen that displayed the image coming through the lens, held up the camera up high continuously for a few minutes, moved it around, panning the view.”
The FBI had to marked this video matter as “remains unsolved”

I think most people reading through these reports will conclude that the Urban Removals Company was just a front for Israeli spies to operate from, as the reports are full of phrases like “Oddly, equipment typically used in a moving company’s daily duty was not found”, ““remarkably clean for a moving truck”, “he “didn’t look like he would work as a Mover”.

However, unless something changes, we may not live long enough to know all the details as the 134 redacted/deleted pages are due to be declassified no sooner than 2035 !

“There comes a point where what some people say just becomes self- discrediting and requires no further comment”

Welcome back Stephen, I like the new name, your Idol (or should I say God now that he has been deified) would be flattered; funny how all these Hicthens quotes are penetrating self observations; like the ones quoted earlier “‘I always think it’s a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem”, a killingly funny line from a bitter misanthrope who was a real specialist in the most venomous of ad hominem attacks. Nearly as funny as this said narcissistic misanthrope being lauded as a “Humanist” by the The British Humanist Association ! Ho ! Ho! Ho !

(Did the BHA have any credibility worth losing anyway ?)

“There comes a point where what some people say just becomes self- discrediting and requires no further comment”

Welcome back Stephen, I like the new name, your Idol (or should I say God now that he has been deified) would be flattered; funny how all these Hicthens quotes, like the ad hominem one before from Barbara, are such accurate penetrating self observations.

Not only 9/11…there was the Oct 10, 2001 arrest of Gersson Smike and Ben Zui, two Mossad agents, inside the Palace of Congress in Mexico City. They were armed with 9 mm Glock pistols and carried a briefcase full of plastic explosive, sufficient to incinerate the building. On October 09,
2001, the two suspects took pictures inside the congress. They told security guards they were photographers. The next day
they were caught inside the Congress with the briefcase containing the bomb making material. The bombing probably would have been on Columbus Day, October 12, for max symbolism. On October 11, all Mexican media reported the story. But then, all media coverage was blanked!! Up north in the evil empire, eLie Weasel decreed the event never happened. Shortly afterwards, the two agents were deported….to Iswail. As it happened,
9/11 was enough to launch the Israelimerican War On Humans.

OH NO, Britain New year’s resolution is Military action in Somalia!
Mr cokehead has new vision, Somalia ” a failed state” !
of course Somlia’s iron ore, tin, gypsum, bauxite, copper, natural gas and of course OIL has nothing to do with this new military adventure?
There is a better way, we can send them from here: hard drugs, alcohol and STD (cheaper and what we can spare plenty)
MR C, don’t go anywhere where your butt will get kicked..remember dead marines and the streets of Mogadishu?

Is there no moderator any longer? we get advert for all kind of rubbish including sex calls here!

Azra,
Another trick of the ziofuckwits is, pretending to be “robots” of a different kind, not their regular cut and paste kind engaged in the defence of the shitty strip of land and all those who sail in her.
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These weird bots that target the threads, are intending to terminate it, and induce those commenting to leave the thread, so the keyboard war can be fighting somewhere else. The keyboard warriors are too thinly spread hence the tactic.
,
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Back to the topic: There are no dangers facing the West. 9/11 was a put up job to start wars of choice based on the crap passed as “defence of the realm”, that became to be the blue print for the “project for the new American century”. Therefore angrosob, and the rest of the ziobots for certain cannot let the light of truth to shine on the serial murder of the Americans, on the US soil, for the sake of “defending their realm”

Yes, I have noticed that some of the Threads here are snuffed out with a lof of apparent spamming, strange how the spam quite suddenly gets through the Spam Filter; it did cross my mind also, that Angrysoba strange breakdown/funny turn might be another derailing tactic…

I forgot to address a couple of points;

“Apparently you are also suspicious of the fact that the removal company had more than one van and that these vans were seen driving around in the vicinity of the removals firm. (?)”

No, I am suspicious that when questioned the Urban Removal backroom staff expressed surprise and bewilderment that their vans were in New York on the 11th September, as they should have been on another job in a different part of the country; the significance of being more than one van is that maybe not all the people were rounded up, thus explaining why the video camera was never found.

.
“And “there was a lot of anti-american sentiment present”. …oh, gosh!”

Well I’m sorry for being surprised that Israelis of all people, having an apparent hatred of the US; you wouldn’t be surprised if it was a group of AQ terrorists, but not the citizens of the most pampered country of the US; can the explanation be that these people were so hard, fanatical right wingers, that they perceived that the US should be doing more to them destroy their enemies, and were angry at this “failure” of the US ?

Another thing that I forgot to mention, is that when asked to account for their apparent joyful high spirits as they watched the attacks on the WTC, from more than one of them, and more than once, the explanation was given that they were pleased that now at least America will realise and sympathise even more with Israel; yet they were celebrating within minutes of the first plane striking, when nobody knew it was a political/terrorist attack, and it was still being reported on the news wires as an accident right up to the second plane impacting.

A X-Mas Prezzie for the Hitch fan club:

Atheist Found Dead in Fox Hole

Hitchens vs. Higher Power?

by NORMAN FINKELSTEIN

Even some of the critical commentary on Hitchens’s passing pays tribute to his atheism, which no doubt shocked readers of Vanity Fair.

But the ultimate irony seems to have gone over everyone’s head.

When I first learned that Hitchens was diagnosed with an excruciating and terminal cancer, it caused me to doubt my atheism.

Could it be merely chance?

The news came just as Hitchens was about to go on a book tour for his memoir.

It was as if he was setting out on his victory lap when the adulating crowds were supposed to fawn over him and—wham!—his legs were lopped off at the kneecaps.

Could it be the hidden hand of a Jehovah?

If I still had doubts, the events of the past week dispelled them.

First Hitchens passed.

If that wasn’t burden enough to bear, the next day Vaclav Havel imploded.

The deep thinkers among us were now beside themselves with grief.

But then, on the third day, Kim Jong-il kicked the bucket.

Was this a practical joke, and who was the joker?

Biblical scholars report that divine interventions usually come in threes.

Moe, Larry, Curly.

Christopher, Vaclav, Kim.

I cannot help but see in this otherwise improbable sequence a divine intelligence at play.

The irony could not be more perfect: the god that the vindictive but witty Mr. Hitchens made a career scoffing at turns out to be…vindictive but witty.

But I will leave the last word to a close buddy of Hitchens’ who is himself a true believer.

When Saddam Hussein was executed, Tony Blair remarked: “I do not believe in capital punishment, but I think the world is a better place without him.”

When I heard that Hitchens was dead, I took a deep breath.

The air felt cleaner, as if after a 40-day and 40-night downpour.

***

I get no satisfaction from Hitchens’s passing.

Although he was the last to know it, every death is a tragedy, if only for the bereft child—or, as in the case of Cindy Sheehan, bereft parent—left behind.

But, still, life is full of surprises.

No one should be too smug in his certitudes.

And if you’ve made a career of pissing on other people’s mostly innocuous beliefs, should it surprise that outside the tiny tent called Vanity Fair, your memory stinks of urine?

Latest Private Eye has the alkie blowhard down as ‘The Hic’. Arf.

@Angrysoba, firstly I’m going to put down all your posts of today, were due to you having a breakdown, or being high, or intoxicated, or all three, and therefore best ignored.
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I was pissed to the gills. And Mary was in fact correct that sake was one of the culprits as I was drinking hot and cold sake with a group of engineers I teach. That on top of Asahi lager, black beer and later I made it to an Irish bar (hence the musical choice) where I drank red wine, Yebisu beer and maybe some Irish whisky.
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Now that I’ve just finished scanning the declassified docs, the “Dancing Israelis” !; Firstly, I stress that I of course don’t know anything for certain; I’m groping for answers, just like everybody else. The key thing is that explanations/events/whatever, must al least be rationally credible: for a long time the “Dancing Israelis” were dismissed out of hand by those branding everybody who question the official story as Conspiracy Nuts, the Dancing Israelis being just a fabricated modern urban myth, but since the release of official FBI & Police reports, they can no longer brush this off , so they are forced, as like the Truthers, to closely examined the details.
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I’m with you on that. There was more “substance” to the story than I had initially thought.
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Re the video camera question; why did I say it had been set-up? Because I recalled reading that the New York Times had first reported that “officials said the men had apparently set up cameras near the Hudson River and fixed them on the World Trade Center”.
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Yes, I found the original New York Times article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/13/us/after-the-attacks-the-investigation-bin-laden-tie-cited.html?pagewanted=all
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But just to take your “rationally credible” criterion, let’s look at the article as a whole and not pick a la carte from it. It is quite clear that what you might call the “official story” is the one that seems most convincing to the NYT reporters and given that we are inherently distrustful of MSM we have to apply the customary heap of salt to any “officials say…” pronouncements. In particular, who is the source for saying that the cameras were set up? We now know from the FBI records that no video camera was found and instead we have some conflicting reports of a possible small video camera with a screen that pops out on the side. Maybe this is true but it seems we have NO witnesses saying that video cameras were set up IN ADVANCE. Further, it seems to the credit of the FBI that they spent more than two months interrogating these guys and doing extensive searches for the video camera but found nothing and knew of no one who had seen a video camera. I think to apply the rational criteria we could say that the witness who thought she saw a video camera may have been mistaken. It is definitely true, for example, that the camera they were found with had a digital screen and it also has one of those flip-up thingies on the top of the camera. (Flip-up thingy being a technical term).

There were of course other similar reports, such as;
“Israeli Foreign Ministry informed by their Consulate in New York, that the 5 Israelis had been arrested for “puzzling behaviour”, having been caught video-taping the disaster, and shouting as to what was believed to be cries of joy and mockery.” & “Article in Tel Aviz newspaper (in Hebrew) reports that the five had gone up to the roof and started videoing the scene, telling “macabre jokes”
Why did I say that it appears that it was set up in advance ? Because they were spotted by witnesses who stated that they were filming within only five minutes of the first plane impacting; so allowing for hearing/seeing the impact, getting onto the roof, preparing & getting all their cameras operational, all within just five minutes seems pretty superhuman to me.
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Yes, but doesn’t that suggest that there was much “setting up” to do? It sounds as if they were only using a hand-held device whether it was a regular camera or a video camera. Nobody, as far as I can see, is reported to have said they were using a TV camera or a tripod-mounted camera.
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Why did I say that it seemed like a professional camera ? Well the aforementioned NYT report stated that cameras had been set-up, implying to my mind tripods etc; however now reading the declassified Police/FBI docs, according to one witness it was “Small dark coloured, with a pop-out screen that displayed the image coming through the lens”, which for 2001 seems quite an expensive bit of gear to me, but I may be wrong on that being as good as professional gear.
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I think there is no witness statement about tripods etc…
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Although no video camera was eventually found, because of the strong witness statements (I think three people in total), Maria & these two;
“believes it was a video recording device rather than a camera, it was been moved slowly from side to side, as if panning the area”
“Small dark coloured, with a pop-out screen that displayed the image coming through the lens, held up the camera up high continuously for a few minutes, moved it around, panning the view.”
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Maybe, I’ll have to read through them again carefully. Anyway, their behaviour was certainly suspicious enough for someone to call the police.
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The FBI had to marked this video matter as “remains unsolved”
I think most people reading through these reports will conclude that the Urban Removals Company was just a front for Israeli spies to operate from, as the reports are full of phrases like “Oddly, equipment typically used in a moving company’s daily duty was not found”, ““remarkably clean for a moving truck”, “he “didn’t look like he would work as a Mover”.
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Well, like I said, I accept that there is slightly more “substance” to the story. Although it should be pointed out that the FBI themselves seemed satisfied that they were not complicit in the attacks. It is interesting that these same Israelis also filed a lawsuit against the officers who interrogated them, claiming that they had been tortured and physically assaulted. It does indeed seem odd behaviour if they were part of the attacks to open up that line of inquiry again. I’m just saying that from what I think is a rational point of view. Wouldn’t you agree?
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However, unless something changes, we may not live long enough to know all the details as the 134 redacted/deleted pages are due to be declassified no sooner than 2035 !
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Unless you are saying that there could be nuclear war between now and then I do expect to be alive in 2035 as I’m 34 now. Of course, too many nights like the other night could shorten the odds.

I meant “whiskey”. D’oh!

In vino veritas. Glad you’ve Soba’d up now, anyway, I was concerned for you back there

BTW Angrysoba, I agree with you about torture; what was the name of that souless journalist in one of the “respectable” papers, who wrote that it would be ok to torture the children of terrorists, for the greater good ?

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Bruce Anderson.
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A lot of Hitchens’ fans try to point out that Hitchens was against torture and they hold up his “waterboarding” antics as exhibit A. In fact, it the article is a perfect example of something that shows Hitchens was NOT anti-torture as charity dicatates that anyone who hadn’t expressed an opinion on waterboarding publicly would still be against it. Apparently Hitchens wasn’t sure until as late as 2007 or 2008 or whatever it was. That’s absurd. How could he not know?

Welcome back Angrysoba…our fste,perhaps,is too realise that sometimes this little crucible,for whatever it’s faults,is some kinda place.We’re not the worst in the world,really.
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Peace unto you and yours.

Hey Angrysoba: I have to say that it’s good to see you back, I’ve read this entire thread and you’re to be commended for remaining civil – not sure I could tolerate being damned as a “ziofuckbot” or whatever with such good grace for such an extended period. I would probably told them to [expletive deleted] long before your patience wore out.
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However, it was as inaccurate for you to declare the whole ix/xi suspicions as having been “debunked” on the dedicated thread here, as it was just plain risible for Stephen to say Iraq “slipped into war”, as if it was Iraq’s silly fault in failing to keep it’s eye on the ball somehow, and our invasion/ occupation just being an inevitable consequence they – darn, shucks – caused to happen.
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That aside, you’re completely right on the torture front – how could Hitchens not know that torture will produce immediate compliance, and tell the inquisitor everything he simply wants to hear? After all, the techniques used by the American inquisitors (including the water-torture) were derived from a 1950′s torture manual from the Chinese which explicitly stated an aim of producing _false_ confessions. How could Hitchens fails to know such basic facts, and use an assumption of ignorance of same in the audience/interviewee without employing intellectual dishonesty?
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Willful ignorance is bad enough, intellectual dishonesty is abusing a gift not granted to many, in pursuit of an evil outcome. Stephen does this. Most of our “leaders” and their apologists do this. Hitchens did this far better than most, and for that I cannot forgive him, any more than I could refer to the doubtless many good sides of any given monster.

Glenn, thanks for the kind words.
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In fact, Hitchens even had the waterboarding techniques used on him by the SERE team whose ostensible purpose is to train US military personnel how to survive, evade, resist, escape (I think) torture. It is predicated on the idea that waterboarding is torture which is why they train people in its use. You know, so that they can learn to survive it or resist it.
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Having said that I doubt it is so refined that it can only be used to extract false confessions. I am pretty sure that true confessions can be extracted too. The difficulty is in knowing which is which. For example, if someone is demanding, “Where’s the money?” and is periodically smothering his client with a wet rag, he may discover the whereabouts of said cash. Of course, if his client is repeatedly told, “Confess! You like to wear ladies underwear. Say it!” then you could also force a false confession. The difference is that some admissions are demonstrable and some are not.

Macky,
You damn fine well know Norman Finkelstein is a self hater, and he hates himself so bad, and stuff!!!!!!!!!!!! In fact the arch ziofuckwit Alan Dershowitz, made sure poor Norman got kicked out of his Job, for his troubles.
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The admission to overdosing on horlicks somehow does not help the case of the five dancing Iswaily caught on 9/11. The facts remain; West is not facing any dangers, and 9/11 was a put up job, that was accomplished with the aid of the Iswaily security companies “guarding” the three airports, and WTC, not forgetting the “odigo” text messages clearly indicating thus.

Angrysoba, were you trying to do a Charles Bukowski or a Tom Waites? Sounds like a fun night! Play it just more time, as the dawn creeps over the hill…

From Dianna Moylan:
My abiding memory of Christopher Hitchens was a debate he had with Tony Blair. His argument was masterful and he made a clever and experienced debater look rather silly. I was delighted with his wit, power of expression and reason. I have no right to feel a personal loss, but I do.

Letter to the National Secular Society

From Abdul the young son of a dead Iraqi Father;
Chris. Hitchens was an animal, and an opportunist wanker, who only thought about getting his next pay cheque to buy more booze. It mattered very little to this lowlife how many souls were killed, and maimed and how much damage was done to the environment? For Chris Hitchens was on a mission to enable the warmongers to get on with their war, so that he could buy his booze.
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As per Nuremberg Principles Chris Hitchens is a war criminal, as well as those other bastards who along with him did sell the Iraq, and Afghanistan wars, and ought to expect the same treatment.
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The letter could not be posted because of the on going Iraq war.
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Now we have fundamentalist militant secularist strutting their stuff, such is Zeitgeist

I’m sure all those upset at Craig’s posts are of dawkinista ilk, they hate their heroes being bad mouthed.

Jimmy Hoots: Clearly, then, you did not bother making any effort at acquaintance with the posts and posters, before making such a conclusion. Are you fond of saying “I’m sure” before uttering demonstrable untruths?

“It does indeed seem odd behaviour if they were part of the attacks to open up that line of inquiry again. I’m just saying that from what I think is a rational point of view. Wouldn’t you agree?”

One word, “chutzpah”.

Quite predictably, a thread on Hitchens quickly devolves into blaming the Jews for 911. Morons.

…”Morons”. Ah yes, we recognize the traditional, measured, adult, tasteful zionist response when challenged by reality.
Call any Jew a moron, criminal or liar, and OMG you are
Aunty Seemite!!