UPDATE In response to the outraged, my position is simple. The Iraq War killed hundreds of thousands and maimed millions. Dead or wounded included over a million children. 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.
The world will undoubtedly be a duller place without Christopher Hitchens. Oh, and a better one too.
British journalism is full of people of the same generationwho have lurched from the Trotskyist far left to a crazed neo-con agenda with no intervening period of sanity. I suspect the available riches for zionist propagandists are a major factor. Hitchens, Aaronovitch, Phillips, Cohen. You can probably think of others. A strange and extremely unpleasant manifestation of intellectual prostitution.
Stephen,
I am pretty sure I said plenty of rude things about Hitchens while he was still alive.
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”.
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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.