20 February 2009

BEIRUT: Dozens of audience members rushed to the podium after Christopher Hitchens, the prolific writer, professor, cultural critic and provocateur par excellence, finished his lecture at the American University of Beirut Wednesday night. Some asked Hitchens to autograph copies of his 2007 book "God Is Not Great," a group of visiting American students thanked him for the experience, and a member of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (SSNP) presented the "anti-theist" and ardently anti-Baathist speaker with a memento.

The gift was simple - a poster with a picture of Hitchens in what appeared to be a position of supplication. "Hitchens, supporter of US Terrorism" the poster read. At the top there was a handwritten note: "You are a Fascist."

Hitchens, a controversial Anglo-American intellectual and renowned wit, has been heavily criticized by many on the left for his unflagging support of the US-led invasion of Iraq, which was seen as a defection of sorts.

Although he was questioned heavily about his stance on Iraq, Hitchens' AUB lecture was focused more broadly on the social currents in the region. Titled "Who are the revolutionaries in today's Middle East?", the lecture, which quickly derouled into a speaker-led discussion, dealt less with answering this question than expanding it. Indeed, at times, the question appeared almost rhetorical - an excuse for spirited exchanges on the ethos and morality of American interventionism, Iranian theocracy, religiously motivated sub-state actors and the state of Israel.

As he defended America's power of "emancipation," Hitchens also posited a geopolitical framework based on opposition between "radicals" and "reactionaries."

Hitchens said he was disturbed by the New York Times regular label of Iraqi Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr as a "radical Shiite cleric." "Sadr," he argued, "is a reactionary."

"Radical to me is still a word worth preserving," he said, with a hint of pride (He had smiled earlier when he was introduced as "an unaffiliated radical.") Hitchens' working definition of the word appeared to be "someone interested in changing the world, raising the standard of humanity."

When pressed, Hitchens did name a few radicals and revolutionaries in the region. "Walid Jumblatt [the powerful Druze leader of the Progressive Socialist Party] is a revolutionary," he said, to the audible surprise of many in the audience. "Students who defy [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad" are revolutionaries, he added, as are the Kurdish nationalists in northern Iraq - who Hitchens painted as a Middle Eastern phoenix rising from the ashes of Saddam's chemical weapons attacks.

Many in attendance seemed more interested in challenging Hitchens on Iraq and the treatment of the Palestinians than in speaking about revolutionary forces in the region. He warned curious and combative audience members, between boastful asides, that "evenhandedness and moral equivalence ... are the same thing sometimes."

During the lively Q and A, Hitchens defended the Bush administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq as a just action against a crime family intent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction. A self-labeled former Trotskyite, Hitchens offered a double-edged hats off to the region's left saying: "It is only those who were vanquished by the US in the Cold war who understand [America's] power of emancipation in the post-Cold War."

He argued that the US did what the UN and the Arab League had proved incapable of doing: disarming Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime. The human costs of "Operation Iraqi Freedom," he contended, were less than if Hussein had been left in power.

He also suggested that the invasion of Iraq was an effective means of deterrence, noting that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi handed over WMDs to the US after the invasion. In this vein, Hitchens said that "the Bush administration was the best for non-proliferation in history."

"Iraq can now be certified disarmed. The [UN] investigators could never have done that," he added.

Indeed, he argued, America's global contribution warranted "special consideration."

While lauding the capacity of American interventionism, he despaired at the growth of regional, particularly Palestinian, Islamist movements.

In the 1980s, Hitchens co-edited a volume, with Edward Said, called "Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question." In an essay in the volume, Hitchens focused on debunking the widely circulated story that Arab leaders had delivered radio broadcasts encouraging Palestinians to flee their homes in 1948.

Wednesday night, he said that the Palestinians' "struggle remains an essential one." But he derided the ideology and techniques of Hamas (what he called "suicide-murder") and other Islamist groups as "a terrible fate for Palestinian nationalism."

Unsurprisingly, Hitchens reserved a special disdain for theocratic governments and the groups they support. He referred, more than once, to the Iranian leadership as "scrofulous." And of Hizbullah he said, "Those who say they are the party of God must be wrong," adding later that "religion cannot define a nationality."

After the lecture, Hitchens and the gift-bearer from the SSNP exchanged a few words. "Don't waste your life ... Don't be a slave to Syria," he told the young party supporter. On Valentine's Day, Hitchens had a very physical run-in with members of the SSNP in Hamra, which left him with some gashes and bruises.

On the car ride back to his hotel, he told The Daily Star that he had been surprised by two things during the lecture. First, that the audience had "no love for Walid," and second, that audience had applauded when he called the Koran, and by extension other religious books, manmade.

When asked, again, to name revolutionaries in Lebanon other than Jumblatt, Hitchens spoke of the prohibitive nature of confessionalism, "even for those who don't believe in it." 

"What about the Bill of Rights?" he said, as a non-partisan curb on sectarianism.

He also spoke pessimistically about the peace process. "American-brokered peace talks are in the past," he said, but added that the two state solution remains the best of all available options.

The conversation continued at The Bristol Hotel where Hitchens expanded on the idea that the threat of Islamism and theocracy extend beyond the region. "We will defeat it or it will kill us," he said of the mentality of those groups who "take their quarrels to buses in London."

He also elaborated on his vision of the growing and increasingly endemic threat of domestic Islamism in the West. "I think it's happened in my lifetime ... there's someone who's pulled up a chair uninvited," he said, in reference to a tacit cultural veto, rooted in faith, that Islamic groups hold in the US, France and the UK.

Likewise, Hitchens warned of the dangerous precedent set by making special legal allowances and concessions to Muslims in Western Europe, and particularly in the US.

"That it's a religious exception is what makes it worse," he said. "It's precisely because it's religion that it's not accepted by the constitution."

Copyright The Daily Star 2009.