I'm sure fellow Hitchwatchers may beat me to this but I just wanted to make a brief comment about two recent Hitchens articles that manage to say sweet f*k all about very important subjects. The first is his piece at Slate What Happened to the Suicide Bombers of Jerusalem?
In this piece he meanders through a number of questions and vague supposition about why the number of suicide attacks have reduced. The first seems to be a mild refutation that despair could be a cause for bombing because, as even our neo Chris admits, the Palestinians still have a lot to despair about. he then looks into the huge and growing wall as a preventer of attacks. With a somewhat snide comment that true suicide bombers should throw themselves against the wall or checkpoints if they can't get any further.
"If despair is your feeling, then nothing can stop you from blowing yourself up against the wall as a last gesture against Israeli colonial architecture. If despair dominates your psyche, then targeted assassinations of others are not going to stop you from donning the shroud and the belt and aiming yourself at paradise, even if only at a roadblock. "
So after some obligatory and totally obvious comments about the horror of throwing children and dishonoured young women away as human vendettas, what does our Christopher conclude?
Well (cricket churps...) nothing really. There is no insight into why at this point in time the bombing have stopped. No mention of changes in US or any other countries policy towards Israel and Palestine. Just silence.
This brings me to his second piece in the Atlantic The Persian Version. Given what's happening in Iran at the moment you would think this would give Chris more than a few soap box moments but unusually he plays it as a fairly straight set of book reviews. I really only reference this one because he touches in passing on one of my favourite pieces of literature from this region. Persepolis. Persepolis is a WONDERFUL graphic novel by a young Iranian woman that discusses growing up in Iran during the time of the over throw of the Shah, moves into exile in Europe and back to Iran.
"In smart and confident strokes she draws a history of the Khomeini revolution as seen by a girl who was nine when the old fanatic returned from exile. The whole chaotic world of parents and other adults, faced with crises that are wholly new and frightening to them, is affectionately and ironically caught by a girl who has a real talent for overhearing. Marxist relatives keep up false hopes that the people have not been fooled; Saddam Hussein’s planes disgorge bombs over the city; veils are imposed on small children; the Jewish neighbors get into a spot of bother; and, yes, a young friend is legally raped by a Revolutionary Guard before being shot. Most stark are the growing girl’s encounters with the komiteh, the brutish and depraved louts who are employed as the enforcers of morality and who take a special pleasure in the taunting and bullying of women. But there is low farce as well: the bastards who come looking for the homemade wine are actually seeking only a bribe, which becomes clear only after the precious fluid has been hastily poured away for nothing. "
He doesn't say much more about this book (which has recently been made into an award winning animated movie). I would like to have heard him talk about the issue of the burqua and Muslim immigration, both key issues in this work. The author Marjan Satrapi who has lived these issues does not support CH's reductionist approach to the subject. In her book she talks about having to wear the hijab under state pressure and the ways that young people rebelled, but she also talks strongly about the pressure to dress against her wishes while in Europe and how it was the misfits and social rejects who became allies rather than the "good" German burgers. In Iran the hijab was a horrible imposition but it was not the first thing or even high on the list of the freedoms they were looking for.
Hitchens finishes his article with the somewhat anodyne statement
"American readers have a special duty, in view of the distraught history between our two countries, to take an interest in this “asset.” Whatever the outcome of the current confrontation, we have the right and the duty of engagement with a people and a culture very much imbricated with our own. How agreeable to be able to report that this is also a tremendous pleasure. " Who would have guessed that axis of evil countries produce great art and love their children too.
Anyway I finish this by noting that in both pieces Hitchens manages to say nothing in a great many words, perhaps because in both areas he would have to admit that some of his earlier certainties were simplistic and shaped by his own prejudices.
Finally as an old queen in Australia used to say "do yourself a favour" and go read Persepolis.
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Coming to a tea party near you: Some music to stir the pot with
Here are two songs by Ron and Kay Rivoli of The Rivoli Revue in the finest Country & Western tradition. According to blurb on their YouTube channel:
A brand of music that is fun and entertaining - Ameriamobilly. Music about America, our love of travel, family, God and country. Unique and up beat the Rivoli Revue will make you smile with the story songs about life in general. Roads we have all walked or will walk one day. Come take a journey with the Rivoli Revue - Not just music - entertainment.
This one's for JQ, to let him know he's not the only one who thinks foreign languages should stay that way.
Press One for English
And here's one for Hitch, the Neocons, and all the other former-Trotskyist crypto-Stalinist pseudo-democratic eco-fascist anti-Islamic Christo-phobic pyrotechnic carpetbagging scum who didn't vote for Ross Perot when they had the chance to save the homeland, and who spend their evenings drinking chardonnay, conspiring together and laughing at ordinary Americans.
Comrade Rakhmetov's splendidly apt descriptive phase "the Preening Popinjay" may not yet have caught on outside of this blog, but others are beginning to notice and name the behavior that that gave rise to the observation. I was reading a post on Enduring America entitled Getting Iran (Loudly) Wrong: Posturing for Mr Ahmadinejad and Mr Hitchens, when I came across this little gem:
The silver lining in this cloud of promoting, posturing and preening analysis is that it's much easier to expose by going to the real “experts” in this story, the folks getting information out of Iran by any means necessary. So, farewell, “Rise and Rise of Ahmadinejad”. Bye bye, Christopher. Hello, new media.
The post in question is out to debunk two lines of thought: "The Rise and Rise of Ahmadinejad" and Hitch's linkage of "the Liberation of Iraq" to "the Liberation of Iran."
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Accusations apart, Kissinger actually had a sex life
Where Was Hitchens In The Early Seventies?, asks Robert Nedelkoff over at The New Nixon, in view of Hitch's recent statement that "At least nobody ever accused Nixon or Kissinger of having any sort of sex life while in office—the distinctly dank reek of the absence of same can be detected throughout the taped records." To quote Nedelkoff:
Well….liberal and radical (and, oftentimes, conservative) pundits and journalists accused Dr. Kissinger of all manner of things during his tenure as National Security Advisor. But an absence of libido was never among the charges leveled at the man who gave the world the maxim “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
To answer the question in this post’s title, at the time Dr. Kissinger was often photographed with ladies as notable as Barbara Walters, Gina Lollobrigida, Marlo Thomas, Candice Bergen, Samantha Eggar, and Jill St. John on his arm (before he remarried in 1973), Hitchens was working on the staff of the New Statesman. His duties there would likely have required him to examine English-language newspapers not only from London (where the Fleet Street press constantly ran photos of Kissinger with various lovelies) but all over the globe (including papers in which many more pictures could be found). It’s difficult to believe that Hitch’s eye never wandered away from the editorials and news articles to see the abundant visual evidence of Kissinger’s appeal to the opposite sex.
"The distinctly dank reek of the absence" — of sex in the office? So Clinton is damned if he does and Nixon and Kissinger are damned if they don't. Or is it that Hitch is getting his own rocks off so infrequently that he is forced to get his thrills by proxy in the form taking of an unsavary interest in the sex lives of the powerful?
These are just a few of the ladies with whom Henry has enjoyed intimate intercourse. But real statesmen never brag about such details as that would be undiplomatic.
While we're on the subject, please recall that Hitchens covered much the same ground back in his Anakin Skywalker period in the essay on Kissinger: Touch of Evil, which is captured for posterity in For the Sake of Argument. Here he quoted with approval Kissinger biographer Walter Isaacson's observation that "The dirty little secret about Kissinger's relationship with women was that there was no dirty little secret."
Remember the university in Iraq Christopher asked us to send books to? Well, I just worked for the same university – “AmericanUniversity of Iraq” – for two semesters. The place is a mess, largely because of shockingly horrible management. It would be dead if it weren’t being propped up by…whoever. The US government? Dr. Bahram Salih? Jalal Talabani? You see, nobody knows because there’s absolutely no transparency at AUIS. Because they’re in Iraq, one presumes, they think they can do whatever they want, ignoring traditional rules about good business practices and laws.
Simply because it’s so well-funded (and because they’re able to at least temporarily recruit teachers like me) the place is a bastion of hope for Iraqi students. However, they have chosen to squander this leadership position by putting hack administrators above teachers. I got into a fight with some administrators and was subsequently fired as a result at the end of the semester (to be honest, I had decided not to come back anyway, and sort of picked this fight, but still…). It didn’t matter that my students loved me and all gave me overwhelmingly positive course evaluations. The fact that I dared to speak out against the hierarchy got me fired. I then realized that these people are essentially Christian Fascists. Joshua Mitchell, the Chancellor, in condemning me, sent me a lecture of an email that was riddled with lines that were swiped from the Bible and intended to put me in place. For instance, he alleged that I was, “only too quick to point out the splinter in someone else's eye but not the beam in my own.”
All I can say now is that AUIS is a dangerous, Imperialistic outfit. It’s a place that promotes democracy and free speech but doesn’t actually practice those ideals. It’s another sinister neocon operation gone awry. I just feel bad for the students who have invested so much time and money into it. I truly hope AUIS doesn’t crash and burn, but if they keep going down this path, I don’t see how it can succeed as a real university.
Praising his man without a single damning adjective, Hitch gets excited that Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani — who has proclaimed that Hitler's first goal was to save Europe from the evil of Zionism and salivated over the prospect of Islamic nuclear weapons — is an emerging challenger to Khamenei.
It's amazing that on the subject of who should be running Iran, a committed anti-"Islamofascist", anti-Nazi, anti-anti-Semite and anti-theist such as our Christopher seems to be rooting for noneother than Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani — an ayatollah who studied theology under Rouhollah Mousavi Khomeini and remained his close follower and aide until the latter's death and an insider who has been at the heart of Iran's Islamic political system ever since its inception.
After the Islamic revolution, Rafsanjani served as Speaker of the Majlis from 1980 to 1989 and President of the Islamic Republic from 1989 to 1997.Since 2002, he has been the Chairman of the Expediency Council that arbitrates and resolves legislative disputes and issues between the Majlis and the Council of Guardians and advises the supreme leader on matters of national policy.
Our contrarian friend has long been hypersensitive to what some would call the "anti-Semitic ravings" of President Ahmadinejad, who had the temerity to host a conference to examine the truth about the events underpinning and surrounding the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis. For Hitch, Ahmadinejad's stance on "the Holocaust" is sufficient reason to exclude him from serious consideration as a national leader. Bearing this in mind, one would expect Hitch to be keeping an equally broad distance from Rafsanjani, who has been quoted as saying:
Europe resolved a great problem – the problem of the Zionist danger. The Zionists, who constituted a strong political party in Europe, caused much disorder there. Since they had a lot of property and controlled an empire of propaganda, they made the European governments helpless. What Hitler and the German Nazis did to the Jews of Europe at that time was partly due to these circumstances with the Jews. They wanted to expel the Zionists from Europe because they always were a pain in the neck for the governments there. This is how this calamity fell upon the Muslims, especially the Palestinians, and you all know this history, more or less.[...]The first goal was to save Europe from the evil of Zionism, and in this, they have been relatively successful.
On the nuclear weapons issue, Wikipedia has two corkers from Rafsanjani on record:
If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists' strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.
And:
Look, as long as we can enrich uranium and master the fuel cycle, we don’t need anything else. Our neighbors will be able to draw the proper conclusions.
Now that you've heard a little bit about Rafsanjani's darker side, read the opening paragraph of our lad's latest Slate piece, and decide for yourself whether Hitch is barking mad or just barking up the wrong tree:
The most exciting and underreported news of the past few weeks in Iran has been that the emerging challenger to the increasingly frantic and isolated "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. And Rafsanjani has recently made a visit to the city of Najaf in Iraq to confer with Ayatollah Ali Husaini Sistani, a long-standing opponent of the Khamenei doctrines, as well as meeting in the city of Qum with Jawad al-Shahristani, who is Sistani's representative in Iran. It is this dialectic between Iraqi and Iranian Shiites that underlies the flabbergasting statement issued from Qum last weekend to the effect that the Ahmadinejad government has no claim to be the representative of the Iranian people.
So what we have here is various members of the Shiite clergy in Iran and Iraq jostling for power and networking among themselves and Hitchens is wetting his pants over the prospects this holds out for regime change we can believe in. But in order to sustain this fantasy in the reader's mind, he has to take care to write an entire article about Rafsanjani against the mullahs without mentioning the fact that Rafsanjani is himself a mullah or that Ahmadinejad isn't.
A rather more realistic view of events in Iran is given by M.K. Bhadrakumar, a retired career diplomat who worked in the Indian Foreign Service. He has been trying to tease out what's been going on in Iran, and he sees the recent election as a contest between two sets of establishment forces, led by Khamenei and Rafsanjani respectively. Moreover, he argues that the Khamenei side won hands down.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei won a resounding victory. The grey cardinal of Iranian politics, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, has been dealt a crushing defeat. Is the curtain finally ringing down on the tumultuous career of the “Shark”, a nickname Rafsanjani acquired in the vicious well of the Iranian Majlis (parliament) where he used to swim dangerously as a political predator in the early years of the Iranian Revolution as the Speaker?
By the huge margin (64 per cent) with which President Mahmud Ahmedinejad won, it is tempting to say that like the great white sperm whale of immense, premeditated ferocity and stamina in Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby Dick, Rafsanjani is going down, deeply wounded by the harpoon, into the cold oblivion of the sea of Iranian politics. But you can never quite tell.
Bhadrakumar also makes clear that, regardless of how the story has been sold to us in the West, the reality is that this has been a struggle between entrenched special interests within Iran.
If we are to leave out the largely inconsequential “Gucci crowd” of north Tehran, who no doubt imparted a lot of colour, verve and mirth to Mousavi’s campaign, the hardcore of his political platform comprised powerful vested interests who were making a last-ditch attempt to grab power from the Khamenei-led regime. On the one hand, these interest groups were severely opposed to the economic policies under Ahmadinejad, which threatened their control of key sectors such as foreign trade, private education and agriculture.
For those who do not know Iran better, suffice it to say that the Rafsanjani family clan owns vast financial empires in Iran, including foreign trade, vast landholdings and the largest network of private universities in Iran. Known as Azad there are 300 branches spread over the country, they are not only money-spinners but could also press into Mousavi’s election campaign an active cadre of student activists numbering some three million.
The Azad campuses and auditoria provided the rallying point for Mousavi’s campaign in the provinces. The attempt was to see that the campaign reached the rural poor in their multitudes who formed the bulk of voters and constituted Ahmadinejad’s political base. Rafsanjani’s political style is to build up extensive networking in virtually all the top echelons of the power structure, especially bodies such as the Guardian Council, Expediency Council, the Qom clergy, Majlis, judiciary, bureaucracy, Tehran bazaar and even elements within the circles close to Khamenei. He called into play these pockets of influence.
Hitch's latest article in Slate is just so stupid that it's hard to even write about how stupid it is. He argues that the current controversy in Iran is the result of the American occupation of Iraq. It apparently doesn't matter to Hitchens that contested elections and, um, revolutions in Iran have been going strong in that country for some time now, unassisted by similar movements in Iraq.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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