欧宝娱乐

“No idea is above scrutiny and no people are beneath dignity.”
― Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue

“The real question is how much suffering we've caused our womenfolk by turning headscarves into symbols - and using women as pawns in a political game.”
― Orhan Pamuk, Snow

“[T]he very multiculturalism and multiethnicity that brought Salman to the West, and that also made us richer by Hanif Kureishi, Nadeem Aslam, Vikram Seth, Monica Ali, and many others, is now one of the disguises for a uniculturalism, based on moral relativism and moral blackmail (in addition to some more obvious blackmail of the less moral sort) whereby the Enlightenment has been redefined as 'white' and 'oppressive,' mass illegal immigration threatens to spoil everything for everybody, and the figure of the free-floating transnational migrant has been deposed by the contorted face of the psychopathically religious international nihilist, praying for the day when his messianic demands will coincide with possession of an apocalyptic weapon. (These people are not called nihilists for nothing.) Of all of this we were warned, and Salman was the messenger. Mutato nomine et de te fabula narrator: Change only the name and this story is about you.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always鈥攁nd this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject鈥攚hat about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews?

I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming鈥擨 want to say 'unsettling'鈥攑recedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then鈥攂elatedly you may say鈥攖o guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“A true martyr is not an opportunist who dies to get a reward of eternal life.
A true martyr is a humanist who dies to save a life.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“Today I want to puke when I hear the word 'radical' applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about 'the West,' to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Extremism manifests itself in different shapes and colors. 'The Absolute Truth' and 'the Only Way' beliefs are among them.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“Since I speak and write about this a good deal, I am often asked at public meetings, in what sometimes seems to me a rather prurient way, whether I myself or my family have 'ever been threatened' by jihadists. My answer is that yes, I have, and so has everyone else in the audience, if they have paid enough attention to the relevant bin-Ladenist broadcasts to notice the fact.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“The bullet that has hit us Muslims today left the gun centuries ago when we let the clergy decide that knowledge and education were not important.”
― Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil

“In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big 鈥� ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.”
― Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life

“As to the 'Left' I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our 'national security' calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Here was a time for the Left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favor of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of 'Left' intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush's legitimacy. So I don't even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

“Antisemitism is unique among religious hatreds. It is a racist conspiracy theory fashioned for the needs of messianic and brutal rulers, as dictators from the Tsars to the Islamists via the Nazis have shown. Many other alleged religious 'hatreds' are not hatreds in the true sense. If I criticise Islamic, Orthodox Jewish or Catholic attitudes towards women, for instance, and I'm accused of being a bigot, I shrug and say it is not bigoted to oppose bigotry.”
― Nick Cohen

“Remaining for a moment with the question of legality and illegality: United Nations Security Council Resolution 1368, unanimously passed, explicitly recognized the right of the United States to self-defense and further called upon all member states 'to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of the terrorist attacks. It added that 'those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of those acts will be held accountable.' In a speech the following month, the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan publicly acknowledged the right of self-defense as a legitimate basis for military action. The SEAL unit dispatched by President Obama to Abbottabad was large enough to allow for the contingency of bin-Laden's capture and detention. The na茂ve statement that he was 'unarmed' when shot is only loosely compatible with the fact that he was housed in a military garrison town, had a loaded automatic weapon in the room with him, could well have been wearing a suicide vest, had stated repeatedly that he would never be taken alive, was the commander of one of the most violent organizations in history, and had declared himself at war with the United States. It perhaps says something that not even the most casuistic apologist for al-Qaeda has ever even attempted to justify any of its 'operations' in terms that could be covered by any known law, with the possible exception of some sanguinary verses of the Koran.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Enemy

“London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain 鈥� the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims 鈥� swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.”
― Nick Cohen

“No one is as murderously 'Islamophobic' as Islamists are.”
― Nick Cohen

“It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to personalize or 'objectify' them in the figure of one individual. Yet ordinary discourse would be unfeasible without the use of portmanteau terms鈥攍ike 'Stalinism,' say鈥攋ust as the most scrupulous insistence on historical forces will often have to concede to the sheer personality of a Napoleon or a Hitler. I thought then, and I think now, that Osama bin Laden was a near-flawless personification of the mentality of a real force: the force of Islamic jihad. And I also thought, and think now, that this force absolutely deserves to be called evil, and that the recent decapitation of its most notorious demagogue and organizer is to be welcomed without reserve. Osama bin Laden's writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Enemy

“It was sometimes feebly argued, as the political and military war against this enemy ran into difficulties, that it was 'a war without end.' I never saw the point of this plaintive objection. The war against superstition and the totalitarian mentality is an endless war. In protean forms, it is fought and refought in every country and every generation. In bin Ladenism we confront again the awful combination of the highly authoritarian personality with the chaotically nihilist and anarchic one. Temporary victories can be registered against this, but not permanent ones. As Bertold Brecht's character says over the corpse of the terrible Arturo Ui, the bitch that bore him is always in heat. But it is in this struggle that we develop the muscles and sinews that enable us to defend civilization, and the moral courage to name it as something worth fighting for.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Enemy

“I am not one of those who believes鈥攁s Obama is said to believe鈥攖hat a solution to the Palestinian statehood question would bring an end to Muslim resentment against the United States. (Incidentally, if he really does believe this, his lethargy and impotence in the face of Netanyahu's consistent double-dealing is even more culpable.) The Islamist fanatics have their own agenda, and, as in the case of Hamas and its Iranian backers, they have already demonstrated that nothing but the destruction of Israel and the removal of American influence from the region will possibly satisfy them. No, it is more the case that justice鈥攁nd a homeland for the Palestinians鈥攊s a good and necessary cause in its own right. It is also a special legal and moral responsibility of the United States, which has several times declared a dual-statehood outcome to be its objective.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide鈥攐ne hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave鈥攐f demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Enemy

“Half the published articles on Gaza contain a standard reference to its resemblance to a vast open-air prison (and when I last saw it under Israeli occupation it certainly did deserve this metaphor). The problem is that, given its ideology and its allies, Hamas qualifies rather too well in the capacity of guard and warder.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“[T]his is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“The United States finds itself with forces of reaction. Do I have to demonstrate this? The Taliban's annihilation of music and culture? The enslavement of women?”
― Christopher Hitchens, A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq

“廿賳 丕賱廿爻賱丕賲 賱丕 賷賳鬲卮乇 亘丕賱賲毓噩夭丕鬲 賵賱丕 亘丕賱禺賵丕乇賯 .. 賱兀賳賴丕 鬲兀鬲賷 賲毓 丕賱兀賳亘賷丕亍 賵鬲睾丕丿乇 賲毓賴賲 .. 兀賲丕 丕賱廿爻賱丕賲 賮賯丿 噩丕亍 賱賱亘卮乇 .. 賵亘噩賴丿賴賲 - 亘毓丿 丕賱賱賴 - 賷賳鬲卮乇 賵賷賳丿丕丨 .. 賵賷賳鬲氐乇 .. 賵亘廿賳丨胤丕胤賴賲 賵鬲禺賱賮賴賲 賵爻胤丨賷丞 賮賴賲賴賲 賷鬲丨賵賱 丕賱廿爻賱丕賲 廿賱賶 囟丨賷丞 .. 廿賱賶 禺夭丕賳丞 囟禺賲丞 賲賱賷卅丞 亘丕賱鬲賴賲 ..賷賱賯賶 丕賱賳丕爻 賮賷賴丕 毓賷賵亘賴賲”
― 賲丨賲丿 丕賱氐賵賷丕賳賷

“I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that 'issue' I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Nothing鈥攏ot even the US Army鈥攎ore threatens the future of a democratic, pluralistic and (dare we wish, secular) Iraq than the political ascendancy of Islamic fascists like Al Sadr.”
― Marc Cooper

“The inhabitants of the villages in the "seam zone" have had to apply for a document that the Israeli army calls a permanent resident permit. As its name suggests, this document is something like a U.S. Green Card, except that in this case the person applying for the permit only wants to stay where he already is, on the land where he has been living all his life.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“According to Colonel Shaul Arieli of the Israeli army reserves, the point of making life so difficult for Palestinians in the gap between the border and the wall is to push them to leave for good.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“By the end of that day, between 2,000 and 5,000 of Jaffa's original 70,000 inhabitants remained in their homes. All the others were gone. They would never be allowed to return. As had happened at Haifa a month previously, the city's Palestinian population was forced down to the port by the Zionist forces; there they were crammed onto boats, skiffs, and trawlers--and driven out to sea, to make their way to Gaza, el- Arish, even as far away as Beirut, leaving behind everything: homes, furniture, clothing, family papers, heirlooms, photographs, libraries. Much of the city was systematically demolished after the fighting. Its souks and commercial districts were entirely flattened. The famous orange groves surrounding the city were cleared away. All that remained of Jaffa after 1948 was the central district, whose homes were parceled out to new Jewish residents: European Jewish immigrants got the pick of the choicest residences in Jaffa; Sephardim and Mizrahim-Arab Jews-got the rest.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“Jaffa will become a Jewish city," declared David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, a month after the city had been cleared of its Arab inhabitants; "to allow the return of the Arabs to Jaffa would be," he added, "foolish." Ben-Gurion had had it out for Jaffa long before 1948. "Jaffa's destruction, the town and the port, will happen, and it is good that it will happen," he had noted in his diary a dozen years previously; "if Jaffa goes to hell, I will not participate in its grief.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation