Michael Totten is a terrific, objective journalist and a very talented photographer. He’s been all over the world and has written dispatches from some of the most fascinating places on earth – both wartorn and not.

This week he sat down for a chat with Christopher Hitchens. 

Part I.

Many of my more conservative readers will immediately tune out, because Hitchens is – in their view – a liberal.  To me, Hitchens is brilliant, and I can’t see myself pigeonholing him. 

Go over to Michael’s site and read the interview. I do believe you will be hard pressed to disagree with the conversation.

Here’s a taste:


MJT: The current president ofIreland said Muslims have the right to be offended by Westergaard’scartoons. I suppose that’s true as far as it goes, that everybody hasthe right to be offended by anything, but why…

Hitchens: Ah yes. This is not new. I’ve written aboutthis many times. It’s reverse ecumenicism. It first became obvious tome when the fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie in 1989. Thereaction of the official newspaper of the Vatican was that the problemwasn’t that the foreign leader of a theocratic dictatorship offeredmoney, in public, in his own name, to suborn the murder of the writerof a book of fiction in another country, who wasn’t an Iranian citizen.The problem was not that.

You and I may have thought, bloody hell, this is a new kind ofthreat. But it’s an old level of threat. Blasphemy is the problem. Thatwas also the view of the archbishop of Canterbury. The general reactionof the religious establishments to that and to the Danish case—and, bythe way, of our secular State Department in the Danish case—was to saythe problem was Danish offensiveness. A cartoon in a provincial town ina small Scandinavian democracy obviously should be censored by thegovernment lest it ignite—or as Yale University Press put it, instigate—violence.

Instigation of violence can only mean one thing. I know the English language better than I know anything else.

MJT: Instigate means it’s on purpose.

Hitchens: These people are saying the grandfather andgranddaughter were the authors of their own attempted assassinations.These are some of the same people who say that if I don’t believe inGod I can’t know what morality is. They’ve just dissolved moralitycompletely into relativism by saying actually, occasionally, carving upgrandfathers and granddaughters with an axe on New Year’s Eve can beokay if it’s done to protect the reputation of a seventh centuryArabian man who heard voices.

MJT: It’s hard to psychoanalyzeother people, but I sometimes suspect that blaming Salman Rushdie andKurt Westergaard, as many writers have, for bringing down the wrath ofthese maniacs from Somalia and Iran, may be a way of convincingthemselves they’ll be safe as long as they don’t cross the same line.Any writer or graphic artist must, at least for a second, think ohfuck, they could come for me if I don’t watch out. They can say tothemselves they’ll be fine if they don’t cross that line.

Hitchens: But the line will never stop shifting.

MJT: Of course.

Go. Read. Now.

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