Hitchens vs. God and Islamic Jihad

Posted July 2, 2007

Our crack shot, karate-chopping, head-bashing action-hero Christopher Hitchens calls a spade a damned shovel in today’s Slate. His piece, entitled "Don’t Mince Words: The London car-bomb plot was designed to kill women" begins

Why on earth do people keep saying, "There but for the grace of God …"? If matters had been very slightly different over the past weekend, the streets of London and the airport check-in area in Glasgow, Scotland, would have been strewn with charred body parts. And this would have been, according to the would-be perpetrators, because of the grace of God. Whatever our own private theology or theodicy, we might at least agree to take this vile belief seriously.

OK, time out for a confession. I love this guy (as noted here, here, here, and here). The breadth of his intellect and the audacity of his arguments astonishes and convinces. One of my goals in life is to never debate Christopher Hitchens — and frankly, the list of people I would avoid debating is pretty short.

I could not put down his latest best-seller. I busted the e-book
while traveling, so I quickly bought a real copy from my favorite
online seller of real books. God is not Great: How Religion Spoils Everything
may not leave you convinced, but it will leave you impressed. True,
Hitchens pretty much defines religion as a list of stuff he hates about
churches and god and proceeds to demolish it — but it is a very
impressive list and quite a thorough demolition. And yes, he cheerfully
pile drives anybody who wants to keep the good and toss out the bad by
asking who in God’s name made them the great sifter?

His book is a New York Times best-seller for a reason: it is a slashing tour de force on a topic that lesser pundits dare not touch. Forget Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins — these guys are a warm up act for the real thing. Hitchens vs God — definitely a worthwhile fight.
(In person, Hitchens is no less intimidating: at a recent Commonwealth
Club debate in San Francisco, I thought that he had converted his host,
a noted religious scholar, to a life of godless athiesm).

Today
however, Hitch picked a soft target, slammed it against the wall, kneed
it in the groin, casually backslapped it across the face, smiled while
it suffered briefly, and issued a pitiless coupe de grace to the back of the head.

Would that all British jihadi Muslims went down so easily. Thankfully these guys were dropouts — disgusting enough to plant car bombs (are all suicide bombers Muslim?
Ever heard of one who wasn’t?). These guys were so bad the London cops
actually called them amateurs (and the Bobbies should know. They towed into an underground parking garage a car reeking of gasoline from the bomb inside. Ouch.).

What’s wrong with this picture? Consider this: the associates of the attackers are not apologizing and the would be victims are not complaining. As Tom Friedman put it this morning:

In the past few years, hundreds of Muslims have committed suicide amid innocent civilians — without making any concrete political demands and without generating any vigorous, sustained condemnation in the Muslim world….

Of course, not all Muslims are terrorists. But it’s been widely noted that virtually all suicide terrorists today are Muslims. Angry Norwegians aren’t doing this
— nor are starving Africans or unemployed Mexicans. Muslims have got to
understand that a death cult has taken root in the bosom of their
religion, feeding off it like a cancerous tumor.

Actually, and very encouragingly, one associate of the attacker did apologize. Writing in the London Observer,
an extraordinary fellow named Mr. Hassan Butt has some genuinely
thoughtful things to day. This guy was once a member of Al-Muhajiroun
and a Muslim jihadi. He begins:

When I
was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi
Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups
linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in
celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for
Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was
Western foreign policy.

By blaming the government for our
actions, those who pushed the ‘Blair’s bombs’ line did our propaganda
work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

Friday’s
attempt to cause mass destruction in London with strategically placed
car bombs is so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist
plots that it is likely to have been carried out by my former peers.

And
as with previous terror attacks, people are again articulating the line
that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy.
For example, yesterday on Radio 4′s Today programme, the mayor of
London, Ken Livingstone, said: ‘What all our intelligence shows about
the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is
not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.’

He then refused to
acknowledge the role of Islamist ideology in terrorism and said that
the Muslim Brotherhood and those who give a religious mandate to
suicide bombings in Palestine were genuinely representative of Islam.

I left the BJN in February 2006, but if I were still fighting for their cause, I’d be laughing once again.
Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7 July bombings, and I were
both part of the BJN – I met him on two occasions – and though many
British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across
the world, what drove me and many of my peers to plot acts of extreme
terror within Britain, our own homeland and abroad, was a sense that we
were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary state that would
eventually bring Islamic justice to the world.

Read the whole thing.
We need voices like this: young, westernized, Islamic voices who dare
to defy the authoritarian tendencies in their religion and renounce
terror — just as brave Jews, Christians, and even athiests like
Hitchens have been doing for centuries.

The second voice we need — and we need it LOUD is women. I cannot believe that a bunch of medieval mysoginists have declared war on women and not one western feminist of note has denounced it.

Ladies, find your voices — these guys (and they are all guys) want you dead. Hitchens, having denounced the criminally idiotic coverage of this event by British media, notes:

Only
at the tail end of the coverage was it admitted that a car bomb might
have been parked outside a club in Piccadilly because it was "ladies
night" and that this explosion might have been designed to lure
people into to the street, the better to be burned and shredded by the
succeeding explosion from the second car-borne cargo of gasoline and
nails. Since we have known since 2004 that a near-identical attack
on a club called the Ministry of Sound was proposed in just these
terms, on the grounds that dead "slags" or "sluts" would be regretted
by nobody, a certain amount of trouble might have been saved by
assuming the obvious. The murderers did not just want body parts in general but female body parts in particular.

Ayann Hirsan Ali (and here) is not enough. Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein where are you? Bush got your tongue?