Christopher Hitchens

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Hitchens would have looked more like this when he wrote the article but perhaps one of the privileges of death is that there is no prospect of being suspected of vanity over the choice of the photograph.



Here's another essay from Arguably well worth a second visit. Greek Fire picked a piece on Pakistan that will stick in the back of your mind forever. Here's another on Lebanon.

It's impossible to read these accounts and not think how ordinary the people, how normal and natural their needs and hopes and how they are the first victims of the cynical and hateful ideologies let loose among them by ugly men.

And just by the way. Whatever happened to the Christians of Lebanon? At one time they had a share in the country that was supposed to guarantee them a place in the country forever. What did they call it? A "bi-national state"? Something like that. 


The Swastika and the Cedar

As Arab thoroughfares go, Hamra Street in the center of Beirut is probably the most chic of them all. International in flavor, cosmopolitan in character, it boasts the sort of smart little café where a Lebanese sophisticate can pause between water-skiing in the Mediterranean in the morning and snow-skiing in the mountains just above the city in the afternoon. “The Paris of the Middle East” used to be the cliché about Beirut: by that exacting standard, I suppose, Hamra Street would be the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

Not at all the sort of place you would expect to find a spinning red swastika on prominent display. Yet, as I strolled in company along Hamra on a sunny Valentine’s Day last February, in search of a trinket for the beloved and perhaps some stout shoes for myself, a swastika was just what I ran into. I recognized it as the logo of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a Fascist organization (it would be more honest if it called itself “National Socialist”) that yells for a “Greater Syria” comprising all of Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Cyprus, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, and swaths of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt. It’s one of the suicide-bomber front organizations—the other one being Hezbollah, or “the party of god”—through which Syria’s Ba’thist dictatorship exerts overt and covert influence on Lebanese affairs.

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