Tuesday, July 12, 2005

A Trio of Must-Reads From the Masterful Hitchens

Christopher has had a busy pen of late, and we're the better for it. First up is a discussion of Jefferson and the exporting of Democracy from the WSJ; then they're is the widely quoted Daily Mirror piece with its soon-to-be-classic enumeration of jihadist grievances:
We know very well what the "grievances" of the jihadists are.

The grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London. The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won't abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art. The grievance of the existence of Hinduism. The grievance of East Timor's liberation from Indonesian rule. All of these have been proclaimed as a licence to kill infidels or apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way.

Finally, don't miss Hitchens in high moral dudgeon on the subject of the Bosnian atrocity of a decade ago:

Those of us who have supported the rescue of both countries have had to put up with a great deal of slander lately. We have been accused of being thoughtless war-mongers, sinister neoconservative cabalists, slaves to Halliburton, agents of Zionism, enemies of innocent Muslims, laptop bombardiers, armchair warriors, and much else besides. I generally find that these loud insults conceal a surreptitious note of queasy unease.

We were right about Bosnia.The European Union utterly failed Bosnia, which was in its very own "back yard." So did the United Nations. So did the Clinton-Gore administration, for as long as it regarded Milosevic as "containable" by the use of sanctions. Bosnia did not cease to be a killing field, and Serbia did not cease to be an aggressive dictatorship until the United States armed forces took a hand.

Is there any doubt he is correct?...

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