PrintSeptember 29, 2012
Missing Christopher Hitchens
"The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam." So said President of the United States Barack Obama before the General Assembly of the United Nations on Monday.
Perhaps only the late columnist, writer, and polemicist Christopher Hitchens (who died this year) could have made sense of the spectacle of an American president condemning the exercise of free speech in a YouTube video made in the United States. Certainly, "the Hitch" -- as he was known to friends -- would have made a fitting response, even if he found the spectacle itself incomprehensible. Not to say unedifying.
And that shows the distance the American left has traveled in the last quarter-century. If progressive artists and progressive politicians will not defend the First Amendment, what will they defend?
In 1989, when Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie for what he'd said about Mohammed in his novel The Satanic Verses, it was...(Read Full Article)
