Christopher Hitchens at the Amazing Meeting 5

very great pleasure to introduce our next speaker Christopher Hitchens is a remarkable intellect and I find myself from time to time and disagreement with him but I never once find myself not respecting and admiring his insight his passion and his skill as a writer and a commentator each issue of the Atlantic Monthly is graced by one of his essays and he is the author of a number of fine books including a long short war the postponed liberation of Iraq why Orwell matters the trial of Henry Kissinger and letters to a young contrarian he is a contributing editor to vanity to Vanity Fair and is written for just about every major publication in the United States and Europe he earned his degree from Oxford in philosophy politics and economics and has been a visiting professor at the University of California Berkeley the University of Pittsburgh and the new school of social research just a few days ago mr. Hitchens published an essay on slate.com about Thomas Jefferson and religion and having some knowledge on that subject myself I was delighted to read his accurate and insightful analysis of what our 3rd president's views were on the separation of church and state there can be no better commentator on our topic skepticism in the media than Christopher Hitchens it therefore seems proper to quote mr. Jefferson wanting to do saying mr. Hitchens Jefferson wrote enlightened the people generally and tyranny tyranny and oppression of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day Christopher Hitchens has been working to enlighten his readers for many years and we are delighted to have him here with us today please welcome an old and dear friend of mr. Randy and of the jrf Christopher Hitchens and if you're having me again I have the impression that people like yourselves come to meetings like this not just to listen but to talk and since we only have 45 minutes together I'll be as brief as I can on my topic and invite your your responses I think I must need to be brief because for someone who's a an atheist and a skeptic and who works professionally in the media that the target-rich environment would otherwise be too broad for me to deal with fully I suppose every one of you knows the sort of problem I'm talking about for example it's it's probably best defined as something that's innate something in the media that is essentially credulous something in the communications industry that seems to need to take things at their own face value it's irritating actually in all fields I would instance something permanently pisses me off the attention paid to ex cathedra remarks made by the man I think of as the Bishop of Rome which is what he's called in the 39 articles of the Church of England but is all in very refer to in our media as if not only he was the Pope but as if this country was a Catholic country the attention given to him the deference given to a man who's titled to be the Vicar of Christ on earth is surely as well as untestable extremely immodest and lacking in humility the Coptic Christians of Egypt have a pope the byzantine orthodox christians of the east have a number of popes there was living memory a rival Pope to this Pope in Avignon and elsewhere it seems very odd to me all the time that this man is always called the Pope as if there was only one and as if we owed him attention that's just an obvious example then there is the obvious journalistic coolants a tional crowd-pleasing thoughtless way in which everyday events are covered there were two of these last year I think both of them showing the incredible exhaustion of imagination that exists among for example headline writers you may recall the terrible tragedy of the Dozen coal miners who were trapped under the rock after a cave-in in the coal field in I believe it was West Virginia where after hope of them have been given up it was then announced they had been found identified communicated with and were still alive so their families who'd had something you may not want to imagine for yourselves the thought of a male member of that family a father or a brother or husband trapped near axe clicks iation under the rock and anthracite dust had the sudden deliverance of being told no there's an air pocket there all right they're alive and that made it much worse I would imagine to be told a few hours later that that news was false that had never been true that was a false alarm and they could go back to after all thinking of their relatives as fixated by emphasize dust alone under the rock but in the meantime on the false first news every news bulletin and every newspaper had already rushed to comment and rushed to print the headline and is there anyone here who can't guess what the headline was America of course it was Miracle as if to rub it in even more as if to add to the pain and misery and loss and isolation of their relatives the same if you remember when the Air France jet broke a wheel landing Montreal Airport and the heroic stewardesses of Air France very highly trained for their job managed to get everybody out onto the tarmac as the plane had slowed around and gone off the runway and nearly virtual catastrophe and there was every headline said miracle the miracle as we all know that you can get human beings by the laws of physics into a metallurgical tube and fly them generally safely and on-time almost anywhere you want something that is effortlessly accomplished every single day but never seems to require the wonder of the moment when an accident is not as it was in the case of West Virginia actually lethal I'm not telling you anything you don't know comrades brothers sisters friends just trying to see if I can do that most difficult of things make you think about something you already know in a way that would make you angry so from this vast field of fatuity and asininity in which our toil as an occasional scribbler and on-air commentator are going to select just one example which also well enough known to you I dare say but I want to emphasize a few points about it and that occurred just after I left this podium last having talked to you about Thomas Jefferson and ended with what I thought was the ringing invocation for the separation of church and state mr. Jefferson build up that wall I left I was feeling good some of you kindly remember it I went about my business within a couple of weeks one of the gravest breaches in that wall that I've yet seen was inflicted upon us and I'm referring to the publication of and the reaction to the publication of some mildly disrespectful cartoons in an evening paper in Copenhagen Denmark I actually know the name of the paper is the jyllands-posten jolanda's Jutland famous promontory of the Danish peninsula it's not necessary to know that no one had ever heard of this newspaper before but everyone suddenly got to know about it not long after I left this podium and here's what happened I apologize to any of you to whom I've told this story before but I'll be pitiless in repeating it even at that cost um dr. Johnson dr. Samuel Johnson the great English lexicographer as you know produced the first real real serious dictionary literary dictionary the English language when he'd performed this huge accomplishment he was visited by many delegations of people in London including a delegation of respectable ladies who waited upon him in his house in Fleet Street and said dr. Johnson we congratulate you very much on your refusal to include any obscene or indecent words in your dictionary and he said well ladies I congratulate you in turn for your assiduity in looking these words up if you understand that joke which clearly you do it's not a joke as a true story you know essentially what the censorious nature is you know all you need to know about the Institute to censor and you know all you need to know about those who find certain things offensive in other words you know that there's no possibility of not offending people who are determined to be offended it will look for occasions to announce that they have been well dr. Johnson came back to me when I read that a group of Imams in Denmark had in response to a set of cartoons published in the Julian's post and decided to become not as defended but very highly organized about it so the first point I want to make about my profession they knew more about media spin than Karl Rove does they knew that a few harmless cartoons had been published that were themselves a satire of the fact that no one in Denmark would agree to illustrate even a children's book on the life of the Prophet Mohammed for fear of making a mistake or offending the faithful in other words the original publication of the cartoons was a mild expression of worry about the extreme toxicity of this question and the extreme combust ability of those who were determined to be offended by it so they already had a twofer they could take the response to it and say it was an aggression and they worked their butts off to do this they took these cartoons to every Muslim capital in the at least in the Arab world they added four additional spin purposes some cartoons that had not appeared in the original Copenhagen paper including a particularly offensive picture of a human mammal wearing a pig snout that it turns out they had photoshopped from a an event I must say I did not attend but might have been interested to attend a pig squealing competition in southern Provence okay there's something for everybody thus adding the incredible in insult of the porcine that most despised of God's creation to the ready grave offense given by the discussion even of the Prophet Muhammad in an afternoon newspaper in Copenhagen Denmark and they worked on it until they were ready to get a response and at that point they had the media as their megaphone they had everyone in my profession working for them their protest was going to be reported in its own terms at its own face value is Denmark really multicultural how these people really been upset was it wise to print these cartoons wall-to-wall coverage they must have believed all their birthdays had come at once but then the campaign succeeded just a little perhaps too well people sold Danish pastries for Danish bacon or Danish biscuits or Danish beer or Danish cheese all across the Muslim world to have their stores broken into and burned their livelihoods destroyed individual Danish and random other Scandinavian civilians were set upon sometimes killed after a while any one of the Christian faith in Nigeria of all places was attacked by association if you like with Scandinavian Christianity that I remember Nigeria being part of any Scandinavian Empire Danish embassies and consulates and diplomatic missions media offices are put to the torch by large and very violent mobs acting under police protection in the capital cities of countries that normally allow no demonstrations at all if a demonstration is allowed by the government of Syria or the government of Libya for example it will only be usually because of the leaders birthday no one can have a spontaneous demonstration in such a place when demonstrations of this kind become that violent and that large and no one is arrested and diplomatic immunity can be violated without action by the police or the Armed Forces one knows that a certain kind of collusion between totalitarianism and populism has broken out and taken a very vicious and violent and cruel form well now comes my point how is my profession in the United States going to report and deal with all this who among you has not heard or felt or thought or said in the last several decades now that if anything any one thing is wrong with our media there's any one thing about it that makes you moan with shame as a consumer let alone for me as a contributor or producer it is the domination of everything by images the domination of everything by the pictorial the driving of words off the front page of magazines and now increasingly of many newspapers by pictures alone the the absolute results of the vision of the visual stimulus you know all of you what I'm talking about but in this case the argument was entirely about the cluster of images and the question was well why won't we show them then how we expected to cover this subject how can we talk intelligently to our audience television or print and we're not showing them the photographs excuse me we're not showing them a picture of a photograph of a reproduction of the cartoons in question we don't it seems trust the audience to make up its own mind as to whether or not these were in fact defensive images or could have a license this tremendous pogrom against a small northern European country and I'll make a digression here on the word offensive I think some of us find it more offensive to see the citizens and the embassies and the newspapers of a small peaceful civilized democracy being lynched and put to the torch we find that much more offensive than the publication of a gentle satire about a desert sphere crowd there were supposed words can only ever be written or recited in Arabic one of some of us think that the first offense is much more genuinely offensive than the second but to hold a position like that in Washington DC last February was to be convicted of holding the most extreme and bizarre and marginal position possible clearly the real problem was the offensiveness of images that could not be shown I'll give you a couple of anecdotes from my own experience of trying to debate this mentality and the and this policy what could the two excuses really be for after all for declining to reproduce the photographs of the actual event that was being the source of the controversy which had admittedly by then become the wall-to-wall coverage of the media the Caribe to one would be that reproducing them would itself be offensive and the second would be that those who had the editorial decision about whether or not to reprint them were frightened were afraid had become themselves intimidated I'm going to leave it to you to decide which of these two would be the most disturbing of the conclusions but I can give you two examples that materialize both instances I went on CNN to debate a spokesman from an Islamist organization in Washington and CNN in its pre discussion sequence showed the page of the nori of the Danish newspaper with the cartoons pixelated out they'd done their due diligence if you like there was a picture of the newspaper but you couldn't see the cartoons they'd been they've been blurred pixelated out you know viewer could still see why this one in the discussion I said to the lady chair I said your viewers would have noticed that you don't trust them to see what we're talking about I accuse you of making this capitulation purely because you are afraid as a network of showing this that you've you've surrendered to threats of violence if you do show them and actually rather am i surprising in some ways my pleasant surprise you said that's true we have bureaus around the world we have reporters all over the place we have a big property in Washington we're not taking the risk of covering the story we're into going to allow people like you to come on and do that for us so that well at least they don't say they do not hypocritical about it but there's still a little twinge of conscience I think sometimes in my profession and they felt it's a bit odd not to be able to show the picture that is the story and I was fascinated to hear the correspondent of PBS say how they had resolved the problem PBS had been invited by the mullahs in the case the originators not just of the protests and the inventors of the offense and the multipliers of the offense by the publication of bogus cartoons and the insight as to the violence of which the rest of the media were by then already you'll have noticed afraid and the insight as to the assault on Danish diplomatic immunity in the attempt to sabotage the change economy nonetheless they invited PBS to come and say well you can come and see us handing copies of the cartoons out we're allowed to show them to anybody pause to notice it the mullahs can show it to anybody but they can kill anyone or threatened with death anyone else who tries to show them to anybody and so PBS said so we showed the mullahs handing the cartoons around to people you couldn't quite see the cartoons maybe once or twice over the shoulder of Danish Imam you could glimpse one but we could say we had in a way shown them because we showed them distributing them to everybody else and so now we can say our job is done I don't think I've ever seen or heard anything as Craven as that in the whole of my life as a writer and commentator and reporter and I might not have made it so much and I wondered sound too much emitting a wail and squeal of self-pity but when I organized the demonstration of solidarity outside the Danish Embassy in Washington DC thinking what it might be nice just for a few minutes to have cameras pointing to Danish Embassy is not on fire and that is surrounded by people saying we stand by Danish democracy against theocracy and we like to Borg beer and other heartening such slogans they'll will it give them a chance to cover something else nobody covered it not interested not interesting at all I want sometimes thought president I said if I go and shoot them no no no no nevermind don't even think about it so that I leave it to you to decide whether it was the fear of being offensive the fear of violating some pseudo multicultural taboo that meant that every reader and viewer in the United States had to be treated like a child whether that is worse than the open admission that I had from so many other editors and publishers that it was done simply out of fear and the willingness to capitulate in advance to even the possibility that those of us who make our living by the First Amendment should actually be prepared to pay back every now and then and take some risks for it you can decide for yourselves which of these two is the most worrying but I'm just here to tell you that on the on an early challenge and it won't be the last one as it wasn't the first to the values of that amendment then all that it represents both in terms of free expression and in terms of church-state separation you might want to know that the profession that regards itself as the first line of defense and the routinely turns a large profit out of the rights that it gets under that amendment a buckled surrendered capitulated ran away collaborated and without a fight and leave you with that thought invite your comments thanks for coming for a couple of questions and right here if you'll join me in the guy'll do your left sir hi um I was wondering if you were aware of a guy named Ezreal Avant columnist for the Calgary Sun Levante no oh he did publish those pictures well actually I should I should have added preps for the role of honor the Western standard in Canada identif it's Calgary did and so did the Weekly Standard neoconservative Murdoch in um in Washington and so did I in Slade because I told people how to link to the cartoons when they read my column calling for solidarity at the Danish Embassy but I couldn't get slate to put the cartoons on it's cartoon page so yes there were ways around it but it was as if you lived in a samizdat society instead of an open one and you having to make the most obvious points about your own profession to the people who actually run it but yes I you're quite right I should have I should have mentioned the the two very tiny exceptions in North America to that question from Jim Underdown director of Science Center first I just blew it Center for inquiry West I practiced that was my problem we should add the free inquiry magazine published all of the cartoons and borders records and books promptly decided not to stock that issue in all their stories yes comment and I should have mentioned that too and I've told I'm publishing a book in May called God is not great which I hope you'll all buy but or if you're in borders steel book stolen is a book sold have you always been told by my agent but I've told my publishers I don't want to read a Borders I'm not going to do any public events though whether they ask me to or not it's its little enough but they might people who do that kind of thing must pay something for it and I really don't think anyone should shop there ever again there's always an alternative bookstore not that much further away don't go to borders anymore yes over question regarding how the media has really changed in pet in the past few decades there was a time when things were simplistic almost overly simplistic to the point of black and white we were on the benevolent we could firebomb Dresden and there was nothing wrong with it but these evil evil soldiers who were driven entirely by world domination could do no right and the Japanese we had some offensive terms for them is it possible that things could have could or have swung into the opposite direction too far to the degree where the contrast is so reduced that it becomes difficult to tell which shade of grey is darker well I think if I guess your question correctly I think what you're what you may be asking me to comment on is or large on is what I mentioned earlier about pseudo or bogus multiculturalism and in other words you could get the impression from a number of commentators and what from a sort of mentality that's becoming regnant in the mass media but to be a Muslim is to a member of an ethnic minority shall we say that your your your proclamations of jihad are something to do with the civil rights struggle for a neglected or despised a group of people who have no alternative but to be what they are if I've got you wrong on that I apologize but that's what I took from your your question I certainly think this has become an extraordinary problem it's not true whether we're just about Islamism either the people are afraid of attacking any expression of faith because it's an attack on a community and communities have to be respected and communities doesn't have their feelings I had it when I published my book on Mother Teresa many many people refused to have me on because it was an attack not on the papacy or on Catholic dogma or on her it's very very extreme and fundamentalist interpretation of it no was an attack on the Catholic community much of it made up of poor and vulnerable people and so on you could had had many editors and chatshow people explain that's why they weren't going to allow me to come on the television about it so yes all of this is is I think going to have to be confronted by those of us who began by thinking that a multicultural multi-ethnic multi-religious Society was a good idea and are now being put in the position where it's values so to speak of being negated mutated and turned against us so that all religions have to be treated with equal respect not just with equal consideration but they all deserve a kind of protection the exact opposite of what's meant by problem Algie cultural society where everything can be discussed and anyone can take part in the conversation um I actually am going to switch my question a bit because I liked his so much and I think he skirted on the issue that he really wanted to address was well they were educated like with propaganda courses and that about the history of how how the enemy has always been demonized and that to rally the people but now so now reporters seek out ways of humanizing the enemy and have we he'll be gone too far now can we actually are we too forgiving of our enemies are we taught that well I think the good question like are we are we are we now incapable of perceiving evil yeah good I mean all right then all in large mosques blown up every day now in Baghdad by Muslims something that not everyone was ready to see or to understand places of worship in fact practically never in the in the numerable civil wars and stripes that I've covered I really have ever seen a case where a place of worship has been attacked by a non-believer by by a humanist or skeptic or an atheist it's always places of worship were desecrated and blaspheme by other believers I think the last time that wouldn't have been true would have been in the Spanish Civil War when the anarchists in Catalonia did burn the Catholic churches down I remember George Orwell saying it was a mistake that they didn't get rid of the Sagrada família Cathedral in Barcelona well they had the chance but perhaps a slightly heartless observation but now if it's in Bosnia the synagogue or a mosque destroyed it's by Christian Catholic or Orthodox fascists if it's in Iraq it's if it's a Shia mosque it's been destroyed by the al-qaeda forces and if it's a Sunni one by the forces of the Mahdi army but we don't call them the parties of God we call them insurgents don't even call them terrorists so I think that's that is a huge capitulation the fact is the parties of God have Iraq in their jaws and they're tearing the society to death and they're desecrating religious monuments and places of worship and pilgrimages every day and killing children in religious schools and we worry that a small paper in Denmark publishing a satire about the Prophet Mohammed might be offensive to Muslims aren't Muslims upset at the mass murder of worshippers in mosques what kind of sense of proportion have we lost quite aside from any sense of what's obscene was hateful what's murderous and what's truly offensive yes a thousand times yes we absolutely the press used the excuse that they didn't want to be offensive they want a free speech but we have to respect and not be offensive and you've kind of already touched on this that the Muslim community I think the press did not bring up the idea that these people were being manipulated by the clerics that you speak of I would have liked to seen the press show those pictures of the clerics passing those out and of the fact that this cartoon came out three months earlier and these people built it up to this thing I'm just wondering how yeah well to know that they were being spun that's why I started that way the it doesn't begin as a panic response to oh dear you know would we be offensive if we cover the story properly it begins as an abject willingness to be manipulated in the first place without protest or complaint by a religious mafia who can get you to jump through hoops and whom no one will say no for fear of giving offense so it's a self-sealing self-reinforcing process and you enter this case you can't even say its image in picture driven because the one thing the media is was the one thing it refused to be on this occasion so it was utterly forced to itself as an institution as a profession and as a communicator or medium of information which means it's really quite a very it's quite a serious cultural defeat on quite a big issue on quite a grand scale and what is even more appalling to me is that it we passed more or less without comment I'm quite I don't know if I've exhausted or infesting on anyone else's time but if I haven't I'm quite willing to be asked any other questions or any other topic but I think they've come to take me away I'm not sure I have to sort of have that feeling the hook is treating onto regretfully and with great respect we're done yes sir well it's been real and I think it fine bookstores everywhere there are some shards of my stuff from now on I'll only be nice to people who've got a receipt okay thank you this is America on behalf of mr. Huck I waited till your hands were full sir on behalf of mr. Andy it really isn't a tan without mr. hitchens here and we're grateful for your time we're grateful for you inside please and come back many more times you bet it thank you you

Channel: JamesRandiFoundation

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Keywords: amazing meeting, tam5, tam, tam 2007, skepticism, hitchens

Id: VTMRcSF7yjQ

Length: 31min 54sec (1914 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2012