Christopher Hitchens Q&A

i was asked if i wanted a moderator and i said no because i don't think anyone thinks i've planted anyone in this audience so if you raise your hands i'll yes sir there's a roving mic for you thank you uh and uh i asked this question uh not in a confrontational way but uh as somebody who's deeply appreciative of all uh that i have learned from you as you have i could ask this about any religion but let's focus on judaism are there some any aspects of judaism which you uh respect admire appreciate and if so what are they okay um i mentioned one the question was audible to all i hope yeah i mentioned one which was the judaism invites people to study its negation i mean i believe with many others that everything matthew arnold leostrass many others everything is a choice a struggle between athens and jerusalem i'm with the athenian side i wish that the other side had won on hanukkah and that jews had become the vectors of greek philosophy in the world i think that would have been wonderful i think it's a real shame the maccabees won that time if there'd be if they hadn't won there'd be no christianity and no islam we could have skipped the whole bloody thing um and so i'm impressed though that the orthodox say here's what you mustn't believe and they told them to study greek and not to become apakuras very few religions are as generous as that and it's a tribute to the skepticism um and the constant doubt that is involved and is i think necessary by the way for survival and probably is one of the reasons why this tribe did survive so so much and for so long that it it did in in a way keep an open mind as well as a great discipline and tradition then um jews don't proselytize much among other jews they do the lubavitch do for example um but they generally don't [Music] what always alarms me about christians and muslims is they say we have this wonderful secret uh we have a personal god who really loves us and if you believe in him if i but since i believe him i'm going to be saved in fact i'm not even going to die and you'd think that would make them happy but it doesn't they can't be happy until you believe it too by force well that i haven't got a minute of my life to spend being proselytized by these raff and then third the jews don't make the elementary stupid mistake of saying the messiah's already come so and they do well in exile um and as i say i mean i think they found another exile in palestine and i don't think that the irony of that has quite yet sunk in but i think that it will hey sir excuse me i didn't see your hand thank you for being here um my question is i worry about the idea of a degree of anti-semitism that you mentioned uh in the middle part of your lecture um i mean how does one know the difference between harmful and harmless anti-semitism and also wouldn't the harm less people be the rats in the plague and the sewer analogy that you used well of course the the people who so to say have it mildly could become the gullible victims of someone who is much less scrupulous that's possible but i do think it's worth making the distinction that's why i took the risk of showing you the hideous visage of mr gibson because you see there someone who's really got it bad and you can tell the real thing and i happen to know the back story so i thought i'd start off like that i mean i know where it comes um from who say well that's what you get for giving your money to bernie madoff for example are probably not going to kill you by the way anyone who says did you say your name was made off oh in that case you have my money um probably does deserve a pasting but it's actually very while i'm on this subject it's quite surprising there was a time in america when a thing like that would have led to quite a lot i think of public and um unofficial anti-jewish feeling it really hasn't and i believe i know why because almost everyone in the united states now has a jewish friend many many many people have of jew somewhere in their family they know not to generalize which wasn't true in the old days uh to the same extent um and i i think i have a feeling that in the united states it's very well controlled so to say i'm not going to say this is the promised land but um i think that it should be a great jewish project to keep the secular constitutional democracy of the united states going so given that i do believe that the prejudice is irradicable because it it it appeals to the pseudo intellectual to the conspiracy theorist to the envious and the jealous person to the gullible person it has all these human faculties on its side you're not going to get rid of it i think it's important to pick your enemies with some care and distinction sir sorry ma'am i was wondering what you've done with your women your next sorry next for the lady please thank you um you mentioned um your concern or interest in the liberals yes you see as anti-semitic having worked on the staff of both martin luther king and jimmy carter in the civil rights movement and seeing some of those who particularly jimmy carter as a case example who would never have his picture taken with dr king while he was alive and some in the liberal side of the jewish community who didn't get involved very very very few of us served on the front lines try to take the civil rights movement situation with the underdog of the african-americans and put that into the middle east where the palestinians become the underdogs and the jews become the racist and do you think that may be a little over compensation for the fact that at the time when there was such a clear thing going on in our country very few people went on the front lines and didn't understand that the final stage was reconciliation and if you look at the palestinians there's within the leadership so few hamas or whatever the charters that want reconciliation so how can you compare the civil rights experience in america or try to connect that to what's going on in israel and i and i see that as a huge problem on the left all good-hearted but completely wrong not all not all of it good-hearted i'd say but i i think yes you i think you identify the the allegorical problem quite well there are people who are looking for analogy in those two situations and sometimes finding it not just on the left by the way if you read saul bellows novels and non-fiction too if you read mr samuel's planet and then you read his uh to jerusalem and back you'll see that he has almost exactly the same worries about confrontations with black power forces in ocean hills brownsville new york or in chicago south side as he does about the middle east he he feels it's a an entangled question and registers i might say very very finely some of the time and i must say rather crudely i must admire of his at other times um the the it's a strange thing that in northern ireland in the slums of belfast the republican slums fly the flag of the plo and the orange ulster unionists very often put up um the israeli flag they conor cruz o'brien wrote a great book perhaps you've read it called the siege making a comparison between the three sort of post-colonial redoubts in the third world is israel south africa and northern ireland all of these very uncomfortable associations to be having um i don't think that that's the problem with the left however at the moment i wish i wish that that's all it was what's happened with a lot of the left is that they genuinely think that islamic jihadism is a movement of brown-skinned disempowered people who've had a hard time um and they if they're against the united states empire they must be doing something right so and most of these people are fantastically ignorant they know nothing about it they've cared not at all to inform themselves so if you say to them actually al qaeda begins in india pakistan as an attempt to destroy the brown skinned multi-ethnic democracy of india by wrenching kashmir out of the indian state and starting a civil war that it makes war on the other asian democracies of the philippines and indonesia in all cases trying to build a separate ultra fundamentalist muslim state they have no they know that at all um they just feel it must be owed something and in several cases including my old publisher new left books explicit texts have been produced saying that since the world proletariat turned out to be a bit of a disappointment it never did what we asked of it at least now there's an alternative source of power a mass disenfranchised movement of resentment against and lately i've noticed that bin laden's been getting this and playing it back he's been recommending to people that they read nerm chomsky for example i don't know what norm thinks when he reads this and he shouldn't be blamed for it but they're trying to get more subtle about it too these complete people who want homosexuals to be buried alive who want women to be slaves who want you know the story you know what you know what the taliban is like um still think they might trick themselves out in some discarded left colors it's a disgusting business symbolized in the recommendation of michael moore's films by the al-qaeda too very low cultural level ma'am here's the mic laryngitis that's okay um thank you for a marvelously elucidated and erudite presentation christopher my question is do you think that films such as an education which is up for several awards right now uh has a subliminal or perhaps a not so subliminal effect on the american psyche i don't i'm sorry i don't know the movie you talk about movies aren't made for people like me anymore i don't go no um but if you if movies in general will you know what i mean the the passion of the christ for example which i i thought i was amazed something that was not just anti-semitic but was incitingly anti-semitic could be shown without protest uh actually had practically no effect with one or two churches in kentucky put up a sign outside on sunday saying the jews killed our lord but that was about the limit of it most people don't remember now how dangerous it used to be to be a jew in boston on easter time and be accused of being a christ killer all the jewish people remember it very well younger jews don't and younger christians don't they aren't taught that anymore it's it's in a way encouraging what that's what nauseated me about gibson doing an end run around this and making sure it got to the middle east with the ugly stuff put back in and that's what shows what a little nazi puke he is and that's why i don't see how he's allowed to just walk around los angeles if you don't mind my sayings what is this [Applause] how serious do you consider farrakhan's rants and protestations against jews to be against the jewish people well two things about that i remember once reading an account of this is years ago but i'm practically certain it was in a suburb of los angeles there was an outbreak of swastika painting at a jewish cemetery and on jewish shops and of course huge kerfuffle headlines agony meetings what's happening all this stuff they caught the hooligans who'd done it who it turned out had no idea what a swastika was didn't know about the nazi party but just knew it if you do that you always get attention you know that upsets people so let's go do that now i don't think fair con is quite in that category because obviously he has a problem with belonging to a very debased form of sectarian islam that takes part in a lot of anti-jewish paranoia but again you see if he had got up and said at madison square garden where i was one of only two white people in the hall that night and actually it wasn't it wasn't at all threatening it was unpleasant but it wasn't it wasn't threatening but he made a huge tirade against the jews and if you remember said and i tell you now jews when god puts you in the ovens it's forever that wasn't very nice to be sitting in the background but who cares what he says suppose he'd said which would be true the real enemy of black america is the irish they kept us out of the building trades their police kicked us around in every city in the country for years uh they treated us like muck they thought they'd become white and look down on us and so they would all be quite largely true do you think the irish would give a damn of course they wouldn't if they even heard him say they'd say who gives a damn it's planet of the apes who is this geezer they wouldn't be hurt no but the jews what a black guy after all we've done for the black people whale whale vegeta there's no crying in judaism actually unfortunately there is too much crying in judaism so it works so don't in other words don't get too easily hun grow a thicker skin don't become insensitive but stuff like that really is pathetic and it shows the underdevelopment of his community and the miseducation that they've got from many of their preachers i'm afraid i have my dear armenian comrades no i have to recognize the distinguished member of the armenian parliament in uragan mr veronica uh whose father is a great ornament of this campus if i'm not if i mistake you yes uh my father and my professor richard hovinessian who gave me my lowest grade uh when i was a student here at ucla so i'm i'm very happy to be sitting behind the former uh foreign minister of the kingdom of thailand and uh and among this very distinguished audience thank you very much uh for uh for the challenge you gave us uh it's not only jews or anti-semites who uh watch the film credits after a movie it's the armenians who also look for their ians to have some some sense of identification uh i just i just wanted to uh ask you in the example of your own patrol of the frontier between civilization and tyranny between uniqueness and universality uh in the legacy of daniel pearl and that's where we're here gathered to give a modern application to that legacy how do you reconcile uh the individual pain that each nation feels the armenians as you know a generation before the holocaust were subject to a genocide and national dispossession uh how do we maintain our own identity our own pain our own suffering uh but at the same time allow for a universal uh mainstreaming uh so that never again uh is really never again for all of humanity thank you well i'm afraid we can't say never again because the one the one vision the pastor of a hagado that i i don't have any difficulty with says in every generation it's going to happen it's going to there's no question about it and i've given the reasons why i think that will be true and why it's an honor and though it's an awful thing to say that in the presence of people who suffered loss from it i'd be doing them no favor if i pretended otherwise now i have a quote here i didn't have time to reach you from someone who used to be a great heroine of mine rosa luxembourg um one of the great jewish thinkers and and mobilizers of the 20th century if she'd won in germany i think there would have been no no nazism and for that reason probably no stalinism either so it's it's a tragedy she's writing to her friend matilda verm from prison in 1917 when things are looking really bad and she says an anguished letter has come to her from a child of vermont rosa replies what do you want with these special jewish pains i feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations of putimayo and the blacks of africa with whose bodies the europeans play ball i have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto i'm at home in the entire world where there are clouds and birds and human tears now one wants to applaud that kind of internationalism and non-sectarianism of course but i don't quite do so because remember this is a woman born in poland zamosh she should have known by then that any sign of anti-semitism is not that it's a sign that something bad is going to happen to the jews it's a sign that something very bad is going to happen to that society it's an unfailing sign i'm sorry sir i can't say that's true about armenia it is a particular tragedy it was the first state organized mass murder of the 20th century planned and directed and it'll be in our hearts always as you and you know you can count on me i've often appeared at your meetings of the commemoration but it doesn't matter which society you take the expulsion of the jews from spain immediately means the regression of spain into a medieval barbarism the expulsion of the jews from the attempt to create a jew free germany i don't have to tell you um the expulsion of the jews from iraq in 1948 950 there were more jews in baghdad than in jerusalem when i was born a terrific collapse implosion of iraqi society as a result so we have no right i think to um claim the special jewish tears if you want but we have every right to say that anti-semitism is not our problem but it's a problem for civilization and it's the common enemy of humanity and i think i think that's the right balance to strike and i and i'm i am sorry to say that i don't think it's true of rwandans of uh irishmen of um gypsies or anyone else to quite that extent though of course all racism is poison there's a there's a mania and there's a there's a homicidal mania that lurks in anti-semitism that really is a plague and needs to be fought with uh humor and um hatred to endlessly renewable energy sources in my case

Channel: UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations

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Length: 20min 3sec (1203 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 23 2021