Christopher Hitchens - mixed feelings

John Derbyshire

... Hitch was a court jester for the liberal elites. He took care never to violate their most sacred taboos. Like Stephen Jay Gould, who also died too young, also of cancer, Hitch carried the banner of soft Marxism forward into the post-Soviet era. ...

Raymond De Souza

... For many of Hitchens’ fellow journalists, the virtuosity of his brilliant writing and bracing conversation earned him a pass on the hatred. But hatred it remained. His commercial genius was to harbour hatreds sufficiently vast and varied that a lucrative constituency could be found to relish all of them....

Jonah Goldberg

... He was no conservative. You can’t really be a conservative in the Anglo-American tradition and hate religion. You can be a non-believer, I think. But you have to at least have respect for the role of religion and maybe a little reverence for the role of transcendence in people’s lives. Hitch had nothing but contempt. It was one of the last truly asinine Marxist things about him.

... I’m not inclined to sugarcoat my take on the man given how he could be absolutely cruel when spouting off about the deaths of others. He could be mean, pigheaded, and insensitive (though never dull!). He could also be generous and kind. He was a brilliant and gifted polemicist who sometimes took the easiest way out by going after his opponents’ weakest arguments rather than their strongest. He defied easy categorization while having a gift for categorizing others. He’ll be missed because he was so damn good at being Christopher Hitchens.

Ann Coulter on 'Occupy' mobs and Mitt Romney

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The niqab (aka 'the vile veil') - a Post Media puff-piece

A Post Media column ("We are not a threat") (Minna Ella in the photo) appeared in yesterday's The Vancouver Sun.  I left the following comment at the digital edition:

This column is a puff-piece (by and for gullible Westerners) promoting Islamist ideology.

Very few Muslim women residing in the West wear the niqab or burka. With the exception of the most repressive nations (eg Saudi Arabia) many Muslim women elsewhere don’t wear it either. Some are forced to do so by radical Muslim patriarchal authority figures for cultural/religious reasons. Others, the most radicalized of Muslim women, claim to choose to do so also for religious/cultural reasons. Either way it is the most radical of Muslim women who wear the niqab or burka in Western countries. Tarik Fatah has said that it is a deliberate flashing of a middle finger to Western infidels.

Radical Islam makes no bones about its hostility to Westerners and to Western values (including gender equality among other personal freedoms). It seeks to propagate its hostile ideology in the West through propaganda and subversive legal tactics. It also poses a serious direct threat to security and safety (remember 9/11 and the Toronto 18).

Is Minna Ella a radical Muslim? Some evidence (from least to most significant):

(1) her claim of theological justification for wearing the niqab is highly debatable. It’s a point of contention even among Islamic scholars. Most Muslim women don’t wear it.
(2) she chooses to wear a niqab knowing full-well that most of her fellow citizens are intimidated by it or, at best, uncomfortable with it. This is not what you’d call sociable behaviour.
(3) she works as an administrator for a school sponsored by the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC). According to one report (Ref below) "The MAC are adherents to the teachings of Hassan Al Banna, an admirer of Hitler, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a preacher of genocidal jihad against Kuffars [infidels]."
[Ref. http://blazingcatfur.blogspot.com/2011/07/muslim-brotherhood-approves-of-toronto.html].

You be the judge.

Christopher Hitchens ... 1949 - 2011

 

Speaking of pieces of sh*t

A close resemblance:

Supplemental update - Ezra Levant on the Kyoto brouhaha:

UNFCCC: "We won't let Canada out of Kyoto"

From Anthony Watts quoting UNFCCC email:

... I regret that Canada has announced it will withdraw and am surprised over its timing. Whether or not Canada is a Party to the Kyoto Protocol, it has a legal obligation under the Convention to reduce its emissions, and a moral obligation to itself and future generations to lead in the global effort....

Canada to UNFCCC: "Blow it!"

CBC's Kyoto Poll

And check out this CBC video (at the 1 hr mark) with Evan Solomon's flabbergasted sputtering when Tom Flanagan and John Ivison say they're AGW skeptics. It seems never to have occurred to him that some of his carefully selected pundits might not be true believers.