Christopher Hitchens Beaten by Syrian Nazi Types

Strange story from Ace of Spades:

I wasn't there. I was there, however, for the immediate after-action report, and have heard it told ten times by now, including most of it from Hitchens. Although I didn't really bother asking much, as I'd already heard it.

Hitch and two others were out on some or such errand. One guy was just telling Hitchens that the Syrian Nazi party had little support in the country but was paid by Syria to kill people, and that he'd been told they're the one party you don't fuck with.

So five minutes later they come across the poster for the Syrian Nazi Party on an abandoned bagel shop -- abandoned, if I had this right, after Hezballah had attacked it last year due to the overly Jewish connotations of bagelry.

So Hitchens immediately takes out a pen and writes "No, no, Fuck You" on the poster. I don't know if he'd digested the story and decided to fuck with them anyway, or else he was just reacting to the modified swastika on the poster.

Now, the Syrian Nazis are not popular and neighborhoods have tried to get their posters taken down. But then they threaten people and cause problems.

So the state leaves them up. To avoid getting their posters defaced or torn down, they post a paid Nazi watcher to keep an eye on their posters.

Well, when this Syrian Nazi goon saw Hitch do this, he confronted him and kinda-sorta attacked him. I say kinda sorta attacked, because what his main intent was was to delay Hitchens from leaving -- until the ten Nazi goons he had just texted on his cell phone could arrive.

There was some kicking and pulling and hitting. Hitch and the others attempted to get into a cab -- the Syrian Nazi goon got right in the cab with them, still hitting Hitchens. They could not force him out. Eventually they all exited, and attempted to get a fresh cab, but other cabbies were now hip to the fact the Syrian Nazis had been riled and wanted no business from them, so two cabs passed refusing their fare.

Now at this point the ten Nazi goons showed up (about five minutes into this-- they came quickly) and Hitch and the other two were probably going to get the crap beaten out of them, at best. However, they finally managed to get a cabbie who was either brave or didn't know the trouble he was getting into and got in, this time without the goon, and left the other ten behind.

Now, as far as the damage Hitch suffered, it wasn't much. He did get some lumps -- a knock on the leg, a scrape on the face. And also his writing hand had been stomped on. He'd been roughed up a bit, but didn't have "the shit beaten out of him." If I hadn't been told the story I wouldn't have known he'd been fucked with at all. Apart from a bit of pain walking and some more pain typing, he was fine.

So, that's the story. I was holding off on it until we were out of the country, but some rat we ran into apparently began blabbing it to his rat-like kin.

And to be honest, I'm personally kinda sick of hearing it myself, and it felt like gossip, but as the early reports are wrong in the details, I'll have a go.

It didn't happen in a bar. It happened mid-day on the street. It wasn't a drunken brawl. I have no idea if Hitchens had drank at all, but if he had, it was like his typical lunch-time bloody mary. (I'm not saying he didn't get drunk-- just not then.)

And no one had the shit beaten out of him. The lefty bloggers saying they've "confirmed" this are apparently talking to people not in a position to confirm it at all.

Christopher Hitchens Flips Off Bill Maher's Morons

Christopher Hitchens twice flips off Bill Maher's moronic audience. Something we'd all like to do.

Shades of William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal.

HITCHENS: IS MICHELLE OBAMA RESPONSIBLE FOR THE JERIMIAH WRIGHT FIASCO?

An interesting read from Hitchens...

What can it be that has kept Obama in Wright's pews, and at Wright's mercy, for so long and at such a heavy cost to his aspirations? Even if he pulls off a mathematical nomination victory, he has completely lost the first, fine, careless rapture of a post-racial and post-resentment political movement and mired us again in all the old rubbish that predates Dr. King. What a sad thing to behold. And how come? I think we can exclude any covert sympathy on Obama's part for Wright's views or style—he has proved time and again that he is not like that, and even his own little nods to "Minister" Farrakhan can probably be excused as a silly form of Chicago South Side political etiquette. All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?

This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. (One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, "Keep my wife out of it," or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse's influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company—and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable—then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.

I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama's 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be "read" at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language. Anyway, at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she's much influenced by the definition of black "separationism" offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. I remember poor Stokely Carmichael quite well. After a hideous series of political and personal fiascos, he fled to Africa, renamed himself Kwame Toure after two of West Africa's most repellently failed dictators, and then came briefly back to the United States before electing to die in exile. I last saw him as the warm-up speaker for Louis Farrakhan in Madison Square Garden in the 1980s, on the evening when Farrakhan made himself famous by warning Jews that "when God puts you in the ovens—it's forever!" I have the distinct feeling that the Obama campaign can't go on much longer without an answer to the question: "Are we getting two for one?" And don't be giving me any grief about asking this. Black Americans used to think that the Clinton twosome was their best friend, too. This time we should find out before it's too late to ask.

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