---
title: "32 Islam Quotes By Christopher Hitchens"
description: "32 Islam quotes by Christopher Hitchens. Plus more from Christopher Hitchens and more Islam sayings from other authors."
image: "https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/3a5/christopher-hitchens-117_bad-day_if-the-qur-an-was-the-word-of-god-it-had_2451562.jpg"
---

> [If the Qur'an was the word of God, it had been dictated on a very bad day.](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/if-the-qur-an-was-the-word-of-god-it-had-been-dictated-on-a-very-bad/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“To take a side against Rushdie, or to be neutral and evasive about him in the name of some vaguely sensitive ecumenical…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/to-take-a-side-against-rushdie-or-to-be-neutral-and-evasive-about-him/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there's…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/i-love-it-when-muslims-go-to-war-with-each-other-as-i-do-when-the/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/55b/christopher-hitchens-117_christian_i-love-it-when-muslims-go-to-war-with-ea_2790722.jpg)

> [You notice how liberals keep saying, 'If only Islam would have a Reformation' - it can't have one. It says it can't.…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/you-notice-how-liberals-keep-saying-if-only-islam-would-have-a/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/i-used-to-call-myself-a-single-issue-voter-on-the-essential-question/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/b4a/christopher-hitchens-117_2008_i-used-to-call-myself-a-single-issue-vot_2464568.jpg)

> [Islam is at once the most and the least interesting of the world's monotheisms. It builds upon its primitive Jewish and Christian…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/islam-is-at-once-the-most-and-the-least-interesting-of-the-world-s/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/if-you-look-at-any-muslim-society-and-you-make-a-scale-of-how/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/718/christopher-hitchens-117_depends_if-you-look-at-any-muslim-society-and-yo_2443193.jpg)

> [I'm a single-issue voter, to get straight to the point. I'm really only interested in the candidate who's toughest and least apologetic…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/i-m-a-single-issue-voter-to-get-straight-to-the-point-i-m-really-only/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/d92/christopher-hitchens-117_apologetic_i-m-a-single-issue-voter-to-get-straight_157958.jpg)

> [“The United States finds itself with forces of reaction. Do I have to demonstrate this? The Taliban's annihilation of music and culture?…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/the-united-states-finds-itself-with-forces-of-reaction-do-i-have-to/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [The Iranian people were converted to Islam not very much longer after the conquest of the Arab world by Islam, but they…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/the-iranian-people-were-converted-to-islam-not-very-much-longer-after/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“Our primeval ancestors were by no means atheistic: they raised temples and altars and offered the requisite terrified obsequies and sacrifices. Their…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/our-primeval-ancestors-were-by-no-means-atheistic-they-raised-temples/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [Islam makes very large claims for itself. In its art, there is a prejudice against representing the human form at all. The…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/islam-makes-very-large-claims-for-itself-in-its-art-there-is-a/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“Half the published articles on Gaza contain a standard reference to its resemblance to a vast open-air prison (and when I last…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/half-the-published-articles-on-gaza-contain-a-standard-reference-to/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [Along with Islam and Christianity, Judaism does insist that some turgid and contradictory and sometimes evil and mad texts, obviously written by…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/along-with-islam-and-christianity-judaism-does-insist-that-some/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [I've noticed that the more flooding there is, the more bullshit gets talked. I mean it was very noticeable in the Asian…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/i-ve-noticed-that-the-more-flooding-there-is-the-more-bullshit-gets/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“The 'pre-emption' versus 'prevention' debate may be a distinction without much difference. The important thing is to have it understood that the…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/the-pre-emption-versus-prevention-debate-may-be-a-distinction-without/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [Islam in its origins is just as shady and approximate as those from which it took its borrowings. It makes immense claims…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/islam-in-its-origins-is-just-as-shady-and-approximate-as-those-from/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“Suppose that we agree that the two atrocities can or may be mentioned in the same breath. Why should we do so?…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/suppose-that-we-agree-that-the-two-atrocities-can-or-may-be-mentioned/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“And I'll close by saying this. Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war,…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/and-i-ll-close-by-saying-this-because-anti-semitism-is-the-godfather/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/it-can-certainly-be-misleading-to-take-the-attributes-of-a-movement/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/like-the-nazis-the-cadres-of-jihad-have-a-death-wish-that-sets-the/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/so-this-is-where-all-the-vapid-talk-about-the-soul-of-the-universe-is/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“My quarrel with Chomsky goes back to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, where he more or less openly represented the "Serbian…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/my-quarrel-with-chomsky-goes-back-to-the-balkan-wars-of-the-1990s/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“I am not one of those who believes—as Obama is said to believe—that a solution to the Palestinian statehood question would bring…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/i-am-not-one-of-those-who-believes-as-obama-is-said-to-believe-that-a/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“The neo-cons, or some of them, decided that they would back Clinton when he belatedly decided for Bosnia and Kosovo against Milosevic,…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/the-neo-cons-or-some-of-them-decided-that-they-would-back-clinton/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/as-a-convinced-atheist-i-ought-to-agree-with-voltaire-that-judaism-is/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/there-s-a-certain-amount-of-ambiguity-in-my-background-what-with/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/dc2/christopher-hitchens-117_ambiguity_there-s-a-certain-amount-of-ambiguity-in_2341405.jpg)

> [“As to the 'Left' I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/as-to-the-left-i-ll-say-briefly-why-this-was-the-finish-for-me-here/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/so-i-close-this-long-reflection-on-what-i-hope-is-a-not-too/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/434/christopher-hitchens-117_ancestors_so-i-close-this-long-reflection-on-what_1216237.jpg)

> [“Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/hitherto-the-palestinians-had-been-relatively-immune-to-this-allahu/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/a88/christopher-hitchens-117_1981_hitherto-the-palestinians-had-been-relat_2564837.jpg)

> [“I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring.…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/i-think-i-have-a-very-good-idea-why-it-is-that-anti-semitism-is-so/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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> [“the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face. . . . What they abominate about ‘the West,’ to put it…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/the-bombers-of-manhattan-represent-fascism-with-an-islamic-face-what/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

[Image](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/28a/christopher-hitchens-117_coming-home_the-bombers-of-manhattan-represent-fasci_566840.jpg)

## Other authors on Islam

- [ ![](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/wp-content/uploads/sms4s/authors/processed/b023/author-tariq-ramadan-88946.jpg) Tariq Ramadan 88 quotes ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/about/islam/tariq-ramadan/)
- [ ![](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/wp-content/uploads/sms4s/authors/processed/b005/author-barack-obama-16275.jpg) Barack Obama 75 quotes ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/about/islam/barack-obama/)
- [ ![](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/wp-content/uploads/sms4s/authors/processed/b010/author-geert-wilders-37183.jpg) Geert Wilders 55 quotes ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/about/islam/geert-wilders/)
- [ ![](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/wp-content/uploads/sms4s/authors/processed/b016/author-malcolm-x-62876.jpg) Malcolm X 54 quotes ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/about/islam/malcolm-x/)
- [ ![](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/wp-content/uploads/sms4s/authors/processed/b005/author-babloo-16107.jpg) Babloo 49 quotes ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/about/islam/babloo/)
- [ ![](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/wp-content/uploads/sms4s/authors/processed/b004/author-ayaan-hirsi-ali-15899.jpg) Ayaan Hirsi Ali 47 quotes ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/about/islam/ayaan-hirsi-ali/)
- [ ![](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/wp-content/uploads/sms4s/authors/processed/b025/author-yasmin-mogahed-96649.jpg) Yasmin Mogahed 44 quotes ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/about/islam/yasmin-mogahed/)
- [ ![](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/wp-content/uploads/sms4s/authors/processed/b020/author-quran-76551.jpg) Quran 42 quotes ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/about/islam/quran/)
- [ ![](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/wp-content/uploads/sms4s/authors/processed/b022/author-seyyed-hossein-nasr-84199.jpg) Seyyed Hossein Nasr 41 quotes ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/about/islam/seyyed-hossein-nasr/)
- [ ![](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/wp-content/uploads/sms4s/authors/processed/b018/author-muhammad-ali-69506.jpg) Muhammad Ali 41 quotes ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/about/islam/muhammad-ali/)
- [ ![](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/wp-content/uploads/sms4s/authors/processed/b021/author-salman-rushdie-82434.jpg) Salman Rushdie 40 quotes ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/about/islam/salman-rushdie/)
- [ ![](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/wp-content/uploads/sms4s/authors/processed/b004/author-andrew-tan-13080.jpg) Rosie 40 quotes ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/about/islam/rosie/)

## More by Christopher Hitchens

> [“The spirit of our accurate and exact philosophy is outraged by conclusions that contradict each other so glaringly.”](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/the-spirit-of-our-accurate-and-exact-philosophy-is-outraged-by/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [“Many governments employ torture but this was the first time that the element of Saturnalia and pornography in the process had been made so…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/many-governments-employ-torture-but-this-was-the-first-time-that-the/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [ It's \[Los Angeles\] mostly full of nonsense and delusion and egomania. They think they'll be young and beautiful forever, even though most of them… ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/it-s-los-angeles-mostly-full-of-nonsense-and-delusion-and-egomania/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning.](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/to-be-against-rationalization-is-not-the-same-as-to-be-opposed-to/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [ \[Religion\] attacks us in our deepest integrity - the core of our self-respect. Religion says that we would not know right from wrong, we… ](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/religion-attacks-us-in-our-deepest-integrity-the-core-of-our-self/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [“In the very recent past, we have seen the Church of Rome befouled by its complicity with the unpardonable sin of child rape, or,…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/in-the-very-recent-past-we-have-seen-the-church-of-rome-befouled-by/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/it-s-surprising-to-me-how-many-of-my-friends-send-christmas-cards-or/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [Suppose there were groups of secularists at hospitals who went round the terminally ill and urged them to adopt atheism: 'Don't be a mug…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/suppose-there-were-groups-of-secularists-at-hospitals-who-went-round/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the requisite disbelief, or who have…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/there-are-after-all-atheists-who-say-they-wish-the-fable-were-true/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [“It isn’t so long since a test of Anglican orthodoxy was applied to anyone seeking to study or teach at Oxford and Cambridge universities.…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/it-isn-t-so-long-since-a-test-of-anglican-orthodoxy-was-applied-to/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [Gullibility and credulity are considered undesireable qualities in every department of human life - except religion ... Why are we praised by godly men…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/gullibility-and-credulity-are-considered-undesireable-qualities-in/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [It's much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don't know quite why this is true but it just is. Don't…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/it-s-much-worse-to-see-a-woman-drunk-than-a-man-i-don-t-know-quite/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/it-s-true-that-obscenity-is-a-matter-of-taste-and-in-the-eye-of-the/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [I worked out early on to give up things I couldn't do well at all.](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/i-worked-out-early-on-to-give-up-things-i-couldn-t-do-well-at-all/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

> [Writing is what's important to me, and anything that helps me do that - or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument…](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/christopher-hitchens/writing-is-what-s-important-to-me-and-anything-that-helps-me-do-that/)

[Christopher Hitchens](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/author/christopher-hitchens/)

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                        "text": "“To take a side against Rushdie, or to be neutral and evasive about him in the name of some vaguely sensitive ecumenical conscience, is to stand against those who try to incubate a Reformation in the Muslim world.”",
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                        "text": "I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there's no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That's all crap.",
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                        "text": "You notice how liberals keep saying, 'If only Islam would have a Reformation' - it can't have one. It says it can't. It's extremely dangerous in that way.",
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                        "text": "If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it's a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.",
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                        "text": "“The United States finds itself with forces of reaction. Do I have to demonstrate this? The Taliban's annihilation of music and culture? The enslavement of women?”",
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                        "text": "The Iranian people were converted to Islam not very much longer after the conquest of the Arab world by Islam, but they refused to adopt the Arabic language, and it's a great point of pride to them that Persian culture and the Persian language and Persian literature survived the conversion to Islam. And the conversion to Islam also was for most of them not the Sunni majority form, but the Shia one. So there's a great discrepancy between Iranian society and many other of what we think of as Arab Muslim States and systems.",
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                        "text": "“Our primeval ancestors were by no means atheistic: they raised temples and altars and offered the requisite terrified obsequies and sacrifices. Their religion was man-made, like all the others. There was a time when Greek thinkers denounced Christians and Zoroastrians denounced Muslims as “atheists” for their destruction of old sites and their prohibition of ancient rituals. The source of desecration and profanity is religious, as we can see from the way that today’s believers violate the sanctity of each other’s temples, from Bamiyan to Belfast to Baghdad.”",
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                        "text": "Islam makes very large claims for itself. In its art, there is a prejudice against representing the human form at all. The prohibition on picturing the prophet - who was only another male mammal - is apparently absolute. So is the prohibition on pork or alcohol or, in some Muslim societies, music or dancing. Very well then, let a good Muslim abstain rigorously from all these. But if he claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest possible warning and proof of an aggressive intent.",
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                        "text": "“Half the published articles on Gaza contain a standard reference to its resemblance to a vast open-air prison (and when I last saw it under Israeli occupation it certainly did deserve this metaphor). The problem is that, given its ideology and its allies, Hamas qualifies rather too well in the capacity of guard and warder.”",
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                        "text": "Along with Islam and Christianity, Judaism does insist that some turgid and contradictory and sometimes evil and mad texts, obviously written by fairly unexceptional humans, are in fact the word of god. I think that the indispensable condition of any intellectual liberty is the realisation that there is no such thing.",
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                        "text": "I've noticed that the more flooding there is, the more bullshit gets talked. I mean it was very noticeable in the Asian tsumai. It happened around Christmas-New Year. The Muslims of Sri Lanka said 'We knew this would happen because the Christians were using alcohol for their Christmas celebrations.' The Buddhists said 'We knew this would happen because of the horrible Muslim slaughter practices.' It's amazing to see how apocalypse or catastrophe makes people behave primitively.",
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                        "text": "“The 'pre-emption' versus 'prevention' debate may be a distinction without much difference. The important thing is to have it understood that the United States is absolutely serious. The jihadists have in the past bragged that America is too feeble and corrupt to fight. A lot is involved in disproving that delusion on their part.”",
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                        "text": "Islam in its origins is just as shady and approximate as those from which it took its borrowings. It makes immense claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or \"surrender\" as a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain. There is nothing-absolutely nothing-in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.",
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                        "text": "“Suppose that we agree that the two atrocities can or may be mentioned in the same breath. Why should we do so? I wrote at the time ( The Nation , October 5, 1998) that Osama bin Laden 'hopes to bring a \"judgmental\" monotheism of his own to bear on these United States.' Chomsky's recent version of this is 'considering the grievances expressed by people of the Middle East region.' In my version, then as now, one confronts an enemy who wishes ill to our society, and also to his own (if impermeable religious despotism is considered an 'ill'). In Chomsky's reading, one must learn to sift through the inevitable propaganda and emotion resulting from the September 11 attacks, and lend an ear to the suppressed and distorted cry for help that comes, not from the victims, but from the perpetrators. I have already said how distasteful I find this attitude. I wonder if even Chomsky would now like to have some of his own words back? Why else should he take such care to quote himself deploring the atrocity? Nobody accused him of not doing so. It's often a bad sign when people defend themselves against charges which haven't been made.”",
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                        "text": "“And I'll close by saying this. Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people, I learned, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilisation, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason, most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad. Daniel Pearl's revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college, the chair of the Islamic Students' Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people are being reported from all over Europe today as I'm talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected. Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this—this pest, by its right name; to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it's probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment, and resolving (some of the time, at any rate) to do a bit more to deserve it. Thank you.”",
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                        "text": "“It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to personalize or 'objectify' them in the figure of one individual. Yet ordinary discourse would be unfeasible without the use of portmanteau terms—like 'Stalinism,' say—just as the most scrupulous insistence on historical forces will often have to concede to the sheer personality of a Napoleon or a Hitler. I thought then, and I think now, that Osama bin Laden was a near-flawless personification of the mentality of a real force: the force of Islamic jihad. And I also thought, and think now, that this force absolutely deserves to be called evil, and that the recent decapitation of its most notorious demagogue and organizer is to be welcomed without reserve. Osama bin Laden's writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.”",
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                        "text": "“Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other 'races' according to need, is not more unrealizable than the idea that a single state, let alone the globe itself, could be governed according to the dictates of an allegedly holy book. This mad scheme begins by denying itself the talents (and the rights) of half the population, views with superstitious horror the charging of interest, and invokes the right of Muslims to subject nonbelievers to special taxes and confiscations. Not even Afghanistan or Somalia, scenes of the furthest advances yet made by pro-caliphate forces, could be governed for long in this way without setting new standards for beggary and decline.”",
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                        "text": "“So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The 'vacuum' will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.”",
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                        "text": "“My quarrel with Chomsky goes back to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, where he more or less openly represented the \"Serbian Socialist Party\" (actually the national-socialist and expansionist dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic) as the victim. Many of us are proud of having helped organize to prevent the slaughter and deportation of Europe's oldest and largest and most tolerant Muslim minority, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo. But at that time, when they were real, Chomsky wasn't apparently interested in Muslim grievances. He only became a voice for that when the Taliban and Al Qaeda needed to be represented in their turn as the victims of a \"silent genocide\" in Afghanistan. Let me put it like this, if a supposed scholar takes the Christian-Orthodox side when it is the aggressor, and then switches to taking the \"Muslim\" side when Muslims commit mass murder, I think that there is something very nasty going on. And yes, I don't think it is exaggerated to describe that nastiness as \"anti-American\" when the power that stops and punishes both aggressions is the United States.”",
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                        "text": "“I am not one of those who believes—as Obama is said to believe—that a solution to the Palestinian statehood question would bring an end to Muslim resentment against the United States. (Incidentally, if he really does believe this, his lethargy and impotence in the face of Netanyahu's consistent double-dealing is even more culpable.) The Islamist fanatics have their own agenda, and, as in the case of Hamas and its Iranian backers, they have already demonstrated that nothing but the destruction of Israel and the removal of American influence from the region will possibly satisfy them. No, it is more the case that justice—and a homeland for the Palestinians—is a good and necessary cause in its own right. It is also a special legal and moral responsibility of the United States, which has several times declared a dual-statehood outcome to be its objective.”",
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                        "text": "“The neo-cons, or some of them, decided that they would back Clinton when he belatedly decided for Bosnia and Kosovo against Milosevic, and this even though they loathed Clinton, because the battle against religious and ethnic dictatorship in the Balkans took precedence. This, by the way, was partly a battle to save Muslims from Catholic and Christian Orthodox killers. That impressed me. The neo-cons also took the view, quite early on, that coexistence with Saddam Hussein was impossible as well as undesirable. They were dead right about that. They had furthermore been thinking about the menace of jihad ism when most people were half-asleep. And then I have to say that I was rather struck by the way that the Weekly Standard and its associated voices took the decision to get rid of Trent Lott earlier this year, thus removing an embarrassment as well as a disgrace from the political scene. And their arguments were on points of principle, not 'perception.' I liked their ruthlessness here, and their seriousness, at a time when much of the liberal Left is not even seriously wrong, but frivolously wrong, and babbles without any sense of responsibility. (I mean, have you read their sub-Brechtian stuff on Halliburton…?) And revolution from above, in some states and cases, is—as I wrote in my book A Long Short War —often preferable to the status quo, or to no revolution at all.”",
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                        "text": "“As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah —for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe .) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.”",
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                        "text": "“There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don’t much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world—or more probably comes at us via the Muslim world—I already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. I would detest myself if I fled from it in any direction. Leo Strauss was right. The Jews will not be 'saved' or 'redeemed.' (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.) They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this in some ways is as it should be. They are, or we are, as a friend of Victor Klemperer's once put it to him in a very dark time, condemned and privileged to be 'a seismic people.' A critical register of the general health of civilization is the status of 'the Jewish question.' No insurance policy has ever been devised that can or will cover this risk.”",
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                        "text": "“As to the 'Left' I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our 'national security' calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Here was a time for the Left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favor of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of 'Left' intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush's legitimacy. So I don't even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction.”",
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                        "text": "“So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist , who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.”",
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                        "text": "“Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always—and this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject—what about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews? I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming—I want to say 'unsettling'—precedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then—belatedly you may say—to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.”",
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                        "text": "“I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long. If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who did have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be forgiven ? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah.”",
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                        "text": "“the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face. . . . What they abominate about ‘the West,’ to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don’t like and can’t defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson.”",
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